tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-41593657089690678442024-03-13T05:52:57.300+00:00As HousesAs Houses is about video games.Leigh Harrisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09843099451159275743noreply@blogger.comBlogger68125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4159365708969067844.post-6558620189567006842019-01-14T22:26:00.000+00:002019-01-14T22:26:37.654+00:00The Millennial Burnout Conversation Also Applies to Gamers Me<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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New year, new you. I’m still me. </div>
<br /><a href="https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/mby89y/millennial-burnout-gamers">Cameron Kunzelman beckoned in 2019</a> with a paean to all the games. Specifically, how it’s a strain to play so many of them, but he carries on because he gosh darn loves ‘em – and it’s his job. And I can sympathise with him, I really can. Whether it’s true or just my imagination, big games seem to keep getting bigger (and longer), and smaller games that are really, really good come out far more often. So where’s the time to play them all?<br /><br />In my case, there isn’t. But over the last few years I’ve developed quite a canny strategy for dealing with this:<br /><ol>
<li>Buy a game</li>
<li>Play the game</li>
<li>Become distracted by life events or another game</li>
<li>Never play the game again</li>
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I rarely finish games now I’m in my late twenties because it always feels like there’s something else I should be doing. Not necessarily something better, just other. Painting my bathroom took over a week for various unforeseen technical reasons. Seven coats of paint and some spot sanding later and now it’s a lovely and inoffensive shade of duck egg blue. (Heed this: however much you want to be a bit kooky with tone and shade in a small bathroom, do not do it. Small bathrooms need to be light and airy to maintain their ambience, even if that means they must also be very pedestrian to look at.)</div>
<br />I’m happy that my bathroom looks nice now. I’d been putting off painting it for a few years, and now it’s done I’ll be able to forget all about it for another handful. Peace of mind in three tins of paint, a dozen metres of masking tape, two rollers, four brushes and a damp rag. As simple and nurturing a recipe as chicken soup for the soul.<br /><br />But what of the games? I imagine Cameron’s ‘gamer burnout’ sits in the pit of his stomach at times, keeping him awake at night as the colours flash before his dilated pupils, restless as they surely are behind his heavy eyelids. I have been there too, a long time ago. But the inverse ailment is equally damaging. To play some of the games but never enough of them, and dart between them like an indecisive puppy brings with it great anxiety. Never finishing anything you start, never seeing out stories, never hitting level caps; that is not good for you.<br /><br />Like Cam, I love games. I have played them for almost all of my life and found great joy in following their artistic and technological development. I am still excited when I play most of them for the first time, awestruck that I’m lucky enough to be setting off on yet another adventure. But as someone with a full-time job outside of games, and friends and family who need regular attention lest they abandon me, I rarely have the time to see any of those adventures out.<br /><br />I fall off games for a couple of main reasons. With something like Hollow Knight, I just lose patience. I liked a lot of what it did with its worldbuilding and tone but hated actually playing it. I think it is a bad implementation and fundamental misreading of the Soulsborne mechanics, and a gatekeepy travesty too enamoured with its core audience to be worth my time. All it needed was an easy mode.<br /><br />I don’t encounter this scenario very often though. Mostly, I’ll play a game up until a certain point and then just stop. It’s as if a switch flips in my head and I suddenly realise I’m full. I do this with food all the time. Bloodborne had me from the very beginning and I played it religiously for tens of hours. One day, not hugely far from the end, I decided I’d got enough out of the experience and that it was time for something new. It’s still sat there on my PlayStation, waiting for me to go back to it. More likely, it’ll survive one more disk drive cull before being uninstalled for a fresh crop of games I’ll never finish either.<br /><br />This pattern does make me genuinely a bit sad. Because I can’t tell whether I ever truly have my fill, or if somewhere unconsciously I just know it’s time to move on. I want to experience as much as possible, but unlike Cameron, I cannot simply play more. I haven’t the time or the energy or even, if I’m being honest, the inclination. <br /><br />Painting my bathroom will always be more important than finishing a game because that, it turns out, is who I am. And I think I’m slowly beginning to accept that and leave the anxiety of my own burnout behind. Until I’ve finished processing this, though, my life with games will continue to be an unsatisfying road movie of incomplete vignettes and plot strands that don’t come together by the end – because there never is one, and there probably won’t ever be.Leigh Harrisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09843099451159275743noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4159365708969067844.post-49106936544347804502016-09-15T16:47:00.000+01:002016-09-15T16:49:59.541+01:00What’s that past the end of my nose? Nothing.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I like writing for a couple of very practical reasons. First, you can do it alone. Waiting around for other people is an inevitability of life, so I appreciate that I can splurge something out privately at the back of the bus should I choose to. Second, it’s quick. Short form writing doesn’t take too long — the clue is in the name. You can usually get a couple thousand words out on a topic of interest if you just put your mind to it. The words are already there, after all, the trick, as a wise man once said, is putting them in the right order.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This isn’t because I’m lazy. No, I like the quick turnaround because it gives me freedom. A failed experiment only holds you for a matter of hours, then it’s consigned to the festering research log. The penalty for failure, especially when the spotlight of the zeitgeist isn’t shining on you (me), is almost nonexistent. If I write something inflammatory and nobody reads it, did I actually ever say it?</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But this is good, because if you’re lucky you’ll improve quickly. Like learning a guitar riff, do it enough and you’ll probably get better. You might never develop the skill to write one of those riffs yourself, but you can still make a decent living in a good cover band — there’s truly is no shame in that. After all, going to watch The Beattles (sic) can’t be any worse than seeing a septuagenarian Paul McCartney, can it?</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So what does all this mean? I’d like to think it gives writers — columnists, reviewers, James Patterson, whatever — a degree of necessary distance from their work. I’m not suggesting people don’t care about what they write, simply that it helps us to not be too precious about it. A 1000 word bimonthly bit for The Guardian would be dream come true for me, but I’m sure that by the second year I’d remember my early pieces about as well as I do my own childhood. The constant forward motion of writing unshackles us from ugly defensiveness.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Once upon a time a game was released as an early access product — it was done, but changes were still being made and things were still being added. Shortly after that, reviews began to appear on the Internet. One of the people who made the game read some of the reviews and didn’t like them. So they verbalised their disdain for the words, the people and the outlets wot had talked about their game. It wasn’t pretty.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Why do people read anything [Journalist X] writes? He’s a jaded game reviewer. My game is a brand new thing.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> [Journalist X] can’t handle games like that — read their other reviews and you’ll see</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> — if it can’t be easily pigeonholed it’s cack.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Don’t mix up my difference of opinion and a personal thing.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> I don’t know [Journalist X] at all or their work</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“It makes me dejected that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">five years’ work</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> ends in a "4/10", I mean, that's a really, really ridiculous score. It rubbishes the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">unique and beautiful experience</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Look at Metacritic. I don’t even understand how you’d get to 4/10. I mean,</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> it’s an insult</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“[Outlet Y] gave us a 3/10 lol. Looking forward to a 1/10 from someone now, it's almost funny. I mean, our analytics show players coming back again and again. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Clearly we’ve made a game a load of people really like</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.”</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(These quotes were rephrased, btw, but the content is pretty spot on; </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">emphasis</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> my own.)</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I think the biggest standout for me is the mention of time. Five years is ages. It’s about as long as I’ve been writing, and I was atrocious when I started. This isn't to state that a game started years ago will pop out bad, that would be ridiculous. All I’m saying is that in the same timespan I’ve written well over 100 pieces, totalling something like 150,000–200,000 words. I’ve jumped around, experimented, failed, and hopefully improved. But that’s all by the by. The most important thing is that I've not had to look at any one of those bits of writing for more than a few days at the most. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When I’m drunk I go searching through my archives. I read back over my past exploits, things I was super proud of a couple of years ago, and I often cringe. Sometimes the ideas are there but the execution is terrible, sometimes it’s the inverse. Sometimes it’s actually quite good, but more often than not it really isn’t. Occasionally, when I’m writing something I already know its meagre worth but plough on regardless, just to excise it from me so I can move on. Most of the time, though, I think what I’m committing to public record is pretty great. It’s only later I can see its true worth, and it’s the distance that helps me look at things more objectively.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now, imagine I didn't have that luxury. Imagine I was forced, through circumstance or choice, to sit on the same thing for five whole years. Reading and rereading; tweaking sentence structure, word choice and subtext, until everything was </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">just perfect</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. In the end, I’d still have produced a short piece of prose The Guardian no longer wanted (“we thought you were dead”), but to my bleary eyes it would be the greatest piece of cultural commentary wot the world had, and would, ever see. The labour of love doesn’t validate the end product — it just makes it harder for us to judge it on its own merits.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I can’t begin to imagine how hard it is to hear that something you’ve worked on for a long time is, to some people, utter rubbish. I reckon it'd feel pretty bad, though. Still, the worst thing you can do in that situation is to just petulantly discount the critique in public. Shout and scream in private all you want; tell friends, colleagues and loved ones Journalist X is wrong about everything (even if you disingenuously purport to not know of him (srsly?)). Do it: you’ll feel better. But don’t stand on a roof calling out a critic's views as being wrong, ill-informed or simply bs just because you disagree. It’s a really bad look.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I think this is a symptom of a larger issue, however, rather than isolated put-upon developers having mini public breakdowns. Early access, with all its ‘behind the scenes access’ and ‘help decide the game’s direction’, has fundamentally changed the act of making games. I’m all for the money up front aspect of it (it’s expensive to make stuff, I geddit), it’s the allowing people to shove their fingers in your pie that I can’t understand. The letting armchair designers have a say in how you make your game. Why would anyone want that? (And no, I’m not confusing this with QA.)</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Playing a game before it’s done attracts three types of people: those who want to see you fail, those who are curious, and those who are already sold on your concept. Group one will tire and leave quickly. Group two will also leave, or they’ll join group three. Group three will likely dwindle over time, calcifying into a contingent of diehards. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If, after a few years in early access development, there are early-adopters left with you upon your soft-release, they will have nothing useful left in them. They are far too emotionally invested in the project to say anything objectively useful. Too many hours spent playing a work in progress has rendered them incapable of rational thought. They will make do and mend; they’ve been doing so for months, if not years. You might get tidbits like “maybe you could let me carry more stuff, but, having said that, it might break the balance, so actually I’m happy to just walk backwards and forwards for 10 minutes, k thx”, but really, what’s that worth?</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Early access throws open the doors to all the yes-men you’ll ever need. Those who don’t like your game left long, long ago and might, of you’re lucky, swing back around to watch your baby disintegrate — if, of course, they still remember who you are. Listening to your remaining early access audience is like listening to your initial pitch idea: great, but far from what you’ve ended up with. Don’t listen, it turns you into this guy:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">PROSPECTIVE CUSTOMER</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I don’t really like sliding puzzles, especially lots of them and with a time limit.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The time limit is there to stop you getting in other players’ way. You’ve plenty of time to complete them, though.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">INTERNAL MONOLOGUE</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Nope, not even going to acknowledge that concern. Nobody’s ever mentioned not liking the sliding puzzles before, so it can’t possibly be an issue.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And nobody really wants to end up this shortsighted, do they?</span></span></div>
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Leigh Harrisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09843099451159275743noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4159365708969067844.post-13015548695904268842016-04-30T16:46:00.000+01:002016-05-05T23:05:22.994+01:00I'd Rather Starve Than Eat Video Game Food<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In its most superficial forms, video game food has its place. A giant ham, whether it’s consumed whole there and then, or tantalisingly rubbed over your sweaty, rippling musculature, will undoubtedly make you feel better—it just will. Likewise, a can of energy beverage will totally boost your reaction times and pain threshold upon its contents dripping down your gullet and into your churning stomach. Which is fortunate, because you’ll need the added spryness to avoid cracking your head on the kitchen counter when the inevitable heart attack arrives, as your innards evacuate your abused body through a series of slightly less painful hernias. Beyond these and a couple of other instances, video game food is rubbish.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It normally occupies the role of placater; constantly wrestling for control with a hunger mechanic. Like weapon degradation and encumbrance, hunger has no place in civilised society. All of these things seek to derail whatever fun is taking place and force you to stop and fanny about in menus. With the possible exception of sharpening your weapon (to maintain damage output) mid-battle in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Monster Hunter</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, which I’ll admit does add to the tension, ‘depleting meter’ mechanics are just an annoyance. They offer nothing but a mild, momentary distraction from your current task. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Food, or whetstones, or whatever else we choose to call them, all do the same thing. They refill a little hourglass that then immediately starts ticking down again. In a game with lots of stuff going on—i.e. a fabulous diversity of moving parts—we just end up hoarding the item we need to keep the sand topped up. In those survival games that are inexplicably super popular nowadays, hourglass flipping is the whole thing. In both cases I cannot abide it. Either as a minor roadblock to progression or the core of an experience, I just don’t see the point in expending my genuine energy to refill and maintain my computer self’s pretend energy. Chopping down trees to make a fire, to cook a pig, to eat a ham, to allow me to do it all again isn’t my idea of a good time. As might be clear already: I like my pork treats to arrive fully-formed, that way I can spend all my time dreaming up increasingly greasy ways of introducing them into my body.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My annoyance runs deeper, though. Beyond them being tragic wastes of time, depleting meters and their effects, and hunger in particular, are just plain inaccurate. Take that most blindingly of-the-moment game, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Sims</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, as a perfect example—though this applies for pretty much any food mechanic going. Little digital Leigh becomes really, really whiney if he’s so much as a tad peckish. He throws strops worthy of legitimising infanticide as he gurgles all over his anachronistically multi-storey home, moaning to anyone who’ll listen that he hasn’t been allowed to make a hoagie in the last ten minutes. If I do the right thing as his legal custodian and leave him to tire himself out, he’ll soon dramatically throw himself through a wall and drop dead. Digital Leigh is a stunted, entitled little brat and I’m glad he more often than not expires from neglect and starvation. One day I’m certain I'll produce one made of sterner stuff, and he’ll certainly thank me when he’s an older, wonderfully well-rounded member of society—just like I’ve finally been able to do with my own parents.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The little Leighs shouldn't drop dead from an afternoon without food, and they shouldn’t start feeling hungry again the moment they wipe the spittle from their collective chins with that final morsel of omelette. That isn’t how big Leigh works. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is perfectly happy not eating for about 18 hours as long as there are better things to do, which there normally are. He’s like this because the human body is riddled with a nuance that no amount of steadily decreasing meters on a screen can ever hope to replicate. Yeah, maybe my ability to work a bar decreases towards the end of a 15 hour shift, but I don’t collapse into a puddle and frolic with all the other liquids down there on the floor. No. I run over the road for my 20 minute break, drink two pints and smoke four, maybe five cigarettes, chew some gum, use the bathroom and get back at it. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">All these things have, in descending order of importance, proved useful in the past for a little pep-up. But none is vital, and it’s this that video games never choose to convey. The illicit beers and the cigarettes weren’t necessary because I was a puckish problem drinker who’d die without them—the way a depleting meter would portray it—they were a hard-earned moment of respite from a crushingly mundane job. They were me thumbing my nose at a management hierarchy I had no respect for, and a means of holding onto some semblance of self-determinism. These are the sorts of reasons most of us eat, drink, smoke—consume. Not to avoid some near-death exhaustion and follow it up with a sudden and complete resurrection. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If you’re playing a video game you haven’t a clue what starvation feels like. But then that’s maybe why so many of us are thrilled by a simplification of a fairly nuanced, painful process. ‘Look: my video game is adding depth and challenge!’ When really we should be saying ‘this is a massive waste of time and actually fairly disrespectful to the many people who, right this second, are genuinely starving to death around the world. God, I, along with this video game exploitation of human suffering, am terrible.’ And while you’re at it with epiphanies: you should probably let ‘the boy’ out of the basement, if he’s not already dead from ‘learning to be a man’, that is. I guarantee he’ll thank you when he’s older.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The above prose is proud to be associated with <a href="http://www.critical-distance.com/" target="_blank">Critical Distance</a>'s <i><a href="http://www.critical-distance.com/2016/04/07/april-2016-food/" target="_blank">Blogs of the Round Table</a></i>, an initiative which seeks to bring the diverse voices of video game criticism together about the person of a monthly topic. I think it's dead good, and so do these lovely individuals:
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><iframe frameborder="0" height="20" mce_src="http://www.tinysubversions.com/bort.html?month=April16" src="http://www.tinysubversions.com/bort.html?month=April16" type="text/html" width="600"></iframe></span>Leigh Harrisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09843099451159275743noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4159365708969067844.post-90074548254192440652016-02-15T17:18:00.000+00:002016-02-15T18:43:59.883+00:00Channel 5's Poor People<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For the longest time I was unaware of Channel 5’s generous policy of not showing ads on its Demand 5 streaming service. Because of this, it has now usurped Channel 4 as my go-to source for trashy shit aimed at simultaneously shaming the working class subjects of its scrutiny and the working class me wot watches it all.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’d long assumed as much, but Channel 5 programming really is as scruffy as we all think it is. Forget the immigrants, manual workers and addicts who litter its documentary output, the real scrubbers are the people who commission the stuff. I recently watched an hour long special on Roma Gypsies in Britain that felt the need to incessantly remind me of how much financial support they were receiving. ‘Eugene is coming to London in a week, but not for work—he wants your hard earned tax money’, the narrator said for the fifth time that scene. Every sentence he spoke ended in some kind of barbed attack. ‘That amounts to £1300 a month in handouts. Handouts = YOUR MONEY.’ ‘He’s bringing over his kids next week—they’ll take your money too. And then wee in your mouth, the little delinquents.’</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The lambastings came thick and fast, the poor voiceover man having been instructed to admonish the Roma and the limp wristed tax paying audience with every breath. I kind of felt sorry for him after a while. Here he was, sat in a nice studio earning not a terrible hourly wage to read out this vitriol. It became a bit much to stomach really. I kept wondering if it was all an elaborate satire of our horrible media landscape, but then I remembered this sort of straight face, hyperbolic scaremongering happens all the time on the Internet and in Luton. It was bound to catch up to the fair television programme at some point, and who else if not Channel 5 would push the boundaries of conceptual sanity?</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Another I watched was all about a dole hotel. A doletel if you will—except it was more of a holetel, really. It’s the sort of place local authorities put people when there aren't one of the 18 council houses free. The proprietor, a ghoulishly smug Toby jug of a man, had the gall to sit, looking straight into the camera—into you, dear viewer—look us all in the eye and tell us he was providing a valuable service. He also mentioned that nobody wanted to stay in a hotel in Axminster as well, but insisted he was philanthropist first, opportunist second.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The hotel itself was a shithole. I’ve visited some ropey abodes in my time, and am always surprised at how little self respect some of the people I’ve worked or been friends with possess. But that’s their choice. The doletel was different, because the people staying in it had no say in the matter. Steve, or John, or Bob, or whatever he was called, he had a choice. And he chose to keep his hotel like a massive squat. There were holes in the walls, grubby furnishings and, ironically enough for the ‘once mighty Axminster’, lots and lots of rubbish carpets.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I can appreciate that a place designed to house transient guests has to be functional and easy to maintain. I can also appreciate that some of Steve’s visitors have so much on their plate that domestic chores and fire safety don’t come as priorities. But really? Fag-stained ceilings? Bathrooms not much better than crusty buckets? Cookers next to beds? Right next to beds?</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Speaking of cookers, actually: turns out Steve has a great relationship with the local food bank, to the point where they know and cater for the needs of each guest. Steve and the food bank man were very proud of that. ‘We get to know them, so we put them together something a bit special’, they said. There wasn’t a mention of the poor bugger with only a microwave to cook with they sent a pair of Frey Bentos pies. A PAIR of oven-only pies! Talk about insult to injury. Sadistic.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And that sort of sums us the spirit of the show. Gawp at those down at the heel, pretend to care and/or raise awareness of their plight in some way, but really just have a laugh at their expense. You could say the show’s subjects had found their way out of the frying pan and into the fire of cruel public opinion. But of course most of them only had a microwave, so that metaphor wouldn’t be in any way applicable.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There is a glimmer of hope for Demand 5, though, something that might just save its soul from the fires reserved for broadcasters who abuse their powers. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Can’t Pay? We’ll Take It Away</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is a smorgasbord of genuine emotion and humanity. It doesn’t look like that to begin with, mind, what with its glib title, excitable narrator, artificially-generated high stakes and dramatic soundtrack. It looks like a programme made expressly to reinforce the middle class smugness that surrounds the accidental and arbitrary chain of events that led to its audience’s comfortable position in life. It looks like a programme made by horrible people for horrible people to watch in a horrible way. But it isn’t.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Can’t Pay?</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is full of cuddles. Each story starts out really hard-line: ‘Sonia, a single mother from Streatham, is about to get kicked out on her arse because she’s a single mother. She’ll have an hour to pack her things, then she’ll be homeless—just like she and her children deserve. (Don’t ever have children, and if you do, don’t ever get divorced).’ It’s all very obvious and class divide-baiting in the way most tacky TV is these days. But then a magical thing happens. The High Court Enforcement Agents we’re following, Steve and Paul, take pity on Sonia. They connect with her on an emotional level. They make her a tea. They give her way more time than the allotted hour. They ring the council on her behalf to sort out temporary accommodation. They share their scathing opinions of this country’s social housing, social care and general niceness provision. They go to the council. They say the council is ineffectual and disgraceful. And they put Sonia up in a hotel, off their own backs, when the state can’t do anything. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m not an idiot. By being different </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Can’t Pay?</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is simply patronising me in a different way. I get that, don’t worry. But I’m on Demand 5, right, so I’m wholly signing up for it to begin with. What I appreciate is that this wonderful bailiff soap opera dared to deviate from the recent past’s preoccupation with telling me the poor have it coming. They do, of course, because poverty clearly breeds poverty, and to escape that gravitational field is markedly more difficult than going to a grammar school and getting really good grades like I did. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Can’t Pay</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, in its own superficial way, wants to lay the cruelty of life’s dice rolls bare. In doing so it is both tender and entertaining, and eminently more watchable than a financially comfortable voiceover artist pithily talking over images of abject misery. Nice one, Channel 5. </span></span></div>
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Leigh Harrisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09843099451159275743noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4159365708969067844.post-5479440751062244622015-11-30T11:05:00.002+00:002015-11-30T11:10:20.684+00:00Scott Shelby is a Bad Man, But That's Totally Fine<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There’s a trophy you can unlock in </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Heavy Rain</span><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> called ‘Perfect Crime’. This exists because one of the game’s four main characters is both protagonist and chief antagonist—though you of course don’t know this until the very end. This means that getting the trophy on your first time round comes down to either luck or some gross personal lust for ruining stories in the name of accumulating hollow achievements. Having said that, there are people I know who insist they saw this particular twist coming well before its gestation period was through. That makes them incredibly prescient or big smelly liars. </span></div>
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Regardless of whether it came with a dollop of gloating self-congratulation, everyone’s opinion of </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Heavy Rain</span><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">’s about-face was about the same: it’s just not right to have a player character turn out to be a wrong ‘un. Which raises the question of why such a twist mightn’t be appropriate for games? We love ‘secret bastards’, as I affectionately call them, in every other storytelling medium. I’m a bit of a pedant to be honest, so I can only really talk about films here, but there are still plenty of examples. Kevin Spacey being Keyser Söze in </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Usual Suspects</span><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is probably the standout. Does anyone remember </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">anything </span><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">else about that film beyond its twist? Who else is in it? Gabriel Byrne? Pete Postlethwaite? Benicio Del Toro? Stephen Baldwin? Who knows? But Kevin Spacey was definitely there and he was definitely a secret bastard, we all know that whether we’ve seen the film or not. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Usual Suspects</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> does a sterling job of keeping its intentions under wraps. First of all, it disguises its main character. In placing Spacey as the narrator we’re misled into thinking he’s somewhat outside the story he’s telling. Yes, he’s there in lots of the scenes, usually somewhere near the back not making a fuss, but he is painted as such a sleight force within the story that we almost instantly forget about that old narrative trick called ‘the unreliable narrator’. Once we’re comfortable with Spacey as a benign force, the film runs rings around us. Is Söze a physically-imposing gangster? Is he a collection of people acting under a pseudonym? Is he a myth used to control the criminal underworld? Nobody, not even our humble storyteller, knows. When the twist finally reveals itself at the film’s end we’re all taken by surprise. And </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Usual Suspects </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">wins lots of awards.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Why then, was </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Heavy Rain</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> not met with similar applause from my friends for its rug-pull, especially considering it uses the same narrative tricks as </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Usual Suspects</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">? Our bad guy, ageing private investigator Scott Shelby, is one of four leads, and so gets lost in the mix. He is portrayed as being heavily emotionally involved in catching the story’s killer. He’s a bit fat and old and nice an emotionally stable to be a child murderer—it couldn’t possibly be him. The misdirection is the same, so why isn’t the end result?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This obviously has a lot to do with the participatory nature of games. In being the one who moves a character around and chooses how they act, we feel a justifiable sense of ownership over everything they do. But should we? We are, after all, never omniscient figures when we order these characters to do our bidding. Just as our forces act upon and influence them, the game itself, with its rules, variables and systems, defines our own trajectories. We control the characters, but we only do so within the constraints of a set of predetermined inputs—doubly in the case of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Heavy Rain</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, which seeks to tell a heavily scripted story whilst still being somewhat interactive. We are never as in control as we’d like to think we are. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I’d also argue that the third person perspective of the game further strengthens our bond with and ownership of its characters. In being able to see their bodies we convince ourselves that we understand them and their motivations. In first person we take on the role of the character, turning them into versions of ourselves wearing power armour, a HEV suit or leather chaps. When we can see them there is a strange disconnect paradox: we are not them, but at the same time we are in control of them, and so a bond of trust develops between player and character stronger than if we were to simply embody them.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Heavy Rain </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">upset so many of my friends because it exploited this in its twist. They couldn’t rationalise and accept that they weren’t fully in control of the middle aged gumshoe they’d been running around for hours. This revelation sullied their opinion of the whole game to the point where they couldn’t see past it. Pre-twist we’d excitedly discussed our progress from the previous night, eager to find out where one another was in the story. Post-twist it was dead to them—they couldn’t forgive its treachery. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Heavy Rain </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">was cheap and exploitative. End of, son.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’d disagree. It’s twist is heavy-handed and gleeful in its execution; the game knows it has played with your sense of control and it is happy you’ve allowed it to do so. But beyond this I think its point is a valid one. We’re so accustomed to our video game protagonists being clear-cut and unambiguous—even when they’re a bit of a bad guy it’s fine as long as it fits with the mechanics and we force-rationalise it—that we’re largely unable to fathom them being anything else. I’d like to see more uneasy alliances between player and protagonist, where we’re unsure of their intentions but unable to do anything beyond stride ever forwards or stop playing. It’d certainly be a bit more interesting than always being zealots, completely dedicated to whatever cause we’ve taken up this week. </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">The above prose is proud to be associated with <a href="http://www.critical-distance.com/" target="_blank">Critical Distance</a>'s <i><a href="http://www.critical-distance.com/2015/11/09/november-2015-forgiveness/" target="_blank">Blogs of the Round Table</a></i>, an initiative which seeks to bring the diverse voices of video game criticism together about the person of a monthly topic. I think it's dead good, and so do these lovely individuals:</span>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Forgive me for asking, but do people still 'do' Patreon? Probably. Thusly... If you're thankful in any way for my free written</span></i><i style="font-family: inherit;"> gift to you, maybe consider making it ever so slightly less free by donating to my lovely Patreon, </i><i style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-GB">it resides here: </span></i><a href="http://patreon.com/ashouses" style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">patreon.com/ashouses</span></i></a><i style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-GB">. Chrz.</span></i><i style="font-family: inherit;"> </i><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span></span>Leigh Harrisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09843099451159275743noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4159365708969067844.post-89986897836178660352015-10-30T19:07:00.000+00:002015-10-30T19:09:38.208+00:00Big Boss Isn't a Very Good Boss At All<div style="text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What follows is a frank and honest discussion of </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; font-weight: 700; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain</span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. It includes intimate details of its woeful and misguided ending.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Big Boss. The clue is in the name I suppose. The greatest warrior of the 20th century, trained by the previous greatest warrior of the 20th century. Bloke with a mullet and an eye patch. Physical carbon copy of his own clone—thanks entirely to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Metal Gear Solid</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">’s protagonist, Solid Snake, being hugely popular and existing in a 3D form long before Big Boss. He’s worked for the US government. He’s been betrayed by the US government. Now he operates for himself, seeking to set up an independent state made up entirely of men who fight wars, presumably as a way of thumbing his nose at the notion of nuanced geopolitics. He’s a madman, by all accounts. But he’s also the flawed protagonist of a few video games, making his tortuous way to becoming the antagonist of a few other video games. He’s sort of a big deal ‘round here.</span></span></div>
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Metal Gear</span><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is weird. It’s weird in a wonderful way that only comes about through a giddy Frankenstein's Monster approach to crafting a narrative, where layers upon layers of increasingly unrelated story are held together with chicken wire and staples. I love the </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Saw </span><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">films for this very reason, because it takes a special sort of madness to keep writing, and indeed rewriting, yourself further into your own stories. Those films started out relatively benignly, with a bad guy called Jigsaw making people suffer for their apparent lack of gratitude for being alive. But then he died at the end of the third film—in one of the series’ many, many swerving plot twists—which posed the question of where everything would go next. Many successful horror series have fallen back on the easy route of just bringing the bad man back to life; he, after all, tending to be little more than a physical embodiment of our fears, and thus it mattering almost nothing that he exist within the realm of scientific feasibility. But them </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Saw</span><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> films are different. They went in another direction altogether, transforming the typical nature of the the horror franchise into something unhinged and beautiful. All seven films exist—and I’m not even joking—as a continuous whole that should be enjoyed in one sitting. After the demise of Jigsaw, previously incidental characters resurface as it is revealed they were part of a bigger plan from the start. Lengthy flashbacks pepper the remaining four films, reconfiguring our understanding of previous events as the filmmakers attempt to write themselves out of prematurely killing off the most compelling player in their opera of moralising carnal voyeurism. Clues are planted in one film, for their true meaning to only be uncovered two or three films later. Scenes are replayed multiple times in multiple films from multiple characters’ perspectives, as the overarching </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Saw </span><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">story is written and rewritten and then rewritten again before our eyes. And in the middle of it all is Jigsaw. A man who died less than half way into the series, controlling years of machinations from beyond, or more accurately </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">before</span><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, the grave.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Big Boss is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">at least </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">as smart as Jigsaw, so we’re told by the games he’s in. He is, remember, the greatest warrior of the 20th century, and with that title comes the necessity for a good deal of forward thinking. At the outset of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">MGS V: The Phantom Pain,</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Big Boss has been shafted in every imaginable way. During the events of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">MGS V: Ground Zeroes</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> nine years earlier, this titan of military planning let himself be hoodwinked into taking his eye off the ball, distracted by the promise of rescuing two on/off allies. While he was out on one of his customary sneaking missions, all hell went and broke loose on his oil rig home of Mother Base, as a paramilitary force masquerading as a UN inspection team did a big old number on his massive private army.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Incidentally, Mother Base is again itself a direct copy of something from an earlier game, in this case </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">MGS 2</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">’s Big Shell, a place that wouldn’t exist in the series’ fiction for another 30 years. But, because </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">MGS 2 </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">was released 15 years before </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">V</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, any such inspiration relationships must be inverted for the sake of canon, as the series ducks and weaves attempting to create something resembling a complete thematic entity.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Taken by surprise, and without their figurehead and tactical lynchpin, his well armed, well trained, well disciplined, well motivated, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">well effective</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> fighting force was left to just stand about getting shot and blown up like a right bunch of lumps. When Big Boss—also sometimes known as Snake for purely revisionist canonical reasons—finally did turn up it was all but too late, so he just grabbed his bro and the only other named character hanging about at the time, Kazuhira ‘Master’ Miller, and legged it in a chopper. Shortly after, that too blew up, because a lady riding in it happened to have a bomb in her fanny—read: vagina/or/womb, maybe the single most unnecessary plot detail to have ever existed—and everyone landed in the sea and was presumed dead. Cut nine years into the future—it being nine years later is referenced at least once in almost every conversation—and Big Boss awakes from a coma with a chip on his shoulder, a foul temper and a new codename, Punished ‘Venom’ Snake, to cement the whole deal.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Snake, then, is in a pretty unenviable position. He has two things he must do: rebuild his army and serve up retribution. His main bent is to seek revenge on those who darked him out, the paramilitary group XOF. XOF is itself, no surprises, a very literally inverted, evil version of his old unit, FOX, from back when he worked for the US government (but how do we know the government isn’t evil?) in previous games. FOX, though, is itself another canonical progenitor written into the series to tie people, places and events neatly together across a sea of games depicting things wildly out of order. In this case, FOX is the team that supposedly birthed FOXHOUND, the elite special forces unit Solid Snake and Big Boss were a part of in the original </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Metal Gear</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and the same team that went on to house the bad guys in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Metal Gear Solid</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. The self-referentiality of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Metal Gear</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> knows no bounds, and it’s wonderful that so many lineages have been written into the series. I’m drawing so much attention to it because of the cheapening effect of reusing very specific visual and thematic motifs </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ad nauseam</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. The odd nod to where an organisation or character will go in the future is a wonderfully solidifying thing, and with </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Metal Gear</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> especially, it has the ability to unify all the strands of a story spanning five decades. I think the XOF/FOX thing is pretty emblematic of how over the years this referentiality has become a runaway train; where fathers and sons are essentially identical characters, the same individuals happen to bump into one another time and time again all over the world, and where individual plot points are more like recurring characters themselves. It’s a bit messy. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Anyway, to relise his vengeance he must understandably first sort out the staffing problems inherent in all your soldiers being dead. This forces the greatest warrior of the 20th century into scrambling about by himself, taking on lucrative but demeaning contracts from all sorts of shifty organisations, illegal governments and groups of wrong ‘uns. He spends lots of the game doing this, sneaking about in abandoned villages, abandoned industrial facilities and abandoned sites of historical significance, all of which have been commandeered by ‘the enemy’ so they can stand about watching out for him, should he decide to approach ‘pon bended, sneaking knee. He’s normally tasked with rescuing prisoners, or removing high ranking officers, or blowing up tanks, and it is on these missions where he primarily sources his new ‘recruits’.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The process is not quite as simple as him going up to a group of soldiers, introducing himself with a handshake and then calling in a giant chopper to take everyone back to Mother Base. Big Boss, Punished ‘Venom’ Snake–the greatest warrior of the 20th century, celebrity among all the men and all the children who, through personal choice or otherwise, hold guns and kill people, you see, is actually more of an idea than a bona fide MVP. As it turns out, for various narrative and mechanical reasons, nobody really knows what Punished ‘Venom’ Snake, actually looks like. Except, of course, for the massive group of soldiers who tried to murder him the minute he woke from his coma at the game’s outset (nine years after the attack on Mother Base), all the game’s main antagonists, and people who have themselves just awoken from their own nine year comas. But really, almost nobody else knows what he looks like, and so bolstering his army becomes more a process of outright abduction and indoctrination than anything related to professional respect among colleagues.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Whenever Snake encounters an enemy he essentially has two choices. He can murder them in some fantastic way, or he can boringly knock them out and kidnap them with a big balloon. Obviously, a load of corpses does not an effective army make, so all those lovely guns, and rocket launchers, and landmines, and head-exploding rays Snake keeps in his bag of tricks begin rapidly gathering dust, as his only real course of action in many of the given situations is to incapacitate and then steal human beings—despite what large parts of the game’s design and marketing would have the player believe. Once back at Mother Base, these soldiers, all of whom are Russian, or Guatemalan, or Zimbabwean, are all sat down with a glass of milk and told they are now under the care of Snake. Learning of this, they all willingly join the cause without question (greatest warrior of the 20th century), and become entirely friendly. They also, for wholly unexplained reasons, all become American, and will forevermore salute Snake and say ‘howdy’ whenever he gets within ten feet of them.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And that’s about it really. Snake does his sneaking missions and keeps kidnaping soldiers, and they keep instantly joining his cause upon arrival at his in no way moustache-twirlingly evil deep sea fortress. There are a couple of little cosmetic things, like if Snake goes around saluting his troops a lot they’ll maybe train harder and get stronger, likewise if he does well on his solo soldier sneaking sojourns, but that stuff is all very nebulous and the game itself doesn't tell the player that anything of the sort is happening. He can also send his boys out on little missions of their own, though only if they’ve been playing nicely while he’s been out doing the proper work. These, though, are about as impersonal as they come, driven, as they are, entirely through the menus on Snake’s chunky ‘80s iPad. He never flies back to Mother Base to see them off with a rousing speech, never salutes them upon their heroic return; he just sits behind his little computer analysing statistical likelihoods of success and pressing buttons like a chump. The worst part of it all is how the outcomes of these assignments are quantified. Whoever designed the UI of his computer is as uninvested as Snake, for all post-mission statistical information—Snake’s favourite type of statistical information—is collated together under a single screen named ‘Rewards’—it’s even got an icon of a little rosette for good measure. It displays how much cash the mission netted Snake’s army, as well all the things his soldiers nabbed from the battlefield: generally stuff like plants, rocks and even more kidnapped soldiers. But it also slings dead operatives up there as well, albeit with their names highlighted in red, so they can mingle in with the 200 grand, 50 bunches of roses and that tonne of clay somebody said they wanted. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The way one chooses to display mission outcomes via a custom firmware is not a big thing, but I think it’s emblematic of the problems with Snake and his management style. Because that’s what it is: management—he isn’t a leader worth his salt. But it’s not really his fault. He’s the protagonist of an action game, and action games haven’t thus far figured out how to be anything but self-centered. You run Snake around and shoot people with tranquilizer guns as your main form of interaction, and there’s not a great deal of room given over to much else. For all the smarts displayed by the enemy AI, and it is very varied and convincing, there’s still not the sense that that intelligence could be mapped decently onto friendly soldiers. Patrol routes aren’t just simple straight lines like they used to be, and it does appear that adversaries are walking about with a bit of self-defined purpose, but that’s only good for the bad guys really. They are there to make infiltrations tense affairs filled with variables and not simple pattern recognition, but they are, at the end of the day, still just walking about to give the player something to avoid. Because of this limitation, there’s no real option but for Snake to go it alone as he always has, and the alternative would necessitate a whole load of scripting, linear environments and essentially making the game into something else entirely. As it stands, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">MGS V </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is a wonderful clockwork world for Snake and the player to shuffle about in. The breadth of environments alone—villages, hilltop forts, airports, compounds and more—makes every infiltration somewhat unique. Add in the litany of non-lethal gadgets used to distract and confuse your foes—honestly, killing is almost always the worst option—and you’ve got yourself a very large stealth toy box. The ancillary base building and staff management aspects on the periphery are well realised to an extent, but they are distanced from Snake to such a degree, essentially just gateing off mechanics for the large part, that you can't in good conscience say they make up anything but a small part of the game and Snake’s role within it. Almost all the focus is still placed on solo sneaking missions.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s strange then, that given </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">MGS V</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> seems to know exactly where its own strengths lie, that there is such a gulf between who Snake is and what the game wants us to think he is. He is, just like all the other Snakes in all the other </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Metal Gears</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, just a bloke with a mullet who crawls around on the floor a lot. There’s no shame in that: the amorphous, interchangeable character of Snake is one of the more compelling blokes in all of contemporary video games. But that isn’t enough for </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">MGS V</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. It wants us to see him not only as the greatest warrior of the 20th century, but also as the greatest man to have ever lived. General. Tactician. Visionary. Father. Philosopher. But he’s none of these things. He’s simply really good at solo sneaking missions, just like his cloned son before him.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is the biggest of all </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">MGS V</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">’s confusions. The game makes all of these bizarre and forceful narrative claims over Big Boss, Punished ‘Venom’ Snake–the greatest warrior of the 20th century, so that he’ll fit into the series’ twisted cannon where he will eventually become all the things he needs to be—General. Tactician. etc. etc.—even though the character and the design of the whole game that surrounds him clearly state otherwise. AND AND AND it’s not even Big Boss at all, which makes the whole thing, which hardly made sense to begin with, stray even further away from possibly ever making any sense. The destructiveness of the game's violently unnecessary twist cannot be overstated. It turns out that all along you’ve been playing as simply Punished ‘Venom’ Snake, who is not simply Big Boss with a fancy new name. This Snake is actually another man entirely, one who received plastic surgery and hypnosis in order for him to believe that he’s the greatest warrior of the 20th century. It is he who will eventually go on to be the antagonist of the very first </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Metal Gear</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, while the real Big Boss will still be the bad guy in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Metal Gear 2</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is unfathomable that this is the case. The whole point of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">MGS V </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">being a story about Big Boss in the ‘80s is that it is meant to show the downfall of a great man—to bridge the gap between his earlier self as a poster boy for elite soldiers everywhere and his ultimate role as the evil general of his own private army. The game fumbles this transition in every way imaginable, both mechanically and narratively, in delivering a fantastic stealth action game with a juvenile about-face ending. The character you play as is not Big Boss, nor is he is in any believable way a leader of men. He is simply what the protagonists of all </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Metal Gear </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">games have always been: a bloke called Snake who sneaks about. There’s nothing wrong with this at all, but the game seems to think there is. What it doesn’t do, and what the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Saw</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> films did so brilliantly, is harness the ability to rewrite stories to create a somewhat coherent whole. As it stands, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">MGS V </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">does the exact opposite, and takes what was an already almost incomprehensible mess and makes it even murkier—and for absolutely no reason other than because it can. It’s a massive achievement that it does so, and it baffles me that this is what constitutes the sorrowful downfall of the greatest warrior of the 20th century. It would appear that the only person Big Boss is ever truly the Big Boss of is himself, and even then he manages to fail miserably at times.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">The above prose is proud to be associated with <a href="http://www.critical-distance.com/" target="_blank">Critical Distance</a>'s <i><a href="http://www.critical-distance.com/2015/10/03/october-2015-leadership/" target="_blank">Blogs of the Round Table</a></i>, an initiative which seeks to bring the diverse voices of video game criticism together about the person of a monthly topic. I think it's dead good, and so do these lovely individuals:</span>
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<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">I spent lots of my life playing The Phantom Pain and I'd like to buy some of it back. Thusly... If you're thankful in any way for my free written</span></i><i style="font-family: inherit;"> gift to you, maybe consider making it ever so slightly less free by donating to my lovely Patreon, </i><i style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-GB">it resides here: </span></i><a href="http://patreon.com/ashouses" style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">patreon.com/ashouses</span></i></a><i style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-GB">. Chrz.</span></i><i style="font-family: inherit;"> </i><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span>Leigh Harrisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09843099451159275743noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4159365708969067844.post-60047896470906447192015-09-30T10:45:00.001+01:002015-09-30T10:45:20.194+01:00No Wonder the Cool Kids Didn’t Like Me: Teenage Years, Societal Fears and Brewed Under License Beers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I went through a curious transition from being a child to a teenager, the same one that, in our own unique ways, I suppose we all must endure to a varying extent. Mine, it must be said, was on the more benign end of the scale. I loved LEGO growing up (buy your kids a massive box of bricks and you'll save a small fortune on toy purchases throughout their lifetime), and I found it really difficult giving it up as I grew older, so I just didn’t. This led to strange juxtapositions like my fifteenth birthday party, which saw a group of similarly aged adolescents in my room all drinking </span><a href="http://www.carlsberggroup.com/brands/Pages/SKOL.aspx" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Skol lager</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (just like at Dave’s party a few months previously) and watching </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The</span><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Evil Dead</span><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, surrounded by LEGO models and the echoing sounds of ‘don’t touch them please, they’re fragile.’ They touched them, of course, because LEGO is universally fascinating and they were probably a tiny bit jealous of me having the wherewithal to still have it proudly displayed in my boudoir. Or maybe they just wanted to laugh at me. Regardless, I was enraptured by those bricks long after my peers had passed them by.</span></div>
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Like any seasoned builder, I rarely followed the plans each set came with, instead making my own creations from the available materials. And, like any seasoned builder, I didn't mix up my sets -- you just </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">don't do that</span><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> -- so was constantly pushed to make new and interesting things from a constant and finite collection of bricks. I loved making buildings for whatever reason, and by my fifteenth birthday party had a sprawling metropolis atop a chest of drawers with drop leaf sides. When they were fully extended I had about two square metres to play with, and I maximised the use of this space with all sorts of offices, apartment blocks, shops, and thoroughfares. It was a sight to behold, honestly.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now, I was fifteen in 2004, so that most hallowed of games, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Grand Theft Auto III</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, had been a part of my life for going on three years. In my metropolis, which I'd named Carcer City after a couple of in-game radio broadcasts mentioned it neighboured </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">GTA III</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">’s Liberty City (it later went on to be the setting of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Manhunt</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, within Rockstar Games' PS2 era metafiction), I'd play out all sorts of crime capers. Some were heroic 70s inspired romps like </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Italian Job </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">or Roger Moore James Bond stories, but most were violent tales of the sort of villainy I'd seen in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">GTA</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. I'd stand in my room for hours on end, acting out revenge stories, gangland takeovers, and bloody massacres with my little plastic people. I'd voice all the characters out loud, as well as that of the narrator, who, looking back, was a strangely literary addition to my video game reproductions. I loved my little LEGO city because it was a canvas for my stories, its plastic walls and roads the setting for the infinite possibilities contained within my young brain. Everything was a mishmash, and so I'd write in explanations for any visual anachronisms. Grizzled robbers from a Western themed set became extrovert gangsters with a penchant for dressing up, much like the droogs from </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A Clockwork Orange</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and sat perfectly in my fiction alongside working folk and aliens (they were futuristic assassins) alike. Everything made sense because anything was possible.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Another of my weirdly childlike </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">GTA</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">-inspired hobbies was drawing maps. I've found maps fascinating from a very young age, partly because of my time as a scout and partly because of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Hobbit</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Just like the LEGO cities, my maps held infinite possibilities. Maps are tools, yes, and tools that have been signifiers of some truly deplorable occurrences; Leopold II of Belgium carving up a large part of Africa to form his preposterously named </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Congo Free State</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> springs to mind when thinking of misery-stained cartography. And while it's true that my maps were inspired by the violence-steeped streets of places like Liberty City, they were first and foremost places of opportunity. Every boulevard, alley, and highway was the setting of some exciting imagined car chase or race. The large compound set back from the road could, at any single moment, be a secret governmental listening post, a high security gang hideout, or a contraband distribution centre. These places were just biro lines in a spiral bound notebook, but they meant so much more to me because I could ascribe whatever meaning I chose to their many abstractions. Maps, in being simplified representations of absolutes, hold the power to show us whatever we wish to see.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The only </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">GTA </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’ve ever finished</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">without cheating is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">IV</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and, with the exception of the PS2 trilogy, I’ve never come close to completing most of them. Despite this, “</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">GTA </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Day” is always exciting for me, because it means I get to carefully unfold a new map and study it maniacally for about half an hour. Whether I’m at home and able to play right there, or at work or in a shopping centre, I always go to the map before the game. Even though that room full of mid-strength lager and LEGO is but a distant memory, I still get a strange buzz out of looking down on roads, building, and tiny people from up on high. I love imagining the stories these places might hold, and the wealth of possibilities I might experience. I hardly ever get the whole way through the games themselves because they can never meet my lofty expectations. They are long and repetitive, and unlike the spaces they take place within, devoid of much meaningful variety. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have this problem in getting along with most large-scale open world games, and it's because they rarely leverage their massive size to satisfying ends. Just like any big city or municipality, they essentially boil down to being large patchworks of smaller spaces, all of which perform similar functions and service similar needs. Real places are structured as such because they have to accommodate millions of people, whereas open world game spaces are created exclusively for the player. I can buy my bread and milk along any number of North London's shopping streets, but I go to the one closest to me for obvious reasons, regardless of them all having their unique charms. Lots of open world games neglect to acknowledge this, and pepper themselves with </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_Green" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Wood Greens</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tottenham" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tottenhams</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stamford_Hill" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Stamford Hills</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmonton,_London" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Edmontons</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoke_Newington" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Stoke Newingtons</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finsbury_Park,_London" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Finsbury Parks</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalston" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dalstons</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, asking us to visit each one and buy the same list of groceries as we go, as if we were inhabiting the lives of a great many people in quick succession. There are loads of lovely pubs or greasy spoons to tempt me away from my local area on a Sunday afternoon, but simple pleasures like those don’t transfer over into games; I just go from one place to the next killing men, stealing posters, and opening crates. The variety of tasks seen in most open world games is very superficial, and so giant tracts of land are placed in between the copy/paste activities to create a paper-thin illusion that what we're doing is in some way unique. But just like buying a bag of tomatoes seventeen times on your way home, doing the same thing in loads of different places isn’t quite analogous to doing different things in loads of different places. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I've been spending lots of time with </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Witcher 3 </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Metal Gear Solid V</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> recently, and they both approach open world design in a slightly different way. Instead of structuring their sprawls as many discrete locations stitched together with roads and fields or city blocks, where each place acts as a level to house only a story beat or side activity and nothing further, these two ask you to liberally revisit locations. I've long found it strange that a game like </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Far Cry 3</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> contains so many lavishly designed places that the player is only ever going to see once for about ten minutes. Dirty great temples, townships, and fortresses, places that loads of people spent ages making, are created to be run through at full pelt and then forgotten. It is, in my mind, a sign of the bloated nature of big-ticket video game extravagance, a practice that at some point has to stop before games begin costing the GDP of small countries to produce. In both </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Witcher </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Metal Gear</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, your objectives regularly call upon you to go back to places with new eyes. This is not just a smart way to get the most out of their environments, which are still certifiably massive, but it also allows the player to reconfigure their understanding of them as well. Simple changes such as the time of day, direction of approach, and enemy type and distribution -- really simple things already built into each game -- can dramatically alter our understanding of a space we're already familiar with. We really don’t need to explore a dozen </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">déjà vu-inducing</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> villages to feel variety, simply a single one to revisit in unique ways. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At the beginning of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Far Cry 3</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> you take part in a daring escape from a prison camp. I dearly wanted to re-explore the place many hours later when my character had become stronger, just to see if I could sneak back in there and have a snoop around while not running for dear life. I scoured the game's map, searching for the camp's environmental hallmarks: the long rope bridge, a large dirt courtyard, its circular configuration of cages and huts. But the place doesn't exist within the game's open world. It is a video game level in the most literal of senses: a separate space to be loaded into and out of, locked away from the player once it's function has been exhausted. At one point later in the game you have to escape from a burning hotel, which involves a lot of scrambling about and well timed jumping. Unlike the camp, you can return there whenever you wish, but there's no point in doing so. The charred remains of the building stand empty, its doors barred with rubble and its gardens deserted. The place sits at the end of a long valley, only accessible from a single track that leads to it and nothing else. The whole area is designed to fulfil the solitary need for a large burning building to have the player escape from; its topography, isolation, and emptiness scream 'one time only', as it stands disused for the rest of eternity.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Open world games are largely fixated not with the places where things take place, but the spaces in between: one-off set piece locations and unnervingly familiar villages and neighbourhoods strung together with miles of less interesting terrain. But this approach has resulted in players spending as much time travelling to and from points of interest as they do actually interacting with them once there. My tiny LEGO cities and homemade maps, along with the concise spatial reconfiguration seen in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Witcher </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Metal Gear</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, tell me that a huge landmass alone isn't necessarily going to assuage the pains of repetition. Nor too, will a place as endlessly varied as </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Grand Theft Auto V</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">’s San Andreas stand to stem the tide of fatigue if all it contains is forty hours of recapitulation. The stories told and the events that take place within spaces have always been where my interests lie, and looking down on a map lets me imagine all the stories I’m probably never going to be told. Maps chart the unknown, show us places we've never been and let us imagine what all their lines and symbols might represent. They are tools of navigation and conquest, but they also hold within them infinite possibilities. The exciting ambiguities of a map rarely carry over into the places it represents, but that's their beauty: we don't, after all, need one of somewhere we already know.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">The above prose is proud to be associated with <a href="http://www.critical-distance.com/" target="_blank">Critical Distance</a>'s <i><a href="http://www.critical-distance.com/2015/09/05/september-2015-maps/" target="_blank">Blogs of the Round Table</a></i>, an initiative which seeks to bring the diverse voices of video game criticism together about the person of a monthly topic. I think it's dead good, and so do these lovely individuals:</span>
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<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Skol is <a href="http://www.sainsburys.co.uk/shop/gb/groceries/skol-4x440ml">£2.50 a four pack</a>, so if I had a tenner and a fridge I could have a pretty lively evening at 2.8% ABV. Thusly... If you're thankful in any way for my free written</span></i><i style="font-family: inherit;"> gift to you, maybe consider making it ever so slightly less free by donating to my lovely Patreon, </i><i style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-GB">it resides here: </span></i><a href="http://patreon.com/ashouses" style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">patreon.com/ashouses</span></i></a><i style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-GB">. Chrz.</span></i><i style="font-family: inherit;"> </i><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span>Leigh Harrisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09843099451159275743noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4159365708969067844.post-88693793088862185962015-08-28T11:39:00.000+01:002015-08-28T12:00:24.878+01:00Games of Future Past - or - We’re Skating on Thin Ice Here, Why Would Anyone Want to Play a 'New Classic Point & Click Adventure Game'? <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: black; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There’s a very real danger involved in mulling over our own yesteryears. Care about a particular era too much and you become the type for whom, for example, constantly talking about the ‘good times we had at school’ is completely acceptable. They were indeed enjoyable, those days when we worked weekends up the shopping village for four quid an hour, spending all our pay on nights out in the ex-mill towns of West Yorkshire. But they were also full of horrible stuff like puberty, a lack of personal autonomy and terrible, gel-based hairstyles. Dismiss the merits of your past too forcefully, however, and you end up in a perpetual cycle of snorting ketamine and hunting out craft brewery taprooms, attempting in vain to prove to yourself that ‘I am </span><span style="color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">undeniably</span><span style="color: black; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> an adult: butterscotch shots and dancing to Pantera are for the kids.’</span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Time marches on and things change. The places we used to go -- if they still exist, many do not -- don’t even play </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Walk</span><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> anymore, because those young people, for reasons I cannot comprehend, don’t seem to see the merit in 90s metal songs about arseholes. No, magic moments pop up to be enjoyed for what they are there and then. It’s okay to recall them fondly from time to time -- and you should, if only to empower your present self through acknowledging that some sort of change has occurred -- but you mustn’t let them wholly define who you are now. There is a reason you don’t find sixteen year olds attractive anymore: you grew up. Painful as that is to admit, it’s probably for the best all round, especially for the adolescents you’re not drunkenly bothering with your bad drugs and even worse ‘stories’. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I remember playing </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> back when I was all innocent, and thinking games couldn't possibly ever get any better. I did the skateboarding a bit in real life then (who didn't?), going down hills in my village and carrying the board over my shoulders at the park (to avoid the embarrassment of “skating” in front of others), but </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Pro Skater 2</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> was different: I could actually do it well. I particularly enjoyed the vert based levels, and would play for hours with my sister and cousin. We’d just </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">chill</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, whiling away entire afternoons and evenings busting tricks and grinding rails while listening to the extremely well curated soundtrack. It was perfect. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It wasn't, obviously, and there were things even then that I recognised as being a little skewy. There were these “secret areas”, like one rooftop in the Philadelphia level, that were cripplingly difficult to get to. Not the kind of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">they’re hard to reach -- but it’s achievable -- for a reason</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> sort of places, it was more a case that the controls couldn’t afford you the level of precision required to get there, so you ended up having to chain together complex and lengthy combinations of tricks to reach these desolate and wholly unrewarding spaces. (This is why I don’t like hard things in games. For me the experience of playing is reward enough; I don’t need a convoluted and taxing time to enjoy myself.) </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Another big thing was how the levels changed when you played multiplayer, as the game had to make adjustments to accommodate you and your partner. Some areas were cut out entirely, or the cars and busses populating streets disappeared. Another very noticeable alteration, and something which struck me as strange at the time, was that all the skies looked different. One level, a giant half-pipe floating in the sea off Hawaii, came with a warm orange sky in singleplayer, but it was all dark when I skated it with my bros. In my naivete I thought the level had been converted into a nighttime one for the sake of aesthetic variation, but looking back now it’s clear that the sky had just been ripped out and replaced with a plain black nothingness to get the game to run. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">None of these things impeded my enjoyment though, because they were but tiny blemishes on an otherwise pristine canvas. The great thing about the early </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tony Hawk’s</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> games was that they were so enjoyable to control -- when not trying to reach silly rooftops, obviously. The fluidity inherent in linking together grinds, manuals, flip, grab and lip tricks was beyond belief, and so it was just plain fun to simply </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">move about</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, regardless of whether you cared to studiously unlock and max out everything or just have a casual sojourn. This focus on the joy of movement also meant that the objectives you had to complete to progress were relatively simple. Grind a specific trio of rails, skate over this flying dollar bill (y’all), collect the letters S-K-A-T-E as if you were a gnarly Donkey Kong: everything was very simple, very manageable, and could always be tackled while just going about the business of skating. They acted as a way of funnelling your attention to a certain part of a level, but were never onerous enough to drag you out of the game’s moment-to-moment fluidity. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As the series progressed -- and particularly after the first four, numbered, titles -- things began to go a little awry. As technology improved, the scope of the levels increased pretty considerably, which made everything a little messier. The strength of the early games’ best stages lay in them being spatially concise. There mightn’t have been much in them, but just like a well designed skate park in real life, they were laid out to maximise what was there, encouraging you to link together tricks off and around the various ramps and rails in increasingly imaginative combinations. But this only worked so well because the travelling distance between bits of furniture was so small. This helped both with the split second timing necessary to successfully keep a line of tricks going, and the ‘just one more go’ urge to get back on the board when things went wrong. As the levels got bigger both of these strengths were lost, and they became more like large, meandering collections of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">stuff</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: ramps, and rails, and canons, and jetskis, and big wheels, and giant, gurning explosions.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Probably the biggest reason the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tony Hawk’s</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> series went to toss is because it lost faith in the ability of the skateboarding itself to be compelling. As the levels got bigger, so too did the list of tricks you could pull off and the absurdity quota of the goals being set for you. Everything got a bit silly. By the fifth game you could jump off your board and incorporate </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">jogging</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> into your</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">skateboarding lines. By the sixth, Bam Margera had shown up to make it all </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">c-razy</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, getting you to light fireworks out of your bum for the funnies -- whilst you maybe pulled a benihana. Seven, eight and nine were all open world, and at some stage introduced a feature which allowed you to build your own parks right on top of the games’, which I believe says a lot about their perceived quality by that point. The beautiful motion of the earlier entries became buried under layers and layers of extra fluff, much of which had very little to do with riding on a bit of wood with wheels. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Good news though: we can pretend none of that happened! After being driven into the ground through annualisation, old </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tony Hawk’s </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is regaining control of its legacy. Let it be heard from the rooftops and echoing through the dirty and cramped streets of wherever you call home: 2015 is the year </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tony </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">comes back -- in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Pro Skater 5</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Like a thousand discarded iterations of Spider-Man, video game skateboarding is starting (almost) over. The game's intent is right there in the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">5</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: we're going back to basics. There'll be no open world. No stories of youthful rebellion and ‘getting out of this dead end town’. No dead-eyed digital representations of MTV personalities spouting off nonsense. No twatting about in general, or so I gather.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All this raises a big question. Is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Pro Skater 5 </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">simply an exercise in nostalgia-mining, a wholesale recreation of years past because, let’s be honest, no one really knows what to do with skateboarding? Or is it an acknowledgement that making a game a year for a decade over familiarises us with even the best video games can offer, leading to an unhappy fatigue we wouldn't wish on our worst enemies? Honestly, it’s probably a mix of the two. But raising this question raises another question: one about the nature of nostalgia itself when it comes to games. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s ironic, that in such a fast-moving industry as video games, where we’re constantly chomping at the bit for the next technological leap, that we’re now increasingly looking to the past -- to before things changed -- to find our fun. Like the ill-fated protagonists of so much speculative fiction, the video game industry seems compelled to forge ever forwards without asking whether it’s even a good idea. By </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Pro Skater 4</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tony Hawk’s</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> games were mechanically perfect. In four short years the skateboarding game went from being a burgeoning concern to its very zenith. In continuing the series thereafter, things took an understandable tumble off a cliff: you can’t make the best better, just dick about with it. Nostalgia in video games breeds off fatigue, off the sense that things are moving too quickly -- and for no reason beyond making money. Games are made, then they receive a sequel, then another, and another, and another, until, all of a sudden, two and a half years have passed and nobody wants anything to do with the original concept. Then you wait. People forget. And finally you reboot. It’s nonsense.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Just like the video game industry, nostalgia itself is very shortsighted. We don’t commonly long for the Middle Ages, or the Industrial Revolution, or Feudal Japan; when dreaming about the past we rarely want to place our fantasy selves in difficult or dangerous situations. We like the idea of the late sixties, with its sex, music and getting high. We like the idea of the pre-depression twenties, where we’d be nattily dressed, drinking martinis and dancing with beautiful people in Art Deco ballrooms. We like the idea of the eighties, when Western culture was at a low point, but you could at least make a lot of money from screwing over those less fortunate than yourself. In nostalgia we long for a time when “things was [sic] simpler”, but also for one that is eminently recognisable and comfortable. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There’d be little room for nostalgia in a world that paced itself in a way that made sense. The only reason most of us long for the past is because we all work in offices with people we don’t like. Drystone wallers don’t fantasise about living with Andy Warhol, so I'm told, because they spend their lives making things in the fresh air. Nostalgia is a sign that we’ve come too far, too fast, and ended up in a worse-off position. We slip into thinking about our childhoods or a bygone age because what we do with large chunks of our lives, and by extension the world in which we do it all, is so devoid of proper, genuine, nurturing meaning. It's comforting to think back to somewhere we'd be perceptibly freer, however misinformed such fantasy is. I have no real qualms that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is going to exist. What worries me more is that to accept it we have to pretend that five other games never did. I think that says a lot, not just about the landscape of video games, but the shoddy and wasteful way the world works today. Nostalgia is an escape from the things we don't like, a means of resetting the world in our favour. It's also really bad for us. It’s very difficult to make things better while you’re gazing over your shoulder, or, as I fear is the case for many veteran developers resurrecting past glories, square at your navel. </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">The above prose is proud to be associated with <a href="http://www.critical-distance.com/" target="_blank">Critical Distance</a>'s <i><a href="http://www.critical-distance.com/2015/08/02/august-2015-nostalgia/" target="_blank">Blogs of the Round Table</a></i>, an initiative which seeks to bring the diverse voices of video game criticism together about the person of a monthly topic. I think it's dead good, and so do these lovely individuals:</span>
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<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">In the very near future I'm going to be Kickstarting a collection of remakes/</span>re-imaginings of<span style="font-family: inherit;"> my earliest (and worst) critical essays. If you want to get in on the ground floor and reap some of the truly bountiful rewards associated with flogging a barrage of recycled ideas, then I'd suggest you invest in the project right away. Thusly... If you're thankful in any way for my free written</span></i><i style="font-family: inherit;"> gift to you, maybe consider making it ever so slightly less free by donating to my lovely Patreon, </i><i style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-GB">it resides here: </span></i><a href="http://patreon.com/ashouses" style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">patreon.com/ashouses</span></i></a><i style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-GB">. Chrz.</span></i><i style="font-family: inherit;"> </i><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span>Leigh Harrisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09843099451159275743noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4159365708969067844.post-19125457679776382492015-07-31T11:57:00.000+01:002015-08-05T06:47:56.328+01:00Shopping On A Hangover: Sorry, I Can’t Carry All These Swords<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“If everything is fun, is anything </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">truly fun</span><span style="font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> -- how do we know?” - Geralt of Rivia </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Context is inescapable when it comes to most things. Take, for instance, a beer being enjoyed at three in the morning with your live-in beloved. It's a frosty Corona, fitted with a generous slice of lime. It comes as standard with a helping of 90s dance music, something like, I dunno, </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AYFaX4JHVk" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dr. Alban</span></a><span style="color: black; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Now, in isolation this is one of the most wonderful of situations I could ever hope to find myself in. I'm dancing in my living room. I'm maybe having a small snack in between sips of beer. I'm jumping up and down, as if I’m really back in the throes of clubland delight. I'm reminded of why, for me, a good, well maintained, mutually respectful and -- of course -- loving long-term relationship is preferable in every way to actually being in a club -- in the 90s or any other period of time -- and trying to find that special someone. I already have. And I'm drinking a beer and dancing with her in my living room at three in the morning.</span><br />
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Ah, yeah, context. That beer needs putting into context. It needs sticking up alongside the ten assorted bottles and pints I've consumed before it over the course of dinner and watching the blues band my boy from work, Nick, is in. And the two bottles of wine she's managed to put away. We're talking about doing this over nine or so hours, so it's fairly spread out, but we're up at three and having a good time; we can't ignore how we got here. We're in high spirits, but the hour will quickly begin to make itself fealt. We'll be in bed for four on this occasion, just as soon as we've emptied the last two Coronas from the fridge. This levity will, of course, have to fit into our wider weekend. Tomorrow morning, despite being hours away, will undeniably be impacted by what we're doing right now. Not by much, it will transpire, and we'll go for a pint and a Sunday fry up for breakfast, but you simply can't be dancing at three in the morning without it affecting many other aspects of your life. This time we'll be lucky. In the past -- and likely sometime again in the future -- having a great deal of fun in the wee hours means you sacrifice some other chunk of some other day. It's just the way it works. Nothing exists in isolation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When I'm not busy galavanting, I sometimes play video games. At the moment I'm playing one called </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Witcher 3</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. It's a roleplaying game which takes place in a massive open world. You play as Geralt of Rivia, a stoic and humorously sarcastic monster hunter who is out to find his missing daughter. I’ve played it for about a hundred and thirty hours thus far, which is more than five full days so I’m told. It’s actually a rather standard affair if you get down and dirty with being reductive, in that it does nothing -- past its quasi-real-time beard growth simulation -- that RPGs before it haven’t already done. What’s kept me enthralled is the care and detail the people at CD Projekt RED have put into their game. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The sheer amount of narrative is the biggest pull for me. Where many games save all their writing up for the main quest, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Witcher 3</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> throws you little stories at every turn. You might, in reality, just be going from one place to another and then killing monsters in many of its little side quests, but this is obfuscated by generous storytelling. Each quest is filled with unique characters, who all have names, lives, family members, friends and enemies. You’ll happen upon conveniently discarded notes and journals that further flesh out these relationships and the wider happenings of the local area. The plots of these quests regularly take swerves into the left-field, which is super exceptional considering how straightforward optional activities usually are in this sort of game. The actual fighting of monsters is fun, I must say, but I doubt I’d’ve continued playing for over a working week if all the game gave me to do was repeatedly press the square button to kill things. I'm the sort of person who needs a constantly changing landscape to keep me interested. I'm also very literal, so it should come as no surprise that I enjoy walking a great deal.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The copious story elements in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Witcher 3</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> contextualise what I’m doing, thus giving my actions meaning, which stops my brain from revolting and telling me to go outside. Without them I wouldn’t still be playing, because regardless of how enjoyable cleaving a man’s torso in two is, it simply can’t hold my sustained attention without a little bit of added meaning.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There are various mechanics of scarcity in effect in the game that make playing as Geralt feel special. As a Witcher, he is reviled by much of society, being, as he is, a wandering, genetically modified monster slayer. He’s a bit of an outsider. To convey this, the game makes his life a little more difficult than most action game protagonists. He has a limited carrying capacity, he can’t quickly heal himself in combat, he can only fast travel from certain points on the large world map, he doesn’t sleep in beds. I’ve already written that I think these things are </span><a href="http://ashouses.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/patching-up-geralt.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">fantastic as a means of mechanically reinforcing his characterisation</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. But I’d like to give myself a facetious rebuttal and just say this: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">shit’s not fun</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m not of the mind that all video games should be fun all the time. Games are an interactive medium, and if we’re only ever willing to create fun experiences for players then we’re tragicall underselling their possibilities. At the same time, lots of big ticket, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">made to be super fun</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> games often have a weird mix of fun and not fun stuff in them. Here, mysterious and unknowably complex formulae are used to decide which of their aspects should evoke bubbling, childish glee, and which should make the player walk super slowly for fifteen minutes because their bag is full and they’re too stingy to throw away a couple of inexpensive swords. These two vastly differing mechanical ideologies chafe together like nobody's business, and their implementation is often a bit arbitrary.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The actual meat and potatoes mechanics of play in big action games are untouchable. To make it genuinely difficult to do basic things like kill people, or punch people or chop people up would be considered sacrilege. I believe the second </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Witcher</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> game actually locked up blocking as an ability to be bought from the skill tree, which, while being audaciously wonderful in concept, is just plain silly for a combat focused experience. That sort of hijinks has to be left to </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_(video_game)" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">little art games</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> at all times; it's just the way of the business unfortunately.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There are loads of systems in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Witcher 3</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> that deliberately aren’t fun as a means of adding mechanical depth to Geralt in the face of his ability to murder with ease. I’ve mentioned many of them already -- fast travel, encumbrance, healing -- but the biggest pain is interacting with shopkeepers. Let me count the ways. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">>ONE</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> - They do not work at night and cannot be coaxed to do so with the old trick of waking them up by force.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">>TWO</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> - They have a limited funds, meaning you can’t sell ten grands worth of pilfered gear to a single peddler in one go.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">>THREE</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> - Their limited funds take ages to replenish, meaning that you have to find a new shopkeeper once you’ve taken all their cash.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">>FOUR</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> - Most of them are men, which sets a somewhat worrying precedent for the politics of the game (</span><a href="http://www.polygon.com/2015/6/3/8719389/colorblind-on-witcher-3-rust-and-gamings-race-problem" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">nothing at all</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><a href="http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2015/06/04/witcher-3-and-diversity/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">has already been</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><a href="http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/austin_walker/blog/on-the-witcher-3-race-and-historicity/110177/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">spoken about</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/245754/Opinion_Cultural_influence_does_not_preclude_diversity.php" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">this, honest</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">).</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">>FIVE</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> - Different traders offer different prices for different types of goods. There is one variety of item (severed monster heads) that only a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">single </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">shopkeeper in the whole game will give you a good price for. He suffers from all of the above character flaws.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Because we're playing as superheroes at all times in big games, nuance has to live in the things surrounding the characters we control. The semblance of a real economy ticking over around Geralt is there to ground him and the world he inhabits a little. Preventing him from embarking on week-long shopping sprees makes him feel a lot more, you know, vulnerable and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">real</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, right? It's the same with the other little niggles. Geralt has the ability to instantly kill an enemy two percent of the time? Balance it out by making him ride a horse for five minutes to the nearest fast travel signpost. He can telekinetically control minds for the rest of the game at level four? Might as well only let him carry three swords, a jug of milk and a bag of flowers (I’m exaggerating slightly).</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Don't get me wrong: I'm being a pedant to make a point that even I'm not a hundred percent on. I understand </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">why</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> systems like this exist -- and again, </span><a href="http://ashouses.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/patching-up-geralt.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’ve already written in praise of them</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. It's just that big ticket games like </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Witcher 3</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, while all the time being giant playgrounds of unrealistically boombastic good times, unnecessarily pepper themselves with deliberately obtuse mechanics in the name of upholding wholly false and inaccurate standards of realism, authenticity and (shudder) immersion. I find it annoyingly selective, and, just like the argument that everyone in the game is white because of historical accuracy, </span><a href="http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2015/06/04/witcher-3-and-diversity/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a bit limp</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> as justifications go. What frustrates me so much about systems like encumbrance, slow health regen (from already capacity-capped potions) and limited access to fast travel is that they are so neutered. They aren't punishing or restrictive enough to be truly meaningful. Weapon carry capacity, to keep harping on an example, should in my mind be limited to equipped weapons only, or not limited at all. I don't see an arbitrary cap sitting somewhere in between as anything but an inconvenience at best, or a nonsensical anachronism at worst. I mean, I </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">get</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> why these things are implemented -- to add certain balances to wildly powerful characters -- I'm just not convinced that they achieve their goal of contextualising such power.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Punitive peripheral systems </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">can and do</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> add nuance, but they do so in an incongruous and contradictory way. They offer the illusion that playing as a powerful character is more taxing than it truly is. But, at the same time, they are do come in handy as a means of controlling and meting out our enjoyment. Just as </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Witcher 3</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> excels because it supplements its core combat experience with lavish storytelling, it's also much more interesting precisely because its hero is forced to think just a little about what he's doing, even if that entails running about, laboriously selling swords to fifteen different retailers. It mightn’t appear much at first, but mechanics of scarcity like these do stop us binging on the genuinely fun parts of a game. Maybe the key to creating fun is to actually limit its quantities? Is it simply the case that fun things accompanied by not fun things actually generates </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">more fun </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">for the player? </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;">I'm not saying that the waiting hangover is ever part of enjoying the dancing in your living room at three in the morning, but it does at least stop us from staying up late all the time. You can't, after all, appreciate the novelty of something that occurs too regularly. Moderation, as we were all told as children, is the key to enjoying oneself. The fun parts of games are usually the most simplistic. Yes, it takes some time to learn to deftly block and then counterattack, but these are mechanics designed to be mastered by the player. Once this is accomplished, don’t we then run the risk of our enjoyment steadily declining, as we begin to simply go through the motions? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On the whole, I don’t think systems like encumbrance succeed in making our all-powerful protagonists feel weaker or more vulnerable. (They </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">do</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Witcher 3</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, but only because they are so heavily incorporated into Geralt’s painstakingly reinforced characterisation.) What they do do, at least, is place the fun stuff like blocking, and counterattacking, and torso cleaving into a wider context alongside really quite rubbish stuff. In doing so, they act as the hangover we all need to be able to truly appreciate the good stuff. They remind us that, yes, this </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">isn’t</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the greatest feeling we’ve ever experienced, but Christ, the stars aligned that Saturday night, and something wonderful came together that more than justified the pounding head come Sunday.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">The above prose is proud to be associated with <a href="http://www.critical-distance.com/" target="_blank">Critical Distance</a>'s <i><a href="http://www.critical-distance.com/2015/07/04/july-2015-pure-fun/" target="_blank">Blogs of the Round Table</a></i>, an initiative which seeks to bring the diverse voices of video game criticism together about the person of a monthly topic. I think it's dead good, and so do these lovely individuals:</span>
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<br /><i>I actually ended up spending about fifteen quid on Coronas that night. Thusly... If you're thankful in any way for my free written</i><i> gift to you, maybe consider making it ever so slightly less free by donating to my lovely Patreon, </i><i><span lang="EN-GB">it resides here: </span></i><a href="http://patreon.com/ashouses"><i><span lang="EN-GB">patreon.com/ashouses</span></i></a><i><span lang="EN-GB">. Chrz.</span></i><i> </i>
</span>Leigh Harrisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09843099451159275743noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4159365708969067844.post-77778957063187723532015-07-24T19:39:00.000+01:002015-07-27T17:10:25.873+01:00Patching Up Geralt Of Rivia, The Last Action Hero<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There's always a catch. When a Witcher asks for "what you find at home yet don't expect" in return for saving someone's life, neither party really knows what form that reward will take. It being an unknown quantity, one can usually be safe in assuming it will be somewhat meaningful. There's always a catch, after all. I like ambiguities like this, and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Witcher 3</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is full of them. You've got your more standard video game ones, like not truly understanding the wider consequences of your actions, or never having a complete grasp of your companions' intentions. But it's home to many more, ones that are much more specifically, well, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Witchery</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You play as Geralt of Rivia, a monster slayer looking to track down his de facto daughter, Ciri. You roam about the land and talk to people she's met, with the hope of eventually figuring out where she's gone. Your control is periodically switched over to Ciri herself, as you relive a particularly important detail of her journey. These being snippets, it's not entirely clear exactly </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">when</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> each event takes place, or even if the details being fed to you are wholly accurate. You're playing as Ciri, but in another character's retelling of her story. Furthermore, some of these episodes include events the storyteller wasn't actually present for, so it’s rather difficult to determine if what you’re seeing actually occurred as presented, or even at all.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The game's narrative progression initially seems like it will be very straightforward, but after a couple of these flashbacks you begin to realise it is anything but. While you’re following Ciri up through the Northern Kingdoms and then westward out to the Skellige Isles, as if in some orderly fashion, it becomes apparent that you're pursuing your leads out of order. Ciri, it would seem, has been all over the place, with Geralt following but a couple of clues, incorrectly assuming he’s only ever a few steps behind her at any given time. In actual fact, he’s been chasing a shadow; fixating on a few sightings of Ciri and reckoning they all tie together into a neat, linear journey, which, it becomes apparent after crisscrossing the gameworld a few times, they very clearly do not. While this isn't a massive narrative upset, it does make you aware that the world of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Witcher 3</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and the storytelling taking place within it, is rarely as straightforward as one might first assume.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This places Geralt in a position few action heroes find themselves in. He's super powerful, more than capable of holding his own in situations calling on his physical abilities. But without enough of the right information, he's largely at a loss. He might well be able to kill monsters and bandits all day long, but if he's doing so in the wrong place -- well, he's not getting very far at all. This allows Geralt to play like the power fantasy archetype he kind of needs to be by the third entry in a once very mechanically complex, PC-only franchise, while also leaving plenty of room for him to actually be a little more nuanced and ineffectual as a character. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The question of why he needs to find Ciri in the first place is posed to Geralt numerous times. Characters outright tell him to give up on his search, stating that she likely doesn't even need the help he feels obliged to give her. He still thinks of her as a child, but, through being in control of her, I know she’s far from helpless. If anything, she’s </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">more</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> powerful than he, able to harness magical abilities to teleport through space and attack enemies with ease. While Geralt crafts potions, oils and bombs to give himself an advantage in combat, Ciri simply </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">has</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> an innate advantage already. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Geralt, then, comes across -- quite intentionally -- as a bit of a relic. He's visibly older than in previous installments, and seems to exist on the fringes of a world that is changing around him. Magic users, non-humans and Elves are being systematically persecuted. Those who are different aren't to be tolerated any longer, and it seems only a matter of time before the eye of this violent cleansing falls on the Witchers. Amidst all this upheaval, Geralt regularly bumps into his old friends and onetime enemies, who themselves are having their lives impacted by the changing times. But never sticks around for long enough for these meetings to be anything more than cursory </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">how d’you dos</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. He visits people in their homes, places of business and clandestine hideouts, does his business (only sometimes in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">way), and then goes off and sleeps in a field. Like Ciri, he's a shadow; never quite a whole person to those around him. But there’s a crucial difference: he is fading, while she is only just beginning to fully form.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Geralt is alone. This is one of the few unambiguous things I can find in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Witcher 3</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. He has a base of operations, the fortress of Kaer Morhen, which is frequented by a few of his remaining Witcher comrades, but he only ends up back there when he really needs to. It's on the world map, sitting up there, fittingly isolated, in the north east, but the game won't let you go there until the story necessitates it. Geralt can't go home. He has no real say in much of what he does; he just roams about, looking for Ciri, looking for monsters to slay, looking for another lonely wood to fall asleep in. Tied to his destiny.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">With no home to speak of, he has to travel light. Encumbrance, something I usually detest, works well here because it’s really quite punitive. It forces you to adventure humbly, taking only the essentials for whatever long journey you’re about to embark upon next. Unequipped weapons and armour weigh a tonne, so it’s impractical to carry much more than what you’re already wearing. Similarly, you can't have Geralt hoover up endless reams of loot to sell, because he simply can't transport it. After all, health replenishing food, plants and monster parts for alchemy, and crafting materials all take up his precious pack space, and are arguably more important than hard currency. Even when you do seek to pawn some unwanted plunder, there’s no guarantee the poverty-stricken traders of the game’s many provincial hamlets will have the cash to buy your wares. Sure, you could travel to the bigger cities of Oxenfurt or Novigrad and sell your tat there, but the gameworld is massive, and it just isn’t always practical to take a long shopping trip. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There’s a real sense of scarcity to the world of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Witcher 3</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and it all works to make playing Geralt feel thematically in touch with the Witcher lifestyle itself. It further brings into focus his standing as an outsider; a man detested, ostracised and removed from the normal world in equal measure, yet allowed to remain there, if only for the time being, because he is useful. He may well be the prototypical action protagonist, but the game goes as far as to ask if this is even a good thing. Geralt certainly, apart from the odd shag and the permission to be sarcastic at all times, doesn’t seem to get much out of being a lone warrior in a world fast losing need for them. Not since the heady days of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Metal Gear Solid 4</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> has a game thrown you into the shoes of a protagonist who is so thoroughly outmoded by his surroundings and outdated lot in life. It's tangibly exhausting playing as Geralt when you stop and think about it for a moment, and I find that pleasantly refreshing.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is for this reason that a recent update to the game makes me slightly uncomfortable. Patch 1.07, released earlier this week, made all sorts of changes to the way the game works. But a couple in particular -- and I’m really not the type to get hung up on this sort of thing normally -- kind of stick in my craw. They’re tiny, on paper, but change Geralt’s place in the world a fair bit. Crafting and alchemical ingredients now weigh nothing, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> there’s a new chest system, like the one </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Resident Evil</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> had. The former </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">sort of</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> makes sense, because there are hundreds of these ingredients to be found, and having ten of each of them was fairly weighty. At the same time, I can’t help but feel that this change devalues the foraging systems they fit into, as now you’re able to simply hoover up items indiscriminately, rather than carefully scouring locations or merchants' inventories for them.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The chest, though, that’s the big kicker. At its heart, it means that Geralt can stockpile a neverending supply of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">stuff</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. The chest, available across the gameworld, works like a Mary Poppin bag, allowing you to store infinite items. You still have to wander up to a magic box and physically get the items, but this unquestionably removes the scarcity that formed a good part of his characterisation. Further to this though, is where the chests are located. Early on in the game you visit a local despot called the Bloody Baron. You meet him a few times, up at his waterlogged manor in Crow’s Perch, to discuss the finer points of adventuring. You strike deals, hunt for clues, learn information and have some light fisticuffs. After each of these episodes you leave. Like every location in the game, you go to Crow’s Perch because there is something or someone there you need. You never just go there. Now there’s a chest there. (And yes, technically a chest is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">something</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> you need, but that’s not the point: it wasn’t always there.) The repository sits in the manor, located in a bedroom Ciri may have stayed in when she passed through. There’s a raging fire, a table of food and a big comfy bed. And they’re all perpetually laid out for Geralt. There are numerous other inviting rooms scattered around the gameworld, all of them waiting for our hero. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I’m sure these all, like the bedroom at Crow’s Perch, existed within the game before last week, so it’s not improbable that I’ve already visited a few of them before. But without the chests in them, these rooms were meaningless to Geralt. They were places filled with cushions, hot water and oil paintings; comfortable places that weren’t meant for him. Geralt is a tragic figure, because while he passes through the realm of normality on a constant basis, he is too extraordinary to ever truly be a part of it. The chests, if only to a small degree, erode this fascinating aspect of his character. They give him the semblance of a home, of a structure and a normalcy, that the rest of the game denies him. Their inclusion is only a very tiny, mechanically-informed decision, but it has quite dramatically affected my understanding of Geralt's presentation as a character. There really is, it would seem, always a catch.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><br />Unlike my boy Geralt, I don't sleep in fields on the regs. I have a house in North London. Thusly... If you're thankful in any way for my free written</i><i> gift to you, maybe consider making it ever so slightly less free by donating to my lovely Patreon, </i><i><span lang="EN-GB">it resides here: </span></i><a href="http://patreon.com/ashouses"><i><span lang="EN-GB">patreon.com/ashouses</span></i></a><i><span lang="EN-GB">. Chrz.</span></i><i> </i> </span></div>
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Leigh Harrisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09843099451159275743noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4159365708969067844.post-83496568181819090472015-06-12T17:56:00.000+01:002015-07-31T11:46:07.615+01:00Playing Puzzle & Dragons: Pints of Guinness Make You Strong <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I've got a hamster called Mr Jibbers. Every day I get in at about six thirty and have my tea (dinner to Southerners). After that he wakes up and starts banging about, flinging his food bowl around and raking it across the bars of his cage in a way reminiscent of my memories of the pound scene in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Lady and the Tramp</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. I'm generally a perceptive kind of guy, so I take this to mean he'd like to come out of his little prison. I oblige of course, every time, and so open the little hatch on top and wait. After about thirty seconds he'll grab a hold of the bars and pull himself up onto the roof, much like a Michael Myers </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">surprise from the ceiling </span>(where he appears behind his victim, lowering himself down from a pipe), just in reverse. His speed and grace in dragging his furry little body weight what would be about seven feet for a human is wonderful and astounding to watch. I do so every time. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Once he's out things go one of two ways. I always let him potter about for a bit, because his curiosity is infectious and the sight of a little creature on top of a cage always reminds me of </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ChOMq8ELXI" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline;">that Hell in a Cell match between The Undertaker and Mick Foley</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. Sometimes I'll scoop him up and stick him in his ball so he can run around my flat and poo loads. He sounds like a fecally-obsessed mariachi band when he's in his ball; transforming himself into a hamster sized poo maraca. The rest of the time I let him run about on the sofa, which is a yellowy cream colour. I like to think its hues remind him of his ancestral home in the Syrian desert, but he probably just enjoys having a bit more space. He never poos on the sofa, so I take this as a sign of contentment.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">While he's hard at it in the cushiony dunes I tend to his cage. I refill the water, sort him a bit of muesli and change the bedding in his little house, careful to replace a modicum of the soiled stuff so he doesn't get upset by the cleanliness. He gets very angry if he can't smell at least a bit of last night's water and muesli in his bed, if you get my drift. My live-in beloved keeps a watchful eye over the little lad while I'm doing this, seeing as he has a compulsion to scale the arms of the sofa and dive headfirst towards the floor. I'm sure he'll be fine, but I just don't like the idea of him breaking something important. By this point our time together is drawing to a close - it's after nine p.m. at this juncture, so time for bed. We both give him little kisses and then stick him back in solitary to spend the rest of his nocturnal evening poncing about by himself. I'd get him a friend to share his time with, but I gather he'd murder and eat them, so alone he shall remain. I repeat this process every day, almost to the letter.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">For some reason unbeknownst to me you can't easily play </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Puzzle & Dragons</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> on Android in the UK. For this simple fact it has always been a forbidden fruit, existing in some strange place where I am a second class citizen, unable to roll the dice on a bit of the Free to Play. After that Mario version of it came out on DS I decided that I'd had enough: I would play it regardless of geographical barriers. I installed this funny Qoo app wot is from Asia (Japan I think), which lets you install all kinds of region-specific wonders. Too right I did. Take that, powers that be!</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Puzzle & Dragons</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, it turns out, is a lot like that </span><a href="http://ashouses.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/im-not-playing-hearthstone-doctor-who.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline;">Doctor Who game</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> I played two years ago. It is a match three puzzle game, but instead of swapping two tiles around to make matches you are able to move the little orbs about on the whole grid of little orbs, theoretically creating massive chains of little orbs. Created chains disappear, dealing damage to whatever monster you are fighting. The more orbs the more damage, and so the quicker you progress. I don't really like this core mechanic, because I just can't figure out how moving the orbs works. The one you are shifting swaps its place with every other it moves past, which is theoretically a really simple equation. For some reason I just can't make my mind get a hang of this, so spend a lot of my time flailing about and making a mess of things. I'll probably never play it again.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">BUT what if I do?</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It's a Free to Play game, and so is full of little hooks to make you want to play it every day (though the game is caring enough to recommend you limit yourself to one hour </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">every single day of your life</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">). The progress you make is really, really slow. To get better you have to collect character cards dropped at random from fallen enemies, and then level these up by feeding other cards to them. As you feed your cards, their health, attack, defence and recovery stats get better, so you can then go and defeat stronger enemies and get better cards. Levelling up costs gold which, again, you receive from fighting. You also sporadically receive special crystals which can be, five at a time - roughly fifteen or twenty battles - spent at a vending machine that randomly generates rarer cards for you. Basically, you've got to play it a lot to get anywhere. So much so in fact, that there are entire websites dedicated to teaching you to play in the most efficient way possible.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It's not for me if I'm being honest, not even in a morbid curiosity way.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">BUT I keep logging into it once a day, just to keep everything ticking over. I receive a little gold, and some points to use on </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">another</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> vender (vending machine to Southerners), one that gifts you tat to further upgrade your cards with. I'm probably never going to play it again, but just on the off chance I do, I want to be in the very best of positions to get back on the horse.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Right: it's time to detonate this heavily laboured metaphor. As games position themselves more and more as services, things to be interacted with regularly in piecemeal fashion, we are all becoming pets. Mr Jibbers managed to escape one evening when I left his cage open after a drunken love-in. During the night he made multiple trips between the living room and bathroom, ferrying food - from the bag he'd eaten his way through - all the way down the hall and into the nest he'd made from pilfered toilet roll. We found him in the morning when we were going about our showering business. We were all suitably impressed.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Ever since, we've called upon the skills of bulldog clips, carefully adding an extra level of cage security. Despite this, Mr Jibbers still tries in vain to escape, foolhardy in his pursuit of the promise of bathroom freedom. I don't think it strikes him <span style="font-family: inherit;">that escape will likely lead to an untimely demise. He's tiny <span style="font-family: inherit;">after all</span>, and my fe<span style="font-family: inherit;">et are huge. We also get a lot of b<span style="font-family: inherit;">i</span>g, hungry birds hanging about our corner of inner city north London, so I don<span style="font-family: inherit;">'</span>t think he'd last too long out on the mean streets either, if he managed to get down three flights of stairs with his little muesli<span style="font-family: inherit;">-</span>filled knapsack.</span></span> <span style="font-family: inherit;">But h</span>e keeps going about the same old routine, as we do with him every night after tea, because habits are comforting. There is a fantastic Against Me! song about this very occurrence, it's called </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a1U2Sif2Bg" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline;">Turn Those Clapping Hands Into Angry Balled Fists</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I'm the same with this silly game about dragons (most of the creatures in it aren't) and puzzles. I'm never going to succeed in it, and so, ironically, <i>my</i> only solution is to escape from it entirely. At the minute though, I just can't seem to get much further than the bathroom.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-GB">The above prose is proud to be associated with <a href="http://www.critical-distance.com/" target="_blank">Critical Distance</a>'s <i><a href="http://www.critical-distance.com/2015/06/06/june-2015-pets/" target="_blank">Blogs of the Round Table</a></i>, an initiative which seeks to bring the diverse voices of video game criticism together about the person of a monthly topic. I think it's dead good, and so do these lovely individuals:</span></span></span>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hamsters cost about two quid a month to keep</span>. Thusly... If you're thankful in any way for my free written</i><i> gift to you, maybe consider making it ever so slightly less free by donating to my lovely Patreon, </i><i><span lang="EN-GB">it resides here: </span></i><a href="http://patreon.com/ashouses"><i><span lang="EN-GB">patreon.com/ashouses</span></i></a><i><span lang="EN-GB">. Chrz.</span></i><i> </i>
</span></span>Leigh Harrisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09843099451159275743noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4159365708969067844.post-45730951806454870912015-06-02T16:31:00.001+01:002015-06-02T16:50:06.319+01:00Wrestling With The Issue At Hand<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I watch professional wrestling. There: I said it. I also play video games, and sometimes wonder why I do either of these things. Come with me while I try to justify myself.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At this point I'm left interacting with video games in the same way I do professional wrestling. Every Tuesday I watch </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Raw</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, WWE's premier showcase for its roster's talent. It's about two and a quarter hours without commercial breaks and airs every week. Every single week of the year. The promotion also broadcasts </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Smackdown!</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, which I could watch on a Friday. That too airs 52 weeks a year. I don't because five hours of wrestling each week is a lot of wrestling. Also, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Raw</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is the show generally used to tell the stories, with </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Smackdown!</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> existing as more of a runty sibling to be constantly overshadowed. Indeed, anything meaningful that happens on it is carefully edited down into cruelly efficient recap packages to be broadcast four days later on </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Raw</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. It's as if even the people at WWE know they're just going through the motions. Beyond the weekly stuff you've got an ad-free pay-per-view spectacular at the end of every month. Chalk it up: three more hours. These are meant to be </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">super special</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> but are normally only slightly more impactful than a regular TV show. AND, ever since the launch of the WWE Network streaming service, you're also sporadically gifted a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">second</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> one of these in the middle of the month. All told, on a bad one you're looking at 26 - twenty six - hours of wrestling a month. I get by with 16 at the most. And it's a slog.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Why do I feel the need to watch wrestling at all, especially given the fact that I largely don't enjoy most of it? Fear. I'm petrified of being left behind, of missing that elusive </span><span style="color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">good moment</span><span style="color: black; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I don't talk about wrestling with anyone. Not even my live-in beloved. We go to a London indie promotion for bimonthly beers on a Sunday, but that's different. You're there and it feels good to see wrestling mere feet away. The WWE stuff I watch is entirely different. It is sanitised, safe and clean. There is no swearing, no blood, no genuine levity, no real soul; at least not one that's conveyed well enough through a TV. I understand why this is: the WWE is a huge public company at this point; it has no real competition and is entirely beholden to advertisers, broadcast partners and shareholders. What is good for business? Money. The money exists in sponsorship deals, merchandise and moving the shows from city to city to city numerous times a week. Door sales. T-shirt sales. Ad sales. Subscription sales. And so the product has to be as universal as possible. It must be exhausting to make WWE's wrestling. It's certainly exhausting watching it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But I'm scared. Scared that now I'm in the hole of watching it I've already invested my time too heavily to stop now. I've only been back since March, but I'm acutely feeling the pressure of sustaining my consumption. You see, when it's good wrestling can be amazing. Truly amazing. At this year's </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>Wrestlemania</i></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> a man called Seth Rollins did something unthinkable (though clearly signposted to death) and won the world heavyweight championship. I knew who he was at the time, but having not watched for a decade I wasn't equipped to really feel the gravitas of the moment. It was cool, yeah, but I wasn't jumping on my sofa in enraged disbelief. When Mankind won the world title in early 1999 I was </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">there</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, because I'd already been there. I knew the stories and liked the character and was overjoyed that he'd been given the push he so rightly deserved. It was a momentous occasion. Like someone who is partial to crystal meth or heroin, I'm constantly looking to replicate the euphoria of days past.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So I keep watching wrestling. Investing myself in it even though I know it is all-consuming and wasteful. I want to feel good. And to feel good I need to submit to the whims of the whole sorry mess. There's loads of good wrestling I could be watching. New Japan. Ring of Honour. Even the WWE's own developmental brand, NXT. But I don't. I keep watching the biggest wrestling, because that's where the best stuff happens, right?</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I'm the same with games.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I chug through big-ticket releases like an alcoholic at a wedding. I slosh it down my throat even though I'm sick of it and have been for years. Why did I play </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Grand Theft Auto V</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">? Why did I play </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Far Cry 4</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">? Why did I play </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dragon Age: Inquisition</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">? I'd had my fill of their particular offerings games ago. I didn't finish any of them, either. It doesn't help that most big games these days are just like wrestling: they never end. Games just go and go and go, offering stuff upon stuff upon stuff to do with very little of it meaningful. Drive here. Shoot this. Ride a horse here and shoot this. Talk to someone. Go here and talk to someone else. Shoot that person after talking to them. Most of it, to lean on an </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">atrocious</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> analogy, is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Smackdown!</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, with so little being </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Raw</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But I keep playing them because I'm scared of being left behind. Scared of missing out. Big games are still, for some reason, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">my thing</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, even though I'm so tired of them and almost never speak to another soul about them. I'm caught up in a self-imposed zeitgeist. Just like with the wrestling, I'm fascinated by a product that no longer appeals to me. One that isn't even created for me at all on the whole. I'm stuck following its progress, watching and waiting. I think it might be because all of my fondest childhood memories of games are of big-ticket ones. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Half Life</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Call of Duty</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Grand Theft Auto III</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Time Crisis 2</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Die Hard Trilogy</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Soul Calibur 2</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Super Mario All-stars + Super Mario World</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Kirby's Fun Pak</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Monster Hunter</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> over the network adapter with my boy Tom. That one time I played </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Counter-Strike</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> on a private server with my friends from school. Watching my mum play all one thousand hours of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Grandia</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Or </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Alundra</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Or </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Final Fantasy IX</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Or </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Legend of the Dragoon</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Anyway.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All of those came in boxes and you bought them in shops. I </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">get</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> that you did this because that's just how you bought everything back then. But for some reason I still subconsciously give more reverence to things wot you can hold in your hands. Which is silly, because most of the games I've truly loved over the last, well, almost decade, have come to me from the Internet and not a plastic case. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Flower</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Valiant Hearts</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Room</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">10000000</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Papers, Please</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Flower</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> on the PS4. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I started playing the adventure game about Alzheimer's, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ether One</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, because it sounds fascinating and tells what I gather to be a touching and well told story in about five hours. I stopped when </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Witcher 3</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> came out because there were posters of it everywhere and it comes on a disc in a box. It is more important. I'd love to fall into its world and explore everything it has to offer me, but if I'm honest I'll probably just stop at some point from fatigue and intimidation. But it's a super important release so I've got to play it. I've just got to. It might be The Best Game Ever Made after all. It might be as fun to play as </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Fallout 3</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> was back when I was a student and stayed up all night drinking cider from large plastic bottles and smoked Marlboro Reds at a rate of knots. But it probably won't be. I don't really enjoy staying up late, and drinking, and smoking fags, and being a layabout. I've kind of changed. I like different things now. I like shorter games, ones about human stories that don’t really revolve around me killing things. So why do I find it so difficult to accept this and move on? Why am I playing a 200 hour game I’ll never, ever finish instead of sitting down with on I could conceivably enjoy over the course of a Saturday afternoon?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For the same reason I sometimes </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">do</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, on occasion, still stay up drinking lots of beers and chuffing many bines. For the same reason I have inexplicably begun watching wrestling again after almost fifteen years. For the same reason my little heart fills with joy whenever I hear </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23uuW79KBhE"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Somewhere Along The</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Line</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> by Billy Joel. I've had some truly wonderful times with all of these things, and I want more of them. I can't accept that my association with them may well have peaked years ago - foolish as that may be. I am, as </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Bouncing Souls</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> said around the same time as The Rock, Stone Cold Steve Austin and Mick Foley were still duking it out, a </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QP2cOXCTroA"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">True Believer</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Whether I like it or not it would seem.</span></span></div>
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<i><span style="line-height: 22.0799999237061px;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Fags and booze cost way more money than they used to. I think it has something to do with the large amounts of tax one pays upon purchasing them because, I'm told, they are bad for your health. Or something to that effect. Anyway, i</span>f you're thankful in any way for my free written gift to you, maybe consider making it ever so slightly less free by donating to my lovely Patreon, </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 22.0799999237061px;">it resides here: </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 22.0799999237061px;"><a href="http://patreon.com/ashouses" style="line-height: 22.0799999237061px;">patreon.com/ashouses</a>. Chuck me a couple of quid and you can rest assured I'll spend it all on getting drunk and being happy.</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 22.0799999237061px;"> Chrz.</span></i></div>
Leigh Harrisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09843099451159275743noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4159365708969067844.post-61700863298238427062015-05-22T14:38:00.000+01:002015-06-08T12:08:50.343+01:00Ain’t Nobody Fresher Than My Click: I’m Not Really Getting Better At This, Am I?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Clicker games, or Incremental games to </span><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/incremental_games"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the initiated</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, are bits of software where you click on a screen and things happen. Popularised by the big daddy of them all </span><a href="http://ashouses.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/rogue-cookie-legacy-clicker-baking.html"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cookie Clicker</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, they appear to be going through a renaissance of sorts at the moment. As Nathan Grayson off of Kotaku </span><a href="http://steamed.kotaku.com/clicker-heroes-is-super-popular-on-steam-for-some-re-1705380774"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">told me this week</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, an Incremental called </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Clicker Heroes</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is super popular on the PC. Almost as popular as </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Grand Theft Auto V</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, which I gather is somewhat surprising. Or is it?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Austin Walker probably hits it straight on the head in </span><a href="http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2014/12/the-crew-review-postcard-america.html"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">his review</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Crew </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(emphasis my own):</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“</span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Crew</span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is a prime example of the </span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">new</span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> power fantasy. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If, as </span><a href="https://twitter.com/RowanKaiser/status/540290039180038144"><span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Rowan Kaiser</span></a><span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> has argued, the old fantasy was about </span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">having</span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> power, the new fantasy is about </span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">accumulating</span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> power.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> The old power fantasy was invincibility codes and infinite ammo. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The new power fantasy is the feeling that you’ve earned your success by your hard work alone.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> This is the fantasy behind the guitar-riff that signifies that you’ve leveled up in </span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Call of Duty</span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> multiplayer. It’s the fireworks and orchestral bombast of </span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Peggle</span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. It’s the steady return on investment in </span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Fantasy Life</span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. It is a power fantasy that reflects our time. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We want to be reassured that our effort will pay off in the end, that progress is guaranteed, and that our achievements are fully our own.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">”</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Incremental is the embodiment of this concept. Its gameplay offering is entirely flat, in that the first thing you do - clicking - is the only thing you do. Despite this, the Incremental keeps you playing by gently upping nonexistent stakes, making you feel increasingly powerful whilst you actually accomplish nothing. You click on things to allow yourself to click more - and faster. That is all you do. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">You commonly begin with clicking for yourself in real time: once or twice a second. You then invest the currency you accrue through these clicks - gold, cookies, gems, whatever - into upgrades geared towards accumulating more currency more quickly. You are normally given two revenue streams: your own physical player-clicks and another set, this one generated for you by the game itself every second. This then spirals into absurd exponentiality, with you generating one, then a hundred, then a thousand, then a million, then a billion bits of currency every click/second. The quantities of booty one receives may indeed increase, but so too do the outlays necessary to maintain this growth. Things develop in a heavily regimented way. At the very beginning, when you’re earning one gold a click, an upgrade might cost you a thousand gold. It’s a thousand clicks. Ten hours later you’re up to a million gold a click. But your upgrades now cost a billion gold. It’s a thousand clicks. What you aspire to is exactly what you began with, just with more zeroes added onto the end.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The illusion of hard-won progress in games is pernicious. It gives us a sense of accomplishment where there shouldn’t be one. That we are leading some noble charge, when we are really just following orders. It makes us feel as though we’re investing our time in something worthwhile. As if we’re getting better at something tangible and transferable. Something we can proudly put on our C.V.s and show off to the world. We are having fun. We may be learning about people, places, subjects, experiences and stories. We might be developing better hand-eye coordination, but we might just as easily be developing carpal tunnel syndrome. What we aren't doing though, is ever, ever - ever getting better at anything beyond a game's specific and delineated series of challenges. We just aren't. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.epicpixel.rpgclicker&hl=en_GB"><span style="background-color: white; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">RPG Clicker</span></a><span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is a curious Incremental, in that it demands you play it more than most do. You have the common duo of player-clicks and automatically generated ones, but these auto-clicks don’t actually happen, well, wholly automatically. It is an Incremental, yes, but it is one dressed up as a fantasy role-playing game. Both types of clicks are used to hurt the enemies from whom, upon their deaths, you receive gold and experience points. Gold is used to increase the damage you deal per click (the more amorphous </span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">clicks per second</span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of other Incrementals) by upgrading your sword - player clicks - and magic - auto-clicks. All very recognisable. However, your magic attacks are not constantly active, as is the case in most other games of the genre. Instead they are governed by a mana meter, and so wholly stop once it is depleted. Your mana pool and the rate at which it recharges can be upgraded with experience points as you level up, but at some point you’re going to run out of auto-clicks. This mightn’t sound Earth-shattering, but for a game of this type it is. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At some point in the lifecycle of playing an Incremental you reach a stage where you can just leave it be and let the numbers keep getting bigger. You might check in every few hours to spend clicks on generating more clicks, but you’re done with the actual player-clicking part. Because you have a finite supply of auto-clicks in </span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">RPG Clicker</span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, you can’t actually get to this wonderful place. You have to be constantly aware of it, managing your mana supplies, switching between player/auto/dual click methods and regularly opening the loot chests that pop up and halt this furious progress altogether. It isn’t just a simple The Number Automatically Gets Bigger game. It’s a stripped back take on the recognisable RPG formula.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I stopped playing </span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dragon Age: Inquisition </span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">because I found it crushingly boring. Loads of it is combat based, and I just didn’t like the fighting. It’s all very removed and distant; not at all engaging. You hold down a button and your character attacks with a basic strike. If you press a different button they’ll do a special one, but this can only be performed once every, I dunno, twenty seconds. Another special can be used more frequently, say every ten, but it deals out less damage. What you’re left with - at least I was - is you holding down your basic attack button at all times to mete out tiny bits of aggression, while cycling through your specials, as and when they become available, to perform more damage. Or, to put it another way, you’re clicking on your phone screen at all times to mete out tiny bits of aggression, while using your magic auto-clicks, as and when they become available, to perform more damage.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Strip away the pretty graphics, voice acting, stories, characters and vast worlds and what you’re left with is often an Incremental. We’re not really getting better at lots of the games we play. We’re following a strictly predetermined path through a carefully-constructed ascendant bunch of challenges. If shooting that man in the head feels easier than it did a dozen hours ago it’s because </span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Far Cry 4</span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> wants it to feel easier. It’s because when you get about halfway through </span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Far Cry 4</span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> you’ll suddenly come across enemies wearing much sturdier armour. Enemies that most certainly aren’t easy to shoot in the head because it takes three bullets to get through their helmets. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Far Cry 4</span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> does this because you still, despite spending twenty-odd hours on it already, have ages left until it ends. It needs to make you want to continue. So it makes you stronger. But it also makes everything harder. Stronger. Harder. Stronger. Harder. Stronger. Harder. Until the very end. The net outcome is the same at all times: a perfectly manageable level of difficulty. As your challenges become more complex you are able to surmount them with newfound skills. Skills you earnt. But also skills that were given right to you. You may have spent experience points to unlock them, but they were there all the time. Something to aim towards. Something to aspire to. Something to keep you doing the same tired old stuff you’ve been doing for years.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’d hazard that this mistaken sense of legitimate mastery is partially to blame for the rampant aggression inherent in some of the discourse surrounding games. It creates a sense of superiority, where skillful play loses all context and begins to represent us in, but also out of games. This in turn allows the purely mechanical competition of playing, whether that be against others directly or a single player campaign, to manifest itself in the world outside of the game. We become better people because we are better at games, </span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">better than those other people</span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. This can’t possibly be the case. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The one thing that is often forgotten about games is that they are </span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">made</span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in the first place. We talk about their design all the time, but regularly forget that a large part of that design is expressly there to make us invested in playing to begin with. In tackling their challenges we are adhering to the rules created </span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">for us</span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. We are not, and never are, doing anything on our own terms. As the Incremental shows us, we are often simply following a structured progression created to funnel us ever onwards, to ensure we keep playing. We are not the masters of destiny; we are being led by the hand, nudged forwards and coerced with baubles at every step. In this way, no true empowerment can come from games. Not in isolation, anyway. Which is why division, aggression and segregation make us all weaker, regardless of whether we maxed out that skill tree or not</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></span></div>
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<i><span style="line-height: 22.0799999237061px;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Some things are earned. Others are given. What follows is a neat combination of the two: I</span>f you're thankful in any way for my free written gift to you, maybe consider making it ever so slightly less free by donating to my lovely Patreon, </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 22.0799999237061px;">it resides here: </span><a href="http://patreon.com/ashouses" style="line-height: 22.0799999237061px;"><span lang="EN-GB">patreon.com/ashouses</span></a><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 22.0799999237061px;">. Chrz.</span></i></div>
Leigh Harrisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09843099451159275743noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4159365708969067844.post-86238564328626689002015-05-21T10:38:00.001+01:002015-05-21T10:38:29.488+01:00Sorcery! On My Phone is Great (And I'm Not Embarrassed to Say So)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I self-consciously balked at the stuff deemed goofy by my peers. As a kid you listened to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Papa Roach</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, talked about football, watched the late night softcore on Channel 5, ate your end of term lunch at McDonald's, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">played</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> football, chased girls, skipped homework, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">watched</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> football and stole booze from your parents. I only actually liked two of those things - the nu metal and the blueys, obviously - and so spent a fair bit of my time pretending to be into the others </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">outside</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of school, where, conveniently, no one could see me </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> doing them. I don't think I fooled anyone, but at the time it seemed I just about passed the societal conditions necessary to be a cool kid. For one to maintain this status you couldn't really like more fringe pastimes. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Magic</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> cards? Not a chance. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dungeons & Dragons</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">? Ha! </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Warhammer</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">40K </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">or otherwise)? The only little figures you were allowed to play with were of the </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subbuteo" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Subbuteo</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> variety (football </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">again</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">). Acknowledging the other kids who liked these things? Big no no. By the age of about fifteen I’d had enough of this sham personality and jumped ship (let's be honest: I was pushed), but I'd already missed out on many an enlightening formative year. It is for this collection of customarily awkward adolescent reasons that I have never sampled a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Fighting Fantasy</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> book.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’ve still not, to be honest, but I understand they're like the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Choose Your Own Adventure </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">books I borrowed from the library in the years before concepts of social standing afflicted my developing brain. Essentially, they are non-linear works of fiction where you pick the narrative progression from a set number of options, creating a quasi-bespoke tale of adventure, intrigue and exploration for yourself. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"Brave adventurer, you are presented with a choice: two - equally ominous - doorways stand before your weary body. The one straight ahead is shrouded in darkness, but might that be the cool wind of freedom emanating from it? The one to your left, while being paved with gold and lit brightly by unflickering torches, looks </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">weird</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, as if its silent promise were too good to be true. A trap perhaps? Make your final choice, o ballsy cartographer. Go straight ahead </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">[turn to 375]</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Go left </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">[turn to 109]</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Turn right and face the wall for an eternity of sorry contemplation </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">[turn to 26]</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">." </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That sort of thing. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I'm told </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Fighting Fantasy</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> took it a tad further and made you roll a die to decide the outcomes of certain choices, but structurally it was pretty similar to the stuff I played. Just as </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Fighting Fantasy</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> took the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Choose Your Own Adventure</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and altered it, making it something entirely new and exciting, so too does a digital reimagining of one of those very game books. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sorcery!</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> for your phone is just that: a game book you play on your phone (or tablet device). But it isn't just on your phone, oh no, it's been designed expressly</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> for</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> your phone. In this respect it's a flawless accomplishment.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">[I realise that a Twine write-up here would be super fitting, but they've been <a href="http://ashouses.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/you-are-citizen-kane-of-video-games_21.html">done to death</a> so we'll go with the linear option. But please feel free to skip about the page and pretend it's one if you wish.]</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Apple don't like making digital things with the characteristics of their physical counterparts anymore, but </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sorcery!</span><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is certainly still into the concept. The first really striking thing about it is its appearance. Everything looks like a real-world object. Its text is voluptuous, resembling the elegant handwriting of official documents from yesteryear. It’s all displayed on sheets of digital parchment that look thick and handmade. There's a weathered, grey look to it all, as if you're playing with something that's significantly older than any actual game book. Physically, a book is a book, and unless you endeavour to make a more </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._%28Dorst_novel%29" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">expensive publication</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> or </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Leaves" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">collection</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Whalestoe_Letters" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">works</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, you're stuck with the properties of a single, standard, cheap paperback. Digital </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sorcery!</span><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> isn't constrained by the limitations of a delivery medium in such a way, and it wholly embraces this freedom. The choices you face are displayed as separate pieces of paper all stacked upon each other, as if you were flipping through pages and picking from truly disparate outcomes to each quandary. Once you make a decision it is then stitched to the ongoing narrative with thread. This is visually striking and lends each new event a sense of permanence, as if you are now literally bound to your decisions. While you can rewind at any time and pick again, this visual cue implicitly tells you not to, just without wholly enforcing draconian permanence. If you cock something up you </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">can</span><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> have another go, but all the stitching is undone and the pages cast aside. It creates a real sense that you are throwing part of your story away if you attempt to rewrite it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The map. Oh my, </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sorcery!</span><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">'s map is beautiful. At first glance it looks to be a fairly standard - though wonderfully expressive and colourful - document. Its place names are drawn in thick calligraphy. Little stylised hamlets comprising a few buildings dot the landscape. Its winding paths, wooded areas and escarpments just beg to be explored. It's lovely. But, as you zoom in with a pinch and move it about with a tactile little swipe, it reveals more of itself. The whole thing it subtly contoured. It's bumpy! Every hill, copse, valley and slope has its own elevation on the map. As you drag it around you get a real glimpse of the places you're visiting. Given that the majority of the locations you travel through are simply described in the text, the addition of this topographic map adds a great amount of depth to the world. Much of the narrative is concerned with specific locations, with the long stretches in between only given little snippets of flavour text. In allowing the player a larger view of the whole world of the game, and showing you where you are in relation to everything else at all times, </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sorcery!</span><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> neatly connects these points together in a simple and terribly satisfying way. The map doesn't just give you an overview of where you've been and have yet to go; it also ties the whole story together in a cohesive way that flipping between pages of a book simply can't match. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-large;"><b>The bloody combat</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Combat in the role playing games on your phone is handled in loads of different ways. Commonly though, you end up with either </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Final Fantasy</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">-like turn-based affairs or </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Zelda</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">-esque real-time hacking. The former works just fine - if that's what you're into. The latter however, well, it just doesn't at all. This is mainly because there aren't any buttons on a phone screen, so it always tends to be a bit slippy and accident-prone. Say what you will, but sliding your fingers about a screen trying to hit virtual buttons isn’t the most accurate of input methods. But, y’know, loads of mobile games choose to work that way so </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">someone</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> must think it’s okay. Again though, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sorcery!</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> isn't happy with just being pedestrian, so its combat is a bit more elegant. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When you enter combat you're presented with a screen that looks a lot like a fighting game. Your character is on the left and your opponent on the right. Each is presented as a lovely little cutout drawing, and everyone is imbued with the loving care that projects from every aesthetic aspect of the game. Encounters play out as a game of oneupmanship, where your aim is to attack harder than your opponent or block them outright. The rules are simple. Each combatant can choose to attack or defend each round. If both parties attack, the stronger of the two wins and the loser takes damage. If one attacks and the other defends, the defender receives a glancing blow which inflicts only a small amount of damage, regardless of the assault’s actual strength. The veracity of attacks is governed by a stamina meter that can only be replenished when blocking, and so a rhythm of attacking and defending emerges as you expend and regain energy.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">You choose how strong a beating you'll hand out by dragging your character closer to the enemy, in yet another example of the game's simple yet rewardingly tactile input. As you approach closer your stamina bar depletes accordingly, and you can make adjustments to deal out more or less aggression. A running commentary accompanies each flight, giving you clues as to what you should do next. "The troll raises its mighty club into the air" suggests you should either block or go in hard and hope you'll be stronger than the attack you are facing. "The assassin, wounded from a deep slash, reels backwards, shifting her weight and protecting herself from your blade" infers that she'll defend, so it's a good time to do the same or strike small, as anything stronger here would be a waste of stamina.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Essentially, what you're being asked to do is a literary version of the real thing. You're reading your duelling partner; their movements, facial expressions and stance, and have to decide upon your response accordingly. It’s excitingly fast-paced for something that doesn’t take place in real-time, as you hurriedly read through the descriptions and pick your actions. Interpreting the clues correctly and delivering a strong, finishing blow to your adversary is incredibly rewarding, as you feel as though you are truly mastering your environment and developing acute combat awareness. For a pair of jittery cardboard cutouts, shifting about like early </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">South Park</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> characters and being narrated by </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">simple text</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (of all things (!)), it is all really - genuinely - engrossing.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-large;"><b>Sending texties</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Games get a big fat rap on the knuckles for hitting the player with too much of this old fashioned text. It's as if, because games are shiny, colourful and fun, people don't see the value in a good bit of prose anymore. It's often seen as lazy for a game to put extraneous narrative into in-world books, or posted bills, or journals. But what happens when your entire game </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">predominantly text? If it's well written it's a boon, to be honest.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sorcery!</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is a great read. Its paragraphs are dense, descriptive and enthralling. It has a knack of conveying both gameplay-specific and narrative information in the space of a single sentence. It is concise, but also lovingly, wonderfully rich. As I've already said, aside from the map and the odd accompanying illustration, the whole world is conveyed through text alone. In an age of hyperrealistic graphics, even on your phone, it is refreshing and heartening to see a game stand by older means of storytelling - and flourishing for it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-large;"><b>Decisions, decisions</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I don’t enjoy games like </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Knights of the Old Republic</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> much - despite their often better-than-average world, character and narrative design - because playing them is so super boring. I've never liked clicking on things and seeing something happen, unless, of course, I'm clicking on a head and watching it explode (games, int it?). I've played and enjoyed later, more action-orientated “epic role-playing games” though, and have been, like many people, grabbed by the concept of making far-reaching decisions. The problem with offering anything on a supposedly grand scale, however, is actually meeting expectations. People are extremely narcissistic, especially when placed in positions of power. If you tell a player that they are a badass with the power to decide the fate of entire races, then you kind of need to let them recognisably commit genocide on a suitably fitting level. You can't boil a species down to a single Queen monster or a robot companion and have them stand in as a proxy for their kin. Games on this scale exist to let you play as a gun-toting Jesus figure, not to mete out your judgement </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">on </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">one. They are, at the end of the day, all about spectacle. If you - o game designer - are allowing people to wipe out the hive-mind of a species, then they understandably want to see a load of its underlings exploding in clouds of innards and bile. And then to see that death-wave ripple around the galaxy through a contrived montage of news footage, security camera tapes and phone videos. You’ve let them take the cruel choice after all, so they are clearly in the market for some power tripping. Let them see how depraved they really are, don't just tell them. This is often the problem when hyped-up decisions come to bear: their consequences just aren't satisfyingly grandiose enough.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sorcery! </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">deftly avoids offering up damp squibs by making itself a much more personal affair. Decisions are rarely more exciting than picking a fork in the road, choosing whether to drink a suspicious-smelling pint or crossing a bridge versus taking the long way round. But you know what? At least you feel the full brunt of their trivial consequences. Go left and you might run into a shack full of coins, or a goblin, or a rejuvenating fountain, or an untimely death. But what if you went right instead? You'll simply never know. Just like everything else about </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sorcery!</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, its level of player choice is smartly concise. It, I think, understands better than most games that it isn't the scale of decisions which excites players, but how meaningful their actions prove to be upon making them. While picking a door mightn't be the most exciting choice you've ever made, its consequences are instantly felt and often continue to be so right through the game. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I chose to cross the bridge, by the way, and it turned out to be a magical construct. I was asked a riddle by its keeper - to simply name a witch. He gave me a dozen options, none of which I could remember hearing before, so I answered honestly and said I was clueless, hoping he might appreciate the candour. No such luck. As the bridge began to disintegrate beneath my feet I ran back the way I'd come, just managing to get onto solid ground before it disappeared completely. Somewhere on my travels there was a person, or perhaps a scrap of paper or a book, that could have told me the answer. But I didn't come across it, and so I was helpless. For me, knowing that little choices like this can have such a far reaching consequence to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">my </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">journey, makes them far more impressive than me choosing to do something super, super grand and then hearing that "it happened somewhere really far away, honest".</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sorcery!</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is a smartly designed game that suits its platform to a tee. It understands exactly what it is and presents itself accordingly - and often exquisitely. It never overreaches its grasp, and is consequently one of the most satisfying experiences I’ve ever had with a game on my phone. All too often mobile titles seem ashamed to be just that, choosing to layer on complexities from consoles or computers as if it will somehow atone for the perceived shallowness of the phone as a place to play games. You can never replicate the nuance of physical buttons on a touch screen. Swiping can’t possibly be as accurate as an analogue stick. Your four and a half inch screen, with your fingers covering up a good portion of it, will never be able to accommodate as much information as a television. None of these limitations need matter if we accept them - if we design to each device’s strengths. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sorcery!</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> understands this. It courses through its very being, its chest puffed out with pride. “I am a game for your phone”, it says, “and I am super proud to be one.” So, in keeping with </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sorcery!</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">’s unwavering conviction, I’d just like to say that yes, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">you</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> mightn’t like this type of thing, but I do. And I’m not ashamed to say so. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /><span style="font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sorcery! 3: The Seven Serpents </span><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">was totally free on Saturday the 16th of May. And I totally didn’t download it in time. Now it’s going to cost me four quid (that’s more than </span><span style="font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">six USD</span><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">) to continue the adventure wot inspired this writing. OMG. FML. ETC. </span><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Or </b>i</span></span>f you're thankful in any way for my free written gift to you, maybe consider making it ever so slightly less free by donating to my lovely Patreon, <span lang="EN-GB">it resides here: </span><a href="http://patreon.com/ashouses"><span lang="EN-GB">patreon.com/ashouses</span></a><span lang="EN-GB">. Chrz.</span></div>
Leigh Harrisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09843099451159275743noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4159365708969067844.post-12677681169164395372015-05-12T15:09:00.001+01:002015-07-31T11:45:47.773+01:00Tunnel Vision: Taking Care of Business (TCB)<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The first few hours are a right blur. Just a collection of scattered little moments really. Trudging ever forwards through the darkness. Peaking at Bad Men through the gap between a stack of barrels. Cowering in dark corners of rooms, trying to hide myself from the dangerous flicker of campfires. Shaking, shotgun in hand, as enemies walk past me a few yards away, hoping beyond hope that they won't spot me. Being armed with dangerous looking guns but not really knowing how to use them. And that's about it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The first few hours of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Metro 2033</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> are magical escapism. You are thrust into the dilapidated tunnels and stations of a post nuclear holocaust Moscow metro and just sort of left to it. You've got a compass and a legitimately linear path to follow, but you are also in an otherworldly and entirely disorientating space. Living in London, I use the tube on an almost daily basis. Like most people, I've looked through ventilation grates and locked doors and wondered where they lead to. What sort of labyrinthine mess hides behind the straight corridors and ninety degree angles of these streamlined underground hamlets. I've never ventured beyond the tunnels I'm expressly granted access to, and having played </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">2033</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> I'm glad my curiosity has never prevailed. Tunnels are scary.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Lots of shooters take place in corridors. What makes the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Metro</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> games so chillingly atmospheric is that their corridors exist to not only physically, but also emotionally constrain the player. I always got the feeling that if things got super rough in, say, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Counter Strike</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> or </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Medal of Honor</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, that I could just jump my character over a fence and be off, running for the hills of freedom. I couldn't, obviously, the games aren't made like that, but at least there was the visual cue that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">something</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> was out there past the chaos of violence. With </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Metro</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> you are underground. While in practice there is nothing behind the constraining facility walls of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Doom</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, theoretically there </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">could be</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. You aren't given this cold comfort in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Metro</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, because there unequivocally isn't anything. You are in a little concrete tube, trapped beneath the ruins of the Russian capital.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is this spatial hopelessness which led to my fearful navigation of these tunnels. Yes, I was up against overwhelming forces and under-equipped, but I have been countless times before in similarly linear environments. Being underground really did something to me. Not having that hollow promise of escape </span><a href="http://ashouses.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/resident-evil-2-and-little-corridor-of-horrors.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">really gets to me</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. And so I cowered. And when that failed, which it inevitable always did, I flailed. Running about mindlessly I'd shoot at shadows, emptying clips of precious ammunition into walls. Into packing crates. Into barrels. Into anything that wasn't the Bad Men out to get me. The claustrophobia of the metro made me forget my hours upon hours of previous combat training - video games haven't, I'm relieved to find, vicariously granted me a tangible proficiency with guns, even in other video games. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I scraped through these encounters - barely - and was struck by just how stressful they were. It's the closeness with </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Metro</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> that's the real killer. When you unload a shotgun into a chest. When you stab a neck. When you bludgeon a head with the butt of your pistol. You're always so close to the consequences of your actions. Even when you manage to shoot someone from a safe distance you're still only a few feet away. Maybe it's that by a decade into the twenty first century our shooters have morphed from the up close and personal days of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Wolfenstein 3D</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to the more shooting gallery style of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Call of Duty</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, but </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Metro</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> just feels, well, raw. It's dirty and in your face like very few games about killing people are. It hurts, if just a little, when you shoot a man's face off, even if he's trying to do the same thing to you, because you are so close to it when it happens. There's no real sense or logic behind any of it. You are trapped underground and need to get to the end of a corridor. It's that simple. I got there by pratfalling and clumsily shooting and stabbing my way through. It was messy and energetic and foolhardy and embarrassing. But at least I managed to get to the next door relatively intact.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A bit later you are given the chance to buy night vision goggles and a rifle with a silencer and a magnifying scope. It didn't seem much at the time, but this purchase changed my entire experience with </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">2033</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Light is super important underground. This might sound silly to point out, but it's necessary. There are those little moments on the tube where all the carriage lights go out. Nobody reacts to them, but that's because they only last for a second or so. What if, though, the lights didn't instantaneously come back on? You'd maybe get ten seconds in before people started fidgeting. Fifteen or twenty and books would be closed. Headphones would begin to fall from ears. By a full minute, I'd hazard, people would begin to panic. Whether the train were moving or not, five minutes of pure, unflinching blackness would be enough to send people into a frenzy. Windows would be clawed at, bodies would be trampled, people would be whole-hog, to the bone terrified. Why? Because without light we quickly realise we're effectively trapped a hundred or so metres underground. It's scary to be trapped in the dark.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">My new arsenal allowed me to harness this power. With my combination of silent, distant weaponry and my ability to see without light, I was able to overcome my fear of the tunnels. My indiscriminate and wildly inaccurate aggression instantly turned to ruthless precision. I'd systematically and silently eliminate all artificial light sources from the subterranean battlegrounds. My enemies were effectively blinded. In their confusion they would clumsily crane their heads, trying to listen out for the assailant of their vision. They'd stumble around like children exploring a cave, completely unaware of my presence, or at least my location. Tunnels that once rang with battle cries and chest beating bravado were now silent but for the hushed whimpers of Lost Men. It was then that I pounced.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I'd cut them down in turn, a single bullet to the brain each. One would fall. Then another. The rest would start to realise that their numbers were dwindling. They'd begin blindly firing into the darkness in a vain attempt to counter my precision. Another. Another. Another. Then the final one. Perfect silence, punctuated only by the gentle hum of my magical goggles, would fall. I hadn't even had the move as I shot them all in the head from the comfort of my darkness. I was removed from them entirely. I had started off as a blind, flailing mess. Now, that would prove to be the fate of my enemies, while I had become an omnipotent dealer of death. I was a God. Or maybe worse.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Devil is in the detail, so we're told, and it was certainly present in my flawless approach to tunnel navigation. There was a kind of gentle naivete to my earlier bumblings; I was simply getting by in my environment. There was no time for malice to infect my actions: I was too busy trying to survive. But as soon as I donned the night vision I became calculating and coolly removed from my actions. In being able to plan out my attacks to the letter, rather than responding to those of others, I'd lost something along the way. I no longer shook and cowered, disgusted by the necessity of my violence. Instead, I stalked and assassinated. And I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the hunt. I went from being acted upon by external forces to totally embodying them. I was all-powerful, and I really, really liked it. The slightly warped, colourless image through my goggles had done the same to my sense of humanity. Through them, I had been given the upper hand, been allowed to take control of my perpetually uncomfortable situation. But I had also completely, irrevocably lost myself in the process.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">The above prose is proud to be associated with <a href="http://www.critical-distance.com/" target="_blank">Critical Distance</a>'s <i><a href="http://www.critical-distance.com/2015/05/04/may-2015-plans/" target="_blank">Blogs of the Round Table</a></i>, an initiative which seeks to bring the diverse voices of video game criticism together about the person of a monthly topic. I think it's dead good, and so do these lovely individuals:</span>
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<i>Believe it or not, but my monthly zone 1-3 travel card for the tube, the unquestionable inspiration for this 'ere writin' AND the thing I use to get to work, costs £144.80. Thusly... If you're thankful in any way for my free written</i><i> gift to you, maybe consider making it ever so slightly less free by donating to my lovely Patreon, </i><i><span lang="EN-GB">it resides here: </span></i><a href="http://patreon.com/ashouses"><i><span lang="EN-GB">patreon.com/ashouses</span></i></a><i><span lang="EN-GB">. Chrz.</span></i><i> </i> Leigh Harrisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09843099451159275743noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4159365708969067844.post-14384623559773170572015-04-24T16:00:00.000+01:002015-07-31T11:45:39.015+01:00One Hit Wonder: Double Dragon Neon and Miriam…? Muriel…? No, it’s Marian!<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;">Does just copying someone else's mistake afford you unaccountability?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The new Spider-Man isn’t going to come with an origin story, apparently. I’d hazard that this is because the lovely people at Marvel/Disney/Sony are finally sure everyone knows why Spider-Man is Spider-Man. He was bitten by a scientifically fiddled-with spider and inadvertently let his hubris hurt those closest to him. Essentially, he learnt that “with great power comes great responsibility”. This kind of stuff is, I think, built into the Western, movie-hungry consciousness, so it's nice to hear it isn't going to be forced upon patrons again.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Less widely known, but still tiresomely unnecessary, is the origin story of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Double Dragon</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Its complex tale of two men beating up lots of people is set in motion by the heartbreaking scene of a woman being punched in the stomach, thrown over a burly bloke's shoulder and having her almost bare arse shown off to all who'll take a look. The lady in question, Marian, is (bizarrely) the joint love interest of protagonist brothers Billy and Jimmy Lee, but also all the sexualised MacGuffin 80s players needed to go and bonk some bonces. ‘It were a different time’, you see, so that's about as complex as narrative justifications got.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Double Dragon</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> received a reboot in 2012 in the shape of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Neon</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. It added numerous extra levels of mechanical complexity and a good ol' dose of persistent character progression - things deemed necessary to bring the aged beat ‘em up into the modern era. Marian, by contrast, still gets a smack in the gut for being a woman, and remains merely a hollow trinket for players to follow. While how one plays the game is deemed important enough to warrant an overhaul, moribund gender representations and a morsel of respect for narrative are clearly not. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The genre is, of course, largely defined by its mechanical purity. It harks back to the days of arcades, where getting through combat challenges was a thrill unto itself, buoyed along by skill or sheer fiscal determination. Completing the game efficiently and without spending a small fortune was a player's aim, and this tension is largely lost once continues are stripped of their monetary value. What we're left with, then, is a relatively rudimentary collection of inputs; combinations of punch, kick and block are tiresomely anemic when compared to newer, more complex games. Something as simple as Double Dragon cannot possibly compete with the likes of contemporary Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden games. They offer hugely deep combat experiences, where positioning, stance, weapons and combo strings affect the very core of one's offensive and defensive capabilities. A 2D beat 'em up, by virtue of its own design tenets, can't possibly feature comparable depth. Yet Neon is preoccupied with augmenting its mechanics within the strict generic template it is confined to, chasing an unachievable complexity while developing very little else. Neon is, essentially, a flashier copy of the original.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Wholesale reproduction-with-bells-on </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">has</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> proved genuinely effective in the past. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Evil Dead II</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is a slapstick take on </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Evil Dead</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, which sees the absurdity of the original’s low budget aesthetic being played for laughs within the framework of what is essentially the same story told again. Aspects of Hulk Hogan’s fight with King Kong Bundy at </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">WrestleMania II</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> were reworked to great effect the following year. At </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">WrestleMania III</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> he picked up and slammed the 520 pound André the Giant, creating what is still one of the most enduring images of professional wrestling. Nirvana’s follow up to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nevermind</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In Utero</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, was consciously created to appear similar to their mainstream breakthrough in terms of basic composition and sound. It was, however, produced in a very raw and stripped-back way, and in parts features many abrasive and contradictory elements. Ultimately it is very difficult to compare the two, and upon release </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In Utero</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> accomplished the band’s desired goal of alienating casual listeners. Skillfully created reproductions, those with a real intent, tend to work out quite well.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Neon</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> seems to tacitly acknowledge that Marian's depiction is outmoded. Right at the end of the credits, after the men have spent the whole game beating on others to protect her honour, and while she has been held prisoner and (surprise, surprise) brainwashed into being a momentary adversary, it is Marian who strikes the final, lethal blow to chief-antagonist Skullmageddon. She is, ultimately, the only one strong enough to bring the story to a close after so many false endings and mid-stage boss battles. The men on the title screen spent hours whipping Ol' Skullers and were still only able to subdue him for a few minutes. Marian truly gets it done though, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Neon </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">tells us. But her victory is hidden right at the end. Admittedly, there is a catchy song playing over the entire credits scroll to hold people's attention, but even so, some will miss this token gesture. It's past the end after all, can you blame them? It's like - to go back to the Marvel Cinematic Universe for a moment - Nick Fury popping up </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">right at the end </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Iron Man</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Him doing so is a lovely little wink to diehard fans, but the average moviegoer will be queueing for the toilet by that point. He isn't part of the plot; he's outside of it, something to look forward to or get you thinking, but he isn't integral to anything that came before his tiny scene.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So why does Marian still need to get a slap?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The answer to this, in my mind, is because the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">experience of playing</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is usually held above anything else a game might have to offer. It’s why addons to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bioshock Infinite</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> tout a “combat experience [that] has been rebalanced and reworked with a greater emphasis on stealth and resource management” (woop woop), right up there with the main draw: a continuation of its story. It’s why </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Titanfall</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">’s entire single player portion is a series of offline multiplayer matches you play against your Xbox. It’s why </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Shadow of Mordor</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">’s numerous expansions all take place in entirely the same location as the main game and simply tweak the mechanics a bit. It’s why </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Far Cry 4 </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Far Cry 3</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and then some (<a href="http://www.haywiremag.com/columns/due-diligence-far-cry-4-doesnt-scare-me-any-more/">but not much more</a>). If it's fun to play does anything else really matter?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Neon </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">lets you counter attacks, share lives with your co-op partner and pull out a high five at a moment’s notice. It, in many ways, plays more smoothly than previous </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Double Dragon </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">titles. And while it is still a bit clunky to move about and perform these maneuvers, it at least pinpoints the deficiencies of its inspiration and works to sort them out. It also gently pokes fun at 80s machismos; painting the Lee brothers as unintelligent, air guitar-wielding, dudebro-ing fools. It </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">sort of</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> does a lot of things right when it comes to updating the template it is - by virtue of being a flashy copy - beholden to follow. Which makes it all the more of a shame that the single most outdated aspect of the series, Marian’s place within the whole mess, is left almost intact. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Neon</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> might be intentionally dumb fun, yes, but it isn’t by any means clueless. Perpetuating this kind of tasteless, backward-looking representation - especially when it changes so much else - isn’t done out of ignorance, it is done out of indifference. And that, to put it lightly, just isn’t very fun.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">The above prose is proud to be associated with <a href="http://www.critical-distance.com/" target="_blank">Critical Distance</a>'s <i><a href="http://www.critical-distance.com/2015/04/02/april-2015-palette-swap/" target="_blank">Blogs of the Round Table</a></i>, an initiative which seeks to bring the diverse voices of video game criticism together about the person of a once again monthly topic. I think it's dead good, and so do these lovely individuals:</span>
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<i>It isn't just women who face a glass ceiling when it comes to monetary income. I, even as a white male living in one of the most expensive cities on the planet, still manage to earn a paltry sum every month. If you're thankful in any way for my free written</i><i> gift to you, maybe consider making it ever so slightly less free by donating to my lovely Patreon, </i><i><span lang="EN-GB">it resides here: </span></i><a href="http://patreon.com/ashouses"><i><span lang="EN-GB">patreon.com/ashouses</span></i></a><i><span lang="EN-GB">. Chrz.</span></i><i> </i> Leigh Harrisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09843099451159275743noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4159365708969067844.post-41304420339580088282015-03-31T19:01:00.001+01:002015-03-31T19:01:21.470+01:00Form Over Function: I’m Going to Buy Video Games a New Vacuum Cleaner<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLqNxIOutp4-KeVM3qdoidxD_mPDsKALyccNslmx1TpFN6W4ULHlvUdWMVkW06kdEloiNVNdlXNxMcQAGhGzyA13q-wGwS66d4Fnz8j1LPuRyt5FxjoMKz_GMt5Ss9HC9y4Jszq2F4gF40/s1600/Hoover_BW.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLqNxIOutp4-KeVM3qdoidxD_mPDsKALyccNslmx1TpFN6W4ULHlvUdWMVkW06kdEloiNVNdlXNxMcQAGhGzyA13q-wGwS66d4Fnz8j1LPuRyt5FxjoMKz_GMt5Ss9HC9y4Jszq2F4gF40/s1600/Hoover_BW.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The day I bought my Playstation 4 I also became the proud owner of a Dyson DC49. It's their - possibly the world's - 'smallest, quietest vacuum cleaner'. You can almost fit it in the palm of your hand. Now, I’ve always wanted a Dyson, let us make that clear from the off, lest I build up the following introductory anecdote to an unfairly inflated stature. For me they are the perfect product for our consumption-led society: functional to a fault </span><span style="font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and</span><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> reassuring expensive. They are the kind of thing even an aged Yorkshireman could get behind, such is their exquisite balance of monetary outlay and usefulness. Upon returning home I carefully laid both products beside one another on the sofa and quietly surveyed the fruits of my wanton spending. I then gleefully opened up my new vacuum cleaner, pieced it together and cleaned my flat. I got to the PS4 an hour or so later.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dysons are great. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span><br />
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When I was young my family had a Hoover upright. It was made entirely of beige and brown plastic, except for the - also beige and brown - plaid knapsack it had slung over its shoulder. This attached attractively to its hyper-80s frame with springs and a sturdy rubber band. It was very</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">elegant. If you unzipped the swinging appendage - something I only did in secret, 'cos 'a Hoover isn’t a toy' - you’d be greeted with a dusty cavern containing the fragile heart of the appliance: paper bag. When not in use this just hung there looking a bit sad, but when the power was switched on the whole thing wheezed into life and inflated. (Much like the chest of the previously mentioned Yorkshireman upon the purchase of his new Dyson many years later.) This paper organ fitted snugly over a plastic pipe, but over time this connection became less dependable. So, to my memory, a length of bungee cord was introduced to stop the machine spilling its dusty guts all over the freshly cleaned carpet. Basically, before Sir James Dyson came along and actually thought about things, vacuuming your flat was a right pain in the arse. It was also ugly, unwieldy and just a little bit held together with sticky tape and string.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">My Dyson, in comparison, just kind of works.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Every aspect of a Dyson vacuum cleaner is there to make using the device functional, simple and intuitive. I’m sure this is because the people who design them understand that cleaning floors is not, you know, fun, and so de-cluttering the experience of doing so </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">might</span><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> be pretty attractive to people. We are, after all, talking about a household appliance: if it doesn’t make a task easier surely it has failed, no? I also think they look lovely, though can appreciate how retro-futuristic grey plastic mightn’t appeal to everyone (because people are monsters).</span><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dragon Age: Inquisition’s</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> level design is not at all like a Dyson. If anything, it’s a lot more like that old Hoover I went to great lengths describing for this fantastically elaborate analogy. While no single instance of the game’s worldbuilding is egregiously terrible, lots of its little niggles do threaten to gang up and pull its trousers asunder, revealing the soft ruddy buttocks of ‘prolly shoulda done that differently’.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Internet’s dictionary quite rightly states that a hub is ‘a centre around which other things revolve or from which they radiate; a focus of activity’. To be quite honest </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Inquisition</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> largely respects this time-honoured definition. It does so, however, only in the broadest of senses. Imagine, if you will, that we grab the most literal meaning of hub - that being ‘the central part of a wheel, as that part into which the spokes are inserted’ - and run, run, run with it. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Inquisition</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">'s wheel would be all nobbly and rough; misshapen to the point of uselessness. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Two such qualm-worthy issues are the game’s hub towns, Haven and Skyhold (my mind pronounces it Skyhooooooold with a bit of added reverb). These two locations are undeniably lovely, but treacherous towards the player. Haven is a pretty little hamlet resting defensively upon a hill, surrounded by wooden ramparts and banked on its sides by mountains and a lake. Skyhold is a more sombre affair, it being a big bloody castle sitting at the peak of a mountain, meaning it is strongly protected by both its environment and the gigantic walls that encircle its keep. Skyhold, by anyone's standards, is a pretty good place to organise a derring-do revolution from.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What neither of these places are good for is organising the playing of an RPG from. Both are littered with the sorts of things one needs to visit regularly - blacksmiths, shops, talkative allies etc. - but everything is so spaced out you end up traipsing about for most of your time. Travel to Haven, for example, and the smithy is a thirty second jog to the east, the shops twenty seconds north up the hill, and the town hall - where you receive missions, deposit plunder and converse with chums - is another twenty seconds after that. These handfuls of seconds start piling up rapidly though, because you’ll need to visit the village every hour or so in between adventuring. Every one becomes more of a chore than the last, as you endlessly tread the same paths over and over - and over again. Skyhold is the same but worse, as it is considerably bigger and things there are spread out over multiple floors (which your map can’t distinguish between) and behind numerous loading screens. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.38; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This, granted, is me being a right grump, but it's been </span><a href="http://kotaku.com/i-wish-dragon-age-inquisition-respected-my-time-1677548813" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">said elsewhere</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.38; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: playing </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.38; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Inquisition </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.38; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is just overly bloated. I've encountered this type design elsewhere recently, with </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.38; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Destiny</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.38; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.38; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Crew</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.38; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.38; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Far Cry 4</span><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;"> all needlessly </span></span><span style="line-height: 22.0799999237061px; white-space: pre-wrap;">tying</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;"> frequently used services to physical locations. Narratively speaking, it makes perfect sense to make me load into a discrete location, run through a castle and then load into a room within that castle so I can check in with my advisors. But when this is an act I have to repeat a hundred-odd times throughout my time with a game it quickly begins to seem mean-spirited. Make me run it the first time, just so I can see all the wonderful bricks you've built around my war table, but then let my warp straight to it after that. Or, here's a thought, allow me to just pull up a menu and do my business when and where I please, thus saving me oodles of time.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Slogs such as this aren't artistic like, say, the </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdjLBYxAcUI" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">lengthy corridor crawl</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> near the end of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Metal Gear Solid 4</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. They are merely examples of inconsiderate design. It was posited in </span><a href="http://metro.co.uk/2014/12/11/the-crew-review-cruising-usa-4982726/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">numerous</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><a href="http://www.polygon.com/2014/12/10/7363397/the-crew-review-xbox-one-ps4-PC" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">reviews</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Crew</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> that it is a deliberately drawn out affair. Commentators pointed to its protracted levelling system, saying it was likely designed to artificially lengthen the game's lifespan by making progress painfully - even unfairly - slow. After all, you’re much less likely to sell your game - and not purchase extra content - if you haven’t yet finished it. Or so the logic </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">may</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> go. This isn't really for me to say, as I've only played a handful of hours of it, but what I have seen firmly pitches it in Ubisoft's current wheelhouse. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ubisoft has become the master of creating games to a template. All of their big-ticket action releases over the last few years have adhered strictly to a formula of forcing players to wile away their time on handfuls of repeated tasks. In </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Assassin's Creed</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> you climb towers and complete side missions to progress. In </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Far Cry </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">you climb radio towers and complete side missions to progress. In Watch Dogs you hack radio towers and complete side missions to progress. In The Crew you drive up to radio towers and complete side missions to progress. The systems undeniably work - it was decidedly thrilling to see </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Assassin's Creed</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">'s world from up on high in 2007 - but repetition on such a magnificent scale kills excitement dead - beyond dead. It just becomes really demotivating.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">All of these games are open world. This brings one to the conclusion that so much effort is put into making these landmasses that the games which actually takes place within them suffer as a result. Copy-pasted design, arduous slogs to progress and unfriendly and time-consuming traipses to perform the most basic - and often necessary - of tasks. It's difficult to paint any of these things in a good light. Maybe we've just reached a point where the rabid consumption of games on such a huge scale has led to companies no longer respecting their audience. If the games still sell - and they do, in huge numbers - can we really blame the Ubisofts of the world for making what they do, or should we really be looking to ourselves for the true target of our chagrin?</span></span></div>
Leigh Harrisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09843099451159275743noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4159365708969067844.post-79205812563269275962015-03-20T15:34:00.000+00:002015-07-31T11:45:26.716+01:00Decorated Hero: Cave Johnson and the Aesthetics of Science<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I don’t really go in for </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">loving</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> many cultural products. I’ve got my favourite film posters on my walls - </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Casablanca, Easy Rider </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Texas Chainsaw Massacre</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> - but they are there because I like both the prints themselves and the films. I find it generally quite difficult to take that step from appreciating something or finding it stimulating to laying down my life in its defence. I’ve never argued about which David Bowie</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">album is the best, or which </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Call of Duty </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">campaign is the most thrilling and visceral (man), or whether becoming a vegan should simply be a personal choice or part of a wider-reaching political/moral crusade. I steer clear because all of these things - and in general any topic with the power to bring forth heated conversation - are hugely subjective, and the people willing to jump into discussion at the drop of the hat - over the Internet or over wine - almost certainly have their minds made up already. I stood on </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoodley_Pike" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a hill</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> once and inadvertently urinated right into the wind. I haven’t made a habit of doing so since.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Beyond </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Flower</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, the undisputed greatest game ever made, I’ve only been emotionally touched in any meaningful way by games a handful of times. At the very end of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ico</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> I got really dizzy and had to have a lie down. </span><a href="http://ashouses.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/resident-evil-2-and-little-corridor-of-horrors.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That corridor</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> from </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Resident Evil 2</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> plagued me for years. I spent the entire duration of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Damnation</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> thinking it showed </span><a href="http://ashouses.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/second-glance-investigating-creation.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">so much promise</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and actually became very attached to the little runt. It is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Portal 2</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, though, that you'll be regaled about on this occasion, because it's what pops right into my head when I think about my fragile, haunted psyche post-play.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is a universally accepted truth that the first </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Portal</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, because of its purity of intent and execution, is a better game, and I'll kind of have to agree with the whole human race on this one. The basic draw - shoot a pair of interconnected portals onto different surfaces and travel seamlessly between the two to solve spatial puzzles - is undeniable genius, but there are many others. The thrill of slowly discovering the macabre secrets hidden within the Aperture Science Enrichment (testing) Centre, the witty repartee spewing from every line of dialogue, its disgustingly high level of artistry and the fact it is pretty much perfect - not to mention the right length - make </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Portal</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> super, super - super fantastic. It's really great. When I was through with it I was left enriched, dumbfounded by the possibilities it hinted at for the whole medium: "games </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">can</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> be something truly unique and special" I thought, as if it had never occurred to me before. It had of course, but </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Portal </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">really is, by my reckoning, one of those creations that will stay with humanity until we haplessly wipe ourselves into oblivion: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Portal</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is really important. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Portal 2</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, also by my reckoning, couldn’t possibly be all of these things again - especially as short - because it is by definition </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Portal Again: Bigger, Bolder & Uncut</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. A bad sequel - </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Friday the 13th Part III </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">or </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">GTA: Vice City</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, par exemple - takes the building blocks of its predecessor and rearranges them, maybe adding in a couple of shiny chrome-coated or talking ones, but largely plays it safe (as houses). A good sequel, like </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Friday the 13th Part II </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(or </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">IV</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">,</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> VII</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> or </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">IX</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to varying lesser extents), takes those blocks, chucks most of them away and builds anew mainly from the bottommost layers; the creative foundations, if you will. So while </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Portal 2 </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">isn’t as much of a watershed moment, it actually resonated with me much more strongly precisely </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">because</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> it so wonderfully follows an already watertight game in a smart way. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Portal </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">cements all the basics of storytelling, mechanics and tone, which leaves its successor ample room to finely craft character and place. These two aspects of it are so inexorably linked together, and in my book are the things which elevate it right up there (almost) alongside </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Portal: The First One</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The opening stretch of the game is almost a humorous send up of the (deliberate) limitations of the first's design. You're thrown into test chambers and tasked with completing their puzzles as you would have previously, but here, owing to the years that have past in between the two games, everything is decrepit and falling apart. Each chamber </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">had</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> a logical solution when it was designed by Aperture - indeed, you completed some of them in the first game - but now the whole place is trashed you have to look beyond the way you played in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Often, you can see how the scenario </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">should</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> have gone, but simply can’t connect the dots because a couple of the elements you remember from the first game are missing. It’s a phenomenally smart way of reintroducing the basic play mechanics, while simultaneously showing the player that things have move on and expanded.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You're reacquainted with GLaDOS, the homicidal AI running the research facility, and introduced to Wheatley, your spunky mechanical sidekick who is suspiciously reminiscent of Stephen Merchant's acting oeuvre. After a boombastic battle the two robotic character switch roles, with your arch enemy now becoming your passive-aggressive chum and the goofy comic relief turning into the evil goofy comic relief. You're then cast down a deep (deep) shaft and into Aperture Science's very past, as it transpires the facility you've been trying to escape from is built upon decades of much older, failed experimentation. Again, this whole setup section displays how flawlessly </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Portal 2</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> handles being a sequel: building upon the very core of the first game but ultimately tearing everything else up in favour of retaining only the basic flavour of that experience.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When you reach the bottom of the shaft you've effectively stepped back in time to the Aperture Science of the 1950s. It is a strange-yet-familiar environment which takes the recognisable and warps it some. The testing facilities are now made of concrete, MDF and steel, rather than the futuristic alloys and clean surfaces of before, and they perfectly capture the essence of sparse, twentieth century industrial futurology. The materials may be bulky and period-accurate, but their function and design are skewed </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">just enough</span><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> towards the future depicted in </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Portal</span><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> that they harbour a forward-thinking glimmer of what we know is to come.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We quickly meet Aperture CEO Cave Johnson, who speaks to the player via pre-recorded messages intended for the original test subjects, and his personal assistant Caroline. After making his fortune selling shower curtains to the US military, we’re told, Cave set about developing outlandish technologies and inviting only “the best and the brightest” from sport, science and the military to test them. We explore a lavish art deco</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ish</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> waiting room, towering geodesical testing structures and cavernous, erm, caverns four kilometres below the Earth's surface. We're all the while treated to rousing speeches from Cave, as he evangelises about Aperture’s creations, their dubious health implications and the gigantic gap between his acumen and that of the “Science Boys”; the people who clearly keep things running. His bravura, however, is infectious, so while he seemingly doesn’t really understand the finer points of what he’s asking you to do, you’re more than compelled to go along with his gusto, as I’m sure many were inclined to do.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As you ascend through the complex you find your way into the 1970s incarnation of the Enrichment Centre and discover the fate of those scientific pioneers two decades earlier. Implicated in the disappearance of "a number of astronauts", Aperture have been forced to lower their exacting standards when selecting test subjects, and by 1972 are paying the homeless sixty dollars a time to participate in experiments. The decadent waiting room has been scaled back to a boxy prefab decked out with linoleum and uncomfortable chairs, while the testing chambers themselves are now spartan and somewhat dangerous looking. They are still made out of the same cheap, hardwearing materials as the 50s ones, but now they hang more precariously in mid air and only include the most necessary of surfaces. Ceilings are no longer present and only the walls which prove pertinent to each experiment are supplied to test subjects, everything else is either a sheer drop or bare steel girders. Cave sounds embittered and increasingly agitated at having to lower His Science to this level, and you get the real sense that something, although we are never told what, has gone terribly wrong (far) upstairs.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Our final stop is 1982 Aperture. Here, there is nothing present that doesn’t unquestionably </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">need</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to be there. The solitary test we navigate is comprised of an exposed pipe, barricades made of scaffolding and a pair of concrete towers with bare steel walkways at their summits. There’s no waiting room per se, just an auditorium leading straight off the offices of Aperture workers, for it is they who are now the test subjects. A dying Cave - he was poisoned by ground up moon rocks, naturally - informs his staff that the Enrichment Centre will soon be automated, but that “there's still a few things left to wrap up”, so it’s business as usual. Through his coughing fits we can hear that Aperture is bankrupt, likely due to its lethally unmarketable inventions, and that he wants his consciousness transferring to a computer. If this can't be accomplished before his fast-approaching demise, Caroline should take over in his stead and be digitised, thus eventually becoming the basis for AI megalomaniac GLaDOS. You then return to the contemporary Enrichment Centre and foil evil Wheatley’s plans, saving the day and ultimately escaping with your life.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It turns out, now that I’ve actually thought about it properly, that your trip through history only makes up about a quarter of the game. This is rather strange really, as my memory of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Portal 2</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is defined by this segment and comparatively little else. I think what’s so special about it is its masterful creation of a sense of place. The first game is deliberately nondescript to create hopelessness; to make you feel as if you’re a rat in a maze so unknowably large that you have no hope of escape. It is this which fuels its last act twist and makes your eventual flight so much sweeter. Falling down the shaft and exploring Aperture’s past is similarly revelatory, because while both the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Portal </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">games have bags of character, it has largely been removed and mechanical up until this point.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">‘Meeting’ Cave and Caroline and interacting with wood, rock and potatoes is initially a bizarre about-face from a series built around gleaming, sterile isolation. Where the test chambers and corridors of the modern Enrichment Centre are built with single-occupancy in mind, these historic locations ooze with, at least to begin with, the sense of a communal stride towards a better(?) future. The grand decor and size of the 50s-era waiting room shows that Aperture was hoping to build something truly wonderful. That its CEO chose to be the ‘face’ of the whole endeavour goes some way to validating this train of thought. Even the 70s portion of the facility is much more personable than anything seen in its later years. There seems to have been a real effort gone into making its communal areas as unthreatening as possible; the cheap-yet-durable chairs, lino and suspended ceiling tiles making the whole place look like a used car showroom. And while Cave might long for the halcyon days before any national heroes ‘disappeared’, he’s at least paying people to test for him - though the amorality is still a bit indefensible. It’s not until the 80s - eerily mirroring our own history - where things begin their turn towards the grim. In the run up to automation, people have understandably ceased being the primary focus, this being reflected in the drab decor and muted colours of our small glimpse of 1982 Aperture. Whatever the era, though, its clear that people </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">were</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> everywhere during this thirty-odd year period, and I found that supremely comforting. When comparing these iterations of the Enrichment Centre to the cold, utterly scientific emptiness of the modern one, they are actually quite uplifting places to visit. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Cave, too, is a pleasure to be around. While he may be a single-minded industrialist, he is no monster, and I read his gruff commands to be more ones of fatherly encouragement than homicidal impressment. I think he genuinely cared about the work done at Aperture, and while that likely came at the cost of many (many) lives, it is quite touching to see how personally involved in everything he is. As things begin to unravel for the company, his sense of deep personal frustration is palpable. While his final few, somewhat deranged recordings are played for laughs, I actually found it quite heartbreaking to witness this man’s transformation from optimistic magnate to embittered relic. His demise is sad, as is Caroline's eventual interment in a machine, and although I only experienced them in a passive way long after their deaths, I became very attached to them. This, I suppose, is a testament to the inescapable sense of loneliness haunting the rest of the two games.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Once I'd defeated evil Wheatley and restored GLaDOS back to her rightful place overseeing the Enrichment Centre, I was finally set free from Aperture's facility. I should have felt a great accomplishment, or at least relief. Instead, I was just really sad. The song that plays over </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Portal</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">'s credits, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Still Alive</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, is a scathing teardown of the player's accomplishments. In it, GLaDOS definitely taunts you, making it clear that although you seemingly just defeated her, she is fine and well, ready to begin testing again in earnest. It’s a darkly comic ditty, sung in sweetly homicidal tones, that promises further adventure. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Portal 2</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">’s song, in striking comparison, is called </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Want You Gone</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and details her resignation at the thought of continued fighting. I’m not suggesting here that another sequel would be a good thing, but hearing my arch-nemesis hang up her murderous ways and set me free in such a downtrodden way was deeply affecting for me.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I went straight outside after the credits rolled, lit up a cigarette, sipped a beer and just </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">stood there</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. I lit up another cigarette. Then another. And maybe another. It was a beautifully sunny day, but I just felt so - bereaved. I recognise how hyperbolic that sounds, but there’s no other description for my feelings at the time. It’s exactly the way I was left as a child at the end of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">E.T.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, when the little alien scoundrel finally gets to go home. My goal for two games - to escape - had been accomplished, but now I'd done so, well, I just felt so </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">empty</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. There’s something special about that couple of hours I spent exploring Aperture’s past, becoming acquainted with Cave Johnson and Caroline and learning of the origins of GLaDOS. Maybe I became so attached to the voices and places through some form of spatial Stockholm syndrome; subconsciously recognising how hopelessly trapped and lost I was, forced to grasp out for anything familiar or constant to protect myself emotionally. Whatever the explanation, this only worked in the short term while I was playing; after the fact I was devastated. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I was surprised by </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Portal</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> simply because it </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">had</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> a story. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Portal 2</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> knocked me for six because its was so affecting. That all of its characters are either robots or recordings says a great deal about the quality of them and the writing and acting that brings them alive. The places, too, are special. In looking into Aperture Science’s past we’re able to understand just why and how things went so wrong. Leaving all of these things behind was deeply distressing for me, a person who so rarely becomes attached to anything inanimate. That, in my book, is a pretty strong compliment, and probably explains why a print of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Portal 2</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> also adorns my walls, right up there next to my most treasured cinematic memories.
</span></span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Images courtesy of </span><a href="http://half-life.wikia.com/" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-style: italic; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">half-life.wikia.com</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and </span><a href="https://twitter.com/kylekurpinski/status/224544985863819265" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-style: italic; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">@kylekurpinski</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">The above prose is proud to be associated with <a href="http://www.critical-distance.com/" target="_blank">Critical Distance</a>'s <i><a href="http://www.critical-distance.com/2015/03/02/march-2015-extended-play/" target="_blank">Blogs of the Round Table</a></i>, an initiative which seeks to bring the diverse voices of video game criticism together about the person of a once again monthly topic. I think it's dead good, and so do these lovely individuals:</span>
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<i>Just like Cave Johnson and Aperture Science, I'm <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=brassic">brassic</a>. If you're thankful in any way for my free written</i><i> gift to you, maybe consider making it ever so slightly less free by donating to my lovely Patreon, </i><i><span lang="EN-GB">it resides here: </span></i><a href="http://patreon.com/ashouses"><i><span lang="EN-GB">patreon.com/ashouses</span></i></a><i><span lang="EN-GB">. Chrz.</span></i><i> </i> Leigh Harrisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09843099451159275743noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4159365708969067844.post-37572449746597964802015-02-20T15:53:00.000+00:002015-02-24T09:38:49.265+00:00Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Warfare * But Were Afraid to Ask Far Cry 2<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Far Cry 2</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is a very serious video game, maybe the most serious video game ever created. Its unflinching earnestness makes it, in my opinion, one of the most important games of recent years, if not all time. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Far Cry 2 </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is everything big-ticket games are almost always too scared to be: it is hard, it is strict, it is a pain to actually play, it is uniformly bland in its approach to conflict and interpersonal relationships, it is - well, genuinely amazing.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;">The power of the game lies in it prioritising itself and its message over the player at every turn. While it is still at the end of the day a shooter - and so ostensibly about interactive death-dealing - this isn’t readily apparent because the tools it gives one to do so are incredibly fickle. Guns degrade with every shot, making them increasingly ineffective with sustained use. Ammunition is precariously scarce out in the field, a problem which is further exacerbated by any remaining bullets in a magazine being lost if you reload before exhausting a clip, both of which - understandably - make any and all combat encounters extremely tense. Most divisively, weapons jam regularly, resulting in a precious second where you can't actually shoot things at all, even if you've successfully navigated all the other hazards to get to that point.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The rest of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Far Cry 2 </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ardently follows this line of thinking. I wouldn't call it aspiring to be realistic, more a willingness to complicate readily understood genre norms to make the player feel uncomfortable.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The game is set, for example, in a civil war-torn African country after governmental collapse. Opposition politicians and the military have drawn their respective lines in the sand and the nation has been split in two, with the nonpartisan civilian population caught in the middle. The player assumes the role of a mercenary who arrives in the country to assassinate The Jackal, the arms dealer supplying below market price guns to both sides and so ensuring the perpetuation of the conflict. To accomplish this task you’re forced to work with and against both sides as a “deniable agent”, essentially meaning every man with a gun, regardless of faction association, sees you as his enemy. It’s a murkier setup than most shooters, actively seeding moral quandaries from the off and removing any real assurances the player would normally receive telling them that they are, without a doubt, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the good guy</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This fractious and ambiguous political landscape has a physical manifestation, as the countryside is dotted with hostile checkpoints that dispatch enemies if the player strays too close to them, something which is largely unavoidable owing to their vast number. Driving or running full pelt through one is never really an option, as foes will pursue you doggedly on foot and from armed vehicles. The only real strategy is to tackle each checkpoint systematically, ideally beginning with an opening barrage from a truck-mounted cannon, and then a more traditional run and gun to mop up any stragglers. It's a winning approach to be sure, with a big pile of bodies accumulating in a respectably efficient time. There's no ceremony or even enjoyment to be had with these skirmishes because the camps quickly refill with new personnel once the current ones are removed and the player moves on. It’s really just an unavoidable facet of the conflict, hence the need for an unflinchingly swift and emotionally removed method of (re)depopulation. The abundance of these camps means that the player is more than likely going to come into contact with them whether they choose to or not; indeed, a journey of any real length across the map will almost certainly result in at least one unwanted encounter. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The aforementioned weapon unreliability and the constant shadow of combat, combined with the player character being quite fragile indeed - only a couple of bullets are required to down you - all ensure one is wary and on the back foot at all times. This makes </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Far Cry 2</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> something most shooters are not: an experience defined by defence rather than offence. Your foes here are a constant within a genre all about flux: they don't simply represent an off-balance equation the player can easily redress through evening the odds with firepower. In </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Far Cry 2</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> your enemies are the innumerable arms of the two almost-incumbent powers, while </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">you</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> are the outsider for once, presenting little more than a minor distraction to these incalculably larger forces. They aren't, as is so often the case, a small group of radical insurgents or terrorists or Commies, waiting about for the player - “the super West” - to turn up, right their wrongs and then go home for a barbecue. They are the divided peoples of a warring nation, the two sides of a conflict which encompasses its entire population. You can’t win, there is no end, and there certainly won’t be a time when you’ll roll through the countryside as part of an impregnable fleet of trucks blaring out rousing tunes. You will simply just </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">remain</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">; a gun for hire, swallowed by a situation much larger and fiercer than yourself. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In most shooters the combat itself is the point of everything, here, it is a means to an end, a way of stemming the flow of an endless conflict, even if only for a moment. You blank out the faces, the faction and the politics behind the guns because there’s no other option: the battle will not end conveniently once you reach the top of that hill or cross that bridge. Reinforcements won’t come and finish the job so you can be whisked off to fight in the snow or the jungle or downtown Manhattan. Everything will just keep on going, because no conflict truly ends when the battle is won. You, quite strikingly, begin to embody your character completely and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">become</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> a mercenary; the person who, yes, might do this because part of them enjoys it, but also the person who unequivocally does this for the money and not allegiance or duty. This is a job, first and foremost. In this way, no pleasure can be gleaned from most of the combat because the player isn’t actively choosing to participate, they are merely a bit-part being sucked into it, generally speaking, against their will. If anything, all the shooting just becomes a chore as you get waylaid and sidetracked at every turn, forced to fight large groups of men en route to the large groups of men you actually needed to fight. When you eventually do arrive at your destination you’ll likely be limping, low on ammunition and sorely lacking in medkits; the game wants you to know that things aren’t always as easy as we’d like them to be, that maybe, just maybe, we’ve all become a bit too accustomed to cheap, easy death. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Far Cry 2</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> wants you to feel helpless, it wants you to appreciate the great weight of your actions, that dealing in violence isn’t quite as carefree a vocation as many other cultural products would have us believe. It, above all else, wants us to feel isolated and alone.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Well, not quite alone. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Early on in your embroilment within the civil war you’re directed to a place called Mike’s Bar. It’s a small watering hole where other mercenaries gather when they’re not plying their trade. Through a bit of friendly repartee you can become acquainted with these contemporaries, who will in turn offer you little jobs to handle for them - sometimes, I’d assume, a cold beer is the more favourable option in a warzone. Upon completing the first of these tasks you’ll engender yourself to their giver, who will be so impressed with your zeal they’ll offer to help you out should you need it. Which you undoubtedly will.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The usefulness of your buddies is twofold. Firstly, they’ll give you their own take on campaign missions, often radioing you while you’re driving to the appointed location and telling you how they’d go about it. These suggestions are always a bit more involved - acquire documents, for example, to publicly shame a target and drive him into hiding, rather than attack him in the open when he’s surrounded by guards</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">- but the results will make the ultimate objective easier. Secondly, they’ll come and scoop you up if you fall in battle, which, as I’ve already discussed, is a certainty. Once your health is entirely depleted you’ll keel over and your vision will go blurry and a bit desaturated. However, instead of being greeted by a rousing quote or simple loading screen, you’ll see the determined visage of friendship, as your buddy slaps you awake and then drags you - in a very stylised, jump cutting fashion - out of harm’s way. They’ll then pump you full of adrenaline and throw you a handgun, fully expecting you’ll get right back to it and partake in a thrilling - it always is, however many times it happens - last stand. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over time you will undoubtedly develop a strong affinity towards the person who repeatedly saves your life, happily returning the favour - and thus flipping the dynamic of the relationship on its head - when needed. If buddies go down in a firefight you only have a short time to stop them bleeding out all over the savannah, so you’ll be forced - and compelled - to quickly make your way to their side and assist, bullets and explosions be damned. If they’ve sustained </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">minor</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> injuries - a broken bone, first or second-degree burns etc. (this still being a video game) - they’ll be okay with the sort of shot in the arm you receive, anything more serious and you’ll actually be called upon to euthanise them, overdose or headshot being your options. A buddy can only recover from injury a few times, after which they straight-up just die the next time they catch a bullet. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is, then, in your best interest to keep these people alive. Beyond their inherent usefulness, however, and despite their relatively superficial nature, these relationships do become meaningful in their own right, primarily as a by-product of the game’s need to be - just like its clearly-held opinion of warfare itself - exhausting and painful. In the harsh environments of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Far Cry 2</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> your buddies act as both a means of novelly dealing with death-avoidance in a mechanical sense, but also in simply giving the player a friendly face amid all the ones you’ve forcibly blurred out. As I’ve said, almost everyone in the game greets you with lethal violence, which is why the couple of minutes you spend with your buddies - people who are genuinely benign - feel so cathartic, even if you are frantically keeping the wolves from your shared door at the same time. It’s truly thrilling when they turn up to help you out of a sticky situation and you battle side by side for a time, primarily because it just breaks up the aggressive sense of loneliness that permeates every minute of the game.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">Bloodying the Water</span></span></h2>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">About halfway through your hunt for The Jackal, Mike's Bar comes under attack. At the same time so too does a church full of civilians, which really does beg the question: who do you try and help? The typical video game response - you playing the supposed good guy and all - </span><span style="color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">should </span><span style="color: black; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> be to head to the church and defend those who can't do so themselves. That's the logical answer for a genre at the heart of a medium that thrives on letting its audience play the unstoppable hero. But in </span><span style="color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Far Cry 2</span><span style="color: black; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">'s waren-like mess of right and wrong, where I'd been barely scraping through </span><span style="color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">with</span><span style="color: black; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the assistance of my foolhardy buddies, well, my choice was made the second the question was asked.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Upon approaching the bar I was ushered inside, where all my buddies were busily gathering together ammunition, blocking doors with fridges and doing that thing where you look into the barrel of your gun through the casing ejector to make sure it isn’t jammed - wise moves all round, everything being considered. Then the assault began. Men poured from the surrounding jungle belching bullets and fire, keeping our little ragtag family cloistered beneath window frames and kitchen appliances for protection. The whole situation was very reminiscent of a lot of the shootouts in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bonnie and Clyde</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, both practically and thematically. Here we were, the roguish bunch of outlaws, hunted down by vastly superior forces, cornered and on the receiving end of overkill-levels of violent retribution. We held out valiantly, popping up from cover for snatched moments of retaliation, but in the end we were overwhelmed. I fell in battle and failed my friends.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I awoke, miraculously, on a truck full of bodies, though I was just about still alive. I was informed that the battle at the bar had been a watershed moment of sorts, and that all of my friends were dead or missing. The guilt I felt was crushing: these people had helped me and saved my life countless times before, indeed, I’d done the same for them, so why hadn’t I been able to help them when it really mattered? I kind of lost my mind a little at this point and became obsessed with the conflict at Mike’s, reloading and reloading my save to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">try and do it better</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (or something), convinced of the idea that if I could hold out against the waves and waves of aggressors they’d eventually stop coming.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">Pulling Focus</span></span></h2>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">They - and it’s clear as day to me now, far removed from the skirmish - simply never do. You fight and fight and fight and eventually succumb: you simply can’t win. There it is again: </span><span style="color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Far Cry 2</span><span style="color: black; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">’s mantra, constantly whispered into your ear: “you can’t win”, “you can’t win”, “why do you keep trying?”. At this point the journey is far from over, and you do eventually make a new bunch of mercenary friends willing to lay down their lives to keep you on your path to The Jackal, but after The Battle of Mike’s Bar it’s just not really the same. Before it everything was hard, sure, but you at least had some control over just how miserable and alone you were. You at least had a </span><span style="color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">chance</span><span style="color: black; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.38; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of saving your buddies and maybe fighting to see another day. After it, though, the cruelty of the game’s intent is laid bare and you begin to fully appreciate what it is trying to teach you. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In a late-game swerve, we discover that The Jackal wanted the war to escalate not for profit, but so the two sides could wipe one another out to such an extent as to create an opening for the mass exodus of trapped civilians. Later still, as you’re on your way to bribe the border guards with diamonds, you’re ambushed by your remaining friends; men and women who, in case you’d forgotten amid all the near-death bonding sessions, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">kill people for money</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. The encounter is brutal in so many ways.</span></span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And that, really, sums up </span><span style="font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Far Cry 2</span><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. It’s a game in which your main objective is to shoot things, but also a game which wants you to question the validity of its own existence and those of its contemporaries. It makes you feel insignificant and weak in a genre built upon power, forcing you into the arms of dangerous strangers to make up some of the deficit. With them, you’ll forge your way across a nation, fumbling with right and wrong as you tirelessly pursue an objective you don’t even fully understand. Yes, you are, I suppose, the good guy on a humanitarian mission, but in the process you actively get involved in a lot of questionable situations, effectively using the very war you are attempting to end as a means of furthering your quest to actually end it. You’re forced to flit between employers, friends and allegiances in pursuit of your target, pragmatically weaving your way through a morally ambiguous warzone, murdering for scraps of information and supplies, never quite sure if you’re doing the right thing. It’s hard to figure that out at the best of times, but especially here, where everyone is driven by necessity rather than choice. Your final betrayal is the game’s way of making sure you’re listening when it tells you for the last time that war is horrible, that it corrupts and eventually makes liars and thieves - or corpses - of us all. In the end, the only source of true conviction is the game itself. It knows that trivialised violence, trivialised warfare - trivialised misery are everywhere, and it wants you to recognise, through a sheer war of attrition, that these things are anything but trivial.</span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB">The above prose is proud to be associated with <a href="http://www.critical-distance.com/" target="_blank">Critical Distance</a>'s <i><a href="http://www.critical-distance.com/2015/02/03/february-2015-buddy-systems///" target="_blank">Blogs of the Round Table</a></i>, an initiative which seeks to bring the diverse voices of video game criticism together about the person of a once again monthly topic. I think it's dead good, and so do these lovely individuals:</span>
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<i>On a scale of one to ten how rewarding did you find the experience of reading what you just read? If you answered anything but five I'd say you probably had a great time, depending on which end of the scale I'm deciding is good at any given moment. If you're thankful in any way for my free gift to you, maybe consider making it ever so slightly less free by donating to my lovely Patreon, </i><i><span lang="EN-GB">it resides here: </span></i><a href="http://patreon.com/ashouses"><i><span lang="EN-GB">patreon.com/ashouses</span></i></a><i><span lang="EN-GB">. Chrz.</span></i><i> </i> Leigh Harrisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09843099451159275743noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4159365708969067844.post-25348210079905997212015-01-23T12:08:00.000+00:002015-01-23T12:08:51.561+00:00Mordor Could Still Use More Shelves<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyYNGws7WAKZ3olwKC_IiblX6t5Flg8crhY-NXKQgnWpobsay7XQCNYIiSKx6wqasCScDSb3xdu1syc4l4q9iCMW_nkoaUvUtYoUPOTAEeqN_SooQs9PEVqZQQm0eSVrn5T5z9mj0JRG5M/s1600/MordorCouldUseMoreShelves_BW.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyYNGws7WAKZ3olwKC_IiblX6t5Flg8crhY-NXKQgnWpobsay7XQCNYIiSKx6wqasCScDSb3xdu1syc4l4q9iCMW_nkoaUvUtYoUPOTAEeqN_SooQs9PEVqZQQm0eSVrn5T5z9mj0JRG5M/s1600/MordorCouldUseMoreShelves_BW.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">I’ve
recently moved house and spent a lot of time doing DIY. I’ve also been playing <i>Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor</i>. DIY is
full of intricacies and I’d go as far as to say these are pretty much
limitless. The “Nemesis System” featured in <i>Mordor</i>
- which generates unique foes for the player algorithmically - is full of
intricacies, though these eventually run dry. That about covers the majority of
the content of </span><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Oc1DI8wQ0urJTNzxtdGyQ5UYGAZS8tZV1Uqk7wVBsVw/edit?usp=sharing"><span lang="EN-GB">this</span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> aborted missive, which is far too unwieldy for
me to ever hope of bringing under control. While I was lost in the maze of
drivel, I kept bumping into myself asking the same question: why, when the
differentiation between ‘story’ and ‘other’ content in open world games is
often so slight, can I spend many, many happy hours labouring repetitively,
only to lose interest in these same tasks the moment I’m not being pushed through
by a narrative?</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Now, the
obvious answer to this is that I’m not actually engaged at all to begin with,
and if you’re happy with that explanation you can </span><a href="http://www.timeout.com/london/things-to-do/things-to-do-in-london-today"><span lang="EN-GB">go off and enjoy the rest of your
day</span></a><span lang="EN-GB">, ‘cos you’ve
certainly earned it. For the rest of us, let’s push on.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">My greatest
misgiving with open world games is that there’s a fundamental sticking point
with their design. On the one hand you have these beautiful and increasingly
dense and detailed worlds that clearly take many talented people ages to make.
On the other you have systems<b>*</b>
imbuing these landmasses with relatively realistic weather conditions, temporal
cycles, seemingly autonomous inhabitants and aggy as anything </span><a href="http://www.amazingaustralia.com.au/animals/cassowary-attacks.htm"><span lang="EN-GB">cassowaries</span></a><span lang="EN-GB">. And on the third hand - this one
emanating from the vicinity of your inner eye, wherever that lies on you - there’s
all the arguably one-note tomfoolery these wonderful places, with their almost
believable ecosystems and topographies, are filled with. The third hand, just
like its inclusion in that turn of phrase, is where the problems stem from.<br />
<b>*(“oh the systems” - Edge did a <i>gushing</i> cover story on <i>Watch Dogs</i> that’s a good deal more
saccharine than </b></span><a href="http://www.edge-online.com/features/without-far-cry-2-there-would-be-no-watch-dogs-ubisoft-on-systemic-game-design-and-player-expression/"><b><span lang="EN-GB">this</span></b></a><b><span lang="EN-GB">.)<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">There’s an
incoherence between the relentless drive to add complexity to game worlds and
the stagnation of the things we’re given to do in them. <i>Mordor</i> - just to get it out of the way - actually does provide the
player with a fair amount of things to do, even if they are almost all geared
around </span><a href="http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2014/10/real-human-beings-shadow-of-mordor-watch-dogs-and.html">killing
things</a><span lang="EN-GB">. They broadly fall
under the <i>Assassin’s Creed</i>
triple-tier system</span><span lang="EN-GB">®</span><span lang="EN-GB"> of traversal, stealth and open
combat, with all three disciplines folding in on one another and making a
particularly sturdy dough. Throw in the Nemesis System, which regularly adds
variety and challenge to situations by augmenting the adversarial landscape of
a particular task, and you’ve got a flavourful - but not fruity, mind - mix.
The only thing missing from this ready to go rosemary-infused ball of delight
is something to make that stuff rise and fill the tin; something to tie all the
bits together and make it feel more than simply a breadbin, sorry, <i>toy box</i>, full of mechanics. (Food
metaphors are okay to use again, no? I heard opinions had gone full-circle on
them.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">This is
normally where the story - and by extension, the one-off scenarios usually
thrown into campaign missions - comes in. There are loads of examples to choose
from, but for argument’s sake I’m going to go with a recently memorable one in
the form of <i>Far Cry 3’s</i> </span><a href="http://farcry.wikia.com/wiki/Kick_the_Hornet%27s_Nest"><span lang="EN-GB">“Kick the Hornet’s Nest”</span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> chapter. In it, the player is
tasked with torching lots and lots of marijuana plants while simultaneously
fending off attackers, getting high and listening to a looping version of the
Skrillex and Damien “Jr. Gong” Marley jam </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nj2EbEIQZ0"><span lang="EN-GB">“Make It Bun Dem”</span></a><span lang="EN-GB">. The weed-induced blurriness aside, very
little of the mission is expressly unique; you’re shooting men and burning
things, both of which can be done at almost any other moment of the game one
chooses. It’s the novel presentation, the repackaging of already familiar bits
and pieces which is where this particular segment shines. That the ‘banging
tunes’ and simple “I’m so effing baked, bro” visual treatment are in no way a
realistic portrayal of dabbling in huge quantities of green matters not: the
game - in maybe an apt metaphor for its entire existence - bluntly<b>*</b> gets its point across. I’m generally
okay with this sort of superficiality, because, well, at least it breathes a
bit of variety into the proceedings, and sometimes - as is the case with the
deliberately chosen example above - it can prove humorously entertaining, if
nothing else. This vibrancy, while not explicitly supplying narrative
exposition, at least feeds from it, imbuing mundane tasks with
small-yet-valuable pinpricks of individuality.<br />
<b>*(Pun/no pun intended, depending on your
stance on puns.)<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB">Mordor</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> goes entirely the other way in this regard,
actually delivering one of the scantest narrative experiences of a big-ticket
game I’ve encountered in a long while. Structurally it reminds me of its
great-great-great-uncle <i>Grand Theft Auto
III</i>, in that most of its meaningful exposition is bundled into the
cutscenes which bookend missions; vignettes that usually take place in discrete
and otherwise unreachable locations hidden behind glowing icons and loading
screens. In keeping most of the story locked into the parts of the game the
player cannot influence, <i>Mordor’s </i>general
play experience remains remarkably similar - despite a steadily expanding
arsenal of offensive manoeuvres - throughout its duration. Mechanically, many
of these upgrades are flashier versions of existing powers, or buffs which
allow them to be used more frequently, injure more enemies or be used across
greater distances. What becomes apparent quite early on is that as these
abilities become available - and the proficiency of the player naturally
increases - everything becomes steadily easier. To combat this we’re presented
with more complex fodder enemies - one needs stunning to prevent a
counter-attack, another wields a massive shield and must be attacked from the
rear etc. - but this only works effectively to a point: a player paying
attention will quickly learn to recognise and thus best these ‘elite’ foes
whilst also dealing with the multitudinous Orcs surrounding them. It’s then
left, as is so often the case, to sheer numbers to ramp up any sort of
difficulty in the face of your unending march towards
probably-turning-evil-in-the-sequel. It’s inspiring stuff.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">This, as
you might guess, would be all fine and dandy if it dangled little bits of
string over my face and outstretched, grasping hands; I liked <i>Far Cry 3</i> after all, and that is full of
the same sort of practices. It’s the general blandness that pervades <i>Mordor’s</i> tasks which makes lots of it a
big slog, as if that metaphorical bread mix from earlier <i>doesn’t</i>, in fact, contain any seasoning at all, never mind the
hallowed herb rosemary. (Are two helpings of that metaphor pushing it a bit?
Probably.) What story is present is shallower than the ankle-deep water I end
up with in the bottom of the shower when I’m washing my hair (I have <i>lots</i> of hair). There’s an arc with
Gollum that is generally a tutorial for combat. There’s and arc with a Dwarf
that is generally a tutorial for fighting with and on Mordorian predators.
There’s an arc with an Orc that is generally a tutorial for the Nemesis System.
There’s an arc with the royal family of <a href="http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/N%C3%BArn">Núrn</a> that is generally a
tutorial for the Domination ability which allows you to possess and exploit
your Orcish enemies. There’s an arc with a Gondorian bloke that is generally a
tutorial…for nothing actually, but it’s largely the only part of the game’s
entire plot that doesn’t feel to be in service of introducing or explaining
game mechanics. (I did all that repetition for a reason. Call it <i>stylistic mirroring</i>, if you will.) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Nowhere is
this lack of care more gut-wrenchingly smug than in the lengthy quest to find
out your companion’s name. He’s pretty much a deus ex machina for the whole
video game bit of <i>Mordor</i>, allowing
the protagonist to get killed after the tutorial (the proper one at the
beginning of the game, the one that tells you how to hold the controller and
not fall off your chair) and be reborn with superpowers. He’s the ghost of an Elf
wot was wronged by Sauron and he’s chosen to possess your boy Talion, the main ‘character’
(“he’s super broody <i>and </i>boring, boss”
“YES! I like it, we’ll take him!”), so he can enact some good ol’ physical
retribution. The only problem with this plan is that your ethereal chum can’t
remember who he is or why he feels so aggrieved. So, in the interest of not
trashing Sauron’s face without first knowing <i>for sure</i> that he needs a slap, he instructs you to run about in a
load of caves to find bits of his old Elf costume, the sight of which will
probably (they will) compel him to have perfectly chronological flashbacks. It
takes about half the game and far too many of these trinkets to dislodge the
truth: he is Celebrimbor, the bloke Suaron tricked into forging the rings of
power ‘fasands of years earlier. It’s a great moment, one that could only have
been made more meaningful if this information hadn’t been <a href="http://www.polygon.com/2014/7/25/5937095/shadow-of-mordors-wraith-is-the-ring-forger-himself-celebrimbor">shouted
from the rooftops</a> <i>months</i> before
the game was released, amid the (admittedly successful) push to make people
care about the game.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB">Mordor</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> is emblematic of my whole beef with open world
games. So much effort goes into making them, effort that is then quickly
undermined by deluges of mediocrity once actual connective tissue is applied.
Having things play well should only ever be the <i>bare minimum </i>aspiration<i> </i>for
one of these large games - what with them being rather lofty undertakings to
begin with. Mechanical purity in isolation, I’d say, is perfectly acceptable within
the realm of a smaller, more focused experience. These offer (ideally) a small
selection of highly-honed mechanics with a focus on skilful play. They don’t
necessarily need or even suit elaborate narratives because a robust play
experience can be rewarding in itself. The problem I find with open world games
is that they <i>aren’t</i> focused enough to
operate in this fashion. Activities are regularly numerous and scattershot, vary
dramatically in quality and are often repeated many, <i>many</i> times despite being guff (I don’t even need to use examples: we
can all dig this sentiment). Without a rewarding narrative justification all we’re
left with is a load of <a href="http://kotaku.com/i-wish-dragon-age-inquisition-respected-my-time-1677548813">tosh
with which to waste our time on</a>, something I seemingly can’t do for too
long.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB">Whoops</span></i><span lang="EN-GB">, it looks like I might’ve been right on the
money all the way back at paragraph two (we’re now on ten): I just don’t like
these games. But I do - or at least I think (or force myself to think) I do. I
like the giddy freedom to <i>do anything</i>,
even if that anything turns out to just be a dozen <i>things</i> copied until they appear to be infinite. I like the
ultimately hollow promise of a massive expanse of land ripe with possibilities
and <i>stuff</i> everywhere - even, to an
extent, after the realisation of its banality has sunk in. I like the
predictable unpredictability of a finite number of systems interacting with one
another to create moments of sheer “emergent” joy. I, I suppose, like those
trepidation-soaked first hours in a new open world, that possibility - even though
I know it to be almost impossibly unlikely - that <i>this one</i> will be different. A well-spun yarn does help to distract
me from the grind, but it will never be able to make uninspired play palatable.
Maybe I’m simply asking too much of the
genre, seeking too much variety and wanting a virtual world to be filled with
the incalculable intricacies of the real one, screws, drills, plaster, sandpaper,
heartache and all. If this is an impossible goal, though, why keep on trying if
all we end up with is expensive disappointment? </span><br />
<br />
<i>I earn a six-figure salary, own three homes and ride on a jet ski at least twice a week. What I don't have, however, is any peer group respect. This, unfortunately, is also measured in cold, hard cash, so if</i><i> you respect my creativity</i><i> and the free written gift I've just given you, maybe consider making it ever so slightly less free (and thus more respectable) by donating to my lovely Patreon, </i><i><span lang="EN-GB">it resides here: </span></i><a href="http://patreon.com/ashouses"><i><span lang="EN-GB">patreon.com/ashouses</span></i></a><i><span lang="EN-GB">. Chrz.</span></i><i> </i> </div>
Leigh Harrisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09843099451159275743noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4159365708969067844.post-14053683250211851072015-01-15T14:12:00.001+00:002015-07-31T11:45:15.043+01:00Role-play it (again), Sam <div class="MsoNormal">
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<br />
I was, I think, trying to play the <i>Half Life</i> mod<a href="http://www.vsmod.co.uk/index.shtml"> <i>Vampire Slayer</i></a> this one
time, when I inadvertently ran into a bunch of people - a dozen or so, which
was fairly respectable even at the height of the rabid modding community
(dilution of the playerbase an’ all) - doing some very strange stuff. Vampire
Slayer, as its name would suggest, was a combat-orientated experience where a
team of humans (the titular Slayers) duked it out with a team of pastier humans
(the titular ‘Pires) using all sorts of<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120877/"> <i>John Carpenter’s Vampires</i></a><i>-</i>inspired
gadgetry. Only these players weren’t doing as they were told. Instead of
swiping at, staking and shooting one another as would be expected, everyone was
gathered around chatting or walking about, enacting something that kind of
resembled real life. That is to say they were all simply flaunting the
generally accepted rules of a team deathmatch game and just <i>not killing one
another</i>. After a little polite inquiry I was informed that I’d happened
upon a role-playing server: a place where one was free to pretend to be
anything or anyone you desired - as long as you didn’t mind doing so dressed as
a<a href="http://www.vsmod.co.uk/characters/characters.htm"> vampire version of
the G-Man</a> with great big claws and a nasty looking <span lang="EN-GB">omelette</span> scalp.</div>
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I was quite impressed by the dedication these inhabitants
displayed to their chosen pastime. The rigid nature of multiplayer Half Life
doesn’t provide much leeway when it comes to methods of interacting with
others, in fact, past killing you can only really text chat and spray graffiti
tags - mine was the picture of Eazy-E you see nearby - as a means of
communication. Which is why I was so in awe of the people I’d been thrown
together with, particularly the way they were making do with these tin can
telephone-quality amenities and running wild with them. One person, dressed as
a hip looking vicar, stood in the hollow innards of a building - mods of the
day were often criminally sparse when it came to interior design - rping
(role-playing) a bank clerk. He (a male avatar at least) just stood there, idly
chatting to other players as they came in to manage their personal finances.
Others ran a little market, there was a pair of jail guards, a cop and what I
can only assume were lunching office workers, such was their confident and
carefree sauntering in between the sandwich purchasing and bill paying.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I didn’t get in on the act too deeply myself, satisfied as I
was to simply watch the patterns of the townsfolk emerge. I felt an acute sense
of being an outsider, as if I were a literal new arrival in an already
established community; a testament, I suppose, to the investiture of the people
I was playing with. And they <i>must</i>
have been pretty into it, because there wasn’t really a whole lot going on past
the idle chitchat and symbolic<i> “I’m going to walk over here and collect your
</i><i><span lang="EN-GB">cheque</span>/foot
long/bunch of flowers/pressed shirts and then walk back and give them to you”</i>
dalliances.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It was bizarre to see, if I’m being honest. Not for what it
was - people can do whatever they want with their free time; I had a slavish
devotion to LEGO well into my late teens - but for the discipline and
creativity on display. Now I know that electing to not shoot one another in <span lang="EN-GB">favour</span> of playing pretend
isn’t really a great stretch of the imagination - even if, by definition, it
entirely <i>is</i> - it’s just the way that these people were conducting
themselves was striking - inspirational, even.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I’m terribly conservative when it comes to my consumption of
games. The zenith of my subversiveness when playing was probably cheating in
each of the PS2 <i>GTAs</i>, but that involved codes put into the games by
their developers, so that doesn’t even count I suppose. Then there was that<a href="http://ashouses.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/who-on-earth-is-darpa-chief-donald.html">
<i>Metal Gear Solid</i> escapade</a> where I ‘hacked’ the game, but that didn’t
end anywhere near as well, so I’m not sure if I can claim that as a dissentient
victory either. I don’t pull my punches when trying to accomplish game things:
basically, if I play something I’m going to do it in a very orderly manner,
using all the tools I’m given to get where I need to be.<a href="http://ashouses.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/difficulty-mill-bulletstorm.html">
Easy mode</a>, I think, is a super valid way to interact with video games, one
which is often overlooked because, hey, “games are meant to be challenging”.
Except no, actually, they really aren’t <i>meant</i> to be that way at all,
because being able to make them super easy is built right into most of them. I
take the simple route all the time.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Call it lazy, call it foolish, call it missing the point
entirely - call it whatever you want - but the basis of my relationship with
most of the things I play is largely adversarial. I don’t think I even enjoy
most of my time spent with video games, largely, I’d assume, because I still
feel beholden to the tangible shiny round ones and so spend far too much time
thinking about The Triple-A rather than the ethereal download stuff one doesn’t
find down their local <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamestation">Gamestation</a>
(if they were to still exist). So yes, I hate games and want them to be over as
quickly as possible, which is why I’ve never gone in for overcomplicating them
or fiddling about and playing them in a seditious way. Which is why, to get
back to a more positive bent, I was so happy to see my rping chums having such
a good time. <o:p></o:p></div>
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In choosing to just stand about and twiddle their thumbs in
inventive ways they’d accomplished what I’ve never myself managed, namely, to
positively influence and alter their video game experiences. In eschewing the
goals set out by Vampire Slayer they were taking control of their affairs and
making the game work for them. (Why they chose an obscure mod to call home is
beyond me, maybe the broody, modern gothic aesthetic was found to complement
their brand of tertiary sector rping.) I don’t think it really matters that
what they were doing wasn’t particularly well suited to their chosen canvas - <i>Second
Life </i>and <i>Playstation Home </i>et al were still years off - in fact that
part maybe makes their stand against conformity all the more impressive.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The only time they ever resorted to playing by the rules was
when a stranger entered the server and tried to <i>ruin the vibe (man)</i> with
shooting or stabbing. Then, and only then, would the citizens all drop their
day-to-days and possefy, hunting down the interloping party with swift
vengeance, the like of which hadn’t been seen since the heady days of <i>Hallowen
4: The Return of Michael Myers.</i> It actually made for a rather strange
sight: I’d become so accustomed to the peaceful comings and goings that these
little bursts of leather-clad disorder didn’t seem to fit with the game at all
any longer. In that respect, I can’t deny that their subversion of what was
expected of them as players - participants, at this juncture might be a better
label - was wholly successful.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I never took this any further though, instead choosing to <span lang="EN-GB">wilfully</span> ignore what could
have been a broadening of my interests and just slide back into the comfortable
cocoon of generalised apathy, a place I still largely remain tenanted in to
this day. Vampire Slayer was one of hundreds of multiplayer mods created for
Half Life and one of almost the same number to disappear with very little
attention. I went on to have a lasting relationship with <i>Day of Defeat</i>,
spending many an hour playing silly deathmatches on custom servers, the kind
running user-created maps that looked like Mario levels or very large suburban
rooms, whilst playing music ripped from horror movies and the announcer from <i>Unreal
Tournament</i>. Sadly, that pretty much sums me as a player up perfectly: I
tread only the most <span lang="EN-GB">well-</span>worn
paths, in generally the most obvious ways and without ever deviating further
than someone else will allow me to. I lap it up and hate the taste, but Christ,
it’s easier than trying any harder.<o:p></o:p></div>
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So “great job” to those who do, you’re better than me by far.<o:p></o:p><br />
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<br />
<span lang="EN-GB">The above prose is proud to be associated with <a href="http://www.critical-distance.com/" target="_blank">Critical Distance</a>'s <i><a href="http://http//www.critical-distance.com/2015/01/03/january-2015-players-choice//" target="_blank">Blogs of the Round Table</a></i>, an initiative which seeks to bring the diverse voices of video game criticism together about the person of a once again monthly topic. I think it's dead good, and so do these lovely individuals:</span>
<br />
<br />
<iframe frameborder="0" height="20" mce_src="http://www.tinysubversions.com/bort.html?month=January15" src="http://www.tinysubversions.com/bort.html?month=January15" type="text/html" width="600"></iframe>
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<i>On a scale of one to ten how rewarding did you find the experience of reading what you just read? If you answered anything but five I'd say you probably had a good time, depending on which end of the scale I'm deciding is good at any given time. If you're thankful in any way for my free gift to you, maybe consider making it ever so slightly less free by donating to my lovely Patreon, </i><i><span lang="EN-GB">it resides here: </span></i><a href="http://patreon.com/ashouses"><i><span lang="EN-GB">patreon.com/ashouses</span></i></a><i><span lang="EN-GB">. Chrz.</span></i><i> </i> <br />
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Leigh Harrisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09843099451159275743noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4159365708969067844.post-90685183894790888792014-12-18T13:43:00.004+00:002015-07-31T11:44:52.110+01:00Return to (Castle) Wolfenstein: The New Order<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvRoZ7VgzUyS7ulrt3wyZVjzzWsYjpdvCBvaknhlYoAl5hf6LNsIgKEREXR8J4cbRQqIdL3iLfTU2PnAi4Kk43IXMTB-EHN6DWHXyYjccjdnjurAOXk6d1mfFQvZyxwpBfNJK5OOi62_A-/s1600/Wolfenstein_TheNewOrder_BW.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvRoZ7VgzUyS7ulrt3wyZVjzzWsYjpdvCBvaknhlYoAl5hf6LNsIgKEREXR8J4cbRQqIdL3iLfTU2PnAi4Kk43IXMTB-EHN6DWHXyYjccjdnjurAOXk6d1mfFQvZyxwpBfNJK5OOi62_A-/s1600/Wolfenstein_TheNewOrder_BW.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">General Wilhelm "Deathshead" Strasse is a gnarly looking
old man, with the kind of exaggeratedly evil voice, mannerisms and
disfigured face one tends to associate with modern depictions of Nazis. He’s
crouched down staring at me through the screen, flanked by two giant
Über-Soldaten, each with one of my comrades, Wyatt and Fergus,
wedged under their weighty knees. He’s goading me - or more
accurately William Joseph "B.J." Blazkowicz, the bloke I’m
in charge of - in that wholly merciless way Bad People From The National
Socialist Party tend to do. And because he’s a thoroughly amoral kinda
guy, you see, he’s up for dissecting one of them and he - here’s
the kicker - wants me to choose who is to be the lucky recipient of his
scientific attention. Do I pick Wyatt, the spunky rookie who only
minutes before had saved me from certain death and whom I now "owe
one"? Or will Fergus, the gruff and straightforward Scotsman who
clearly has a history with B.J - though to what extent I’m unsure; I
didn’t play two thousand and nine’s <i>Wolfenstein</i></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: #444444; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span lang="EN-GB">- be the last man allowed to possibly, maybe, perhaps
stand back up?</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<a name='more'></a><br />
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Decisions.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Decisions.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">Decisions.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">Hold it for a bit longer, just so we’re sure he’s not joking.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Decisions.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Nope, video game Nazis are lots of things, but never, ever - ever
jocular.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Decisions .</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Scottish I suppose, bugger it.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">As Wyatt is hauled into a machine to have his good-natured brain sucked
out the back of his head I begin to wonder if I’ve made the right decision, if
I’ve just sacrificed the wrong soldier - from the wrong side of the Atlantic
(the ever-present spectre of nationalism does funny things to the mind). As
fate would have it I’m given a good long while to think about this, because
shortly after escaping with my non-sacrificial comrade, B.J. is nicked by
shrapnel, ending up in a coma for fourteen years, a span which is tastefully
cut down to a two minute time lapse. While he has far longer to agonise over
this decision than myself, I still feel pretty rough as the seasons slip by and
the camera pans to the left, the room bathed in desaturated hues and ambient
music. Ending this period of reflection, I stab a Nazi in the throat and embark
on a bloody and vengeful road trip of sorts; for the next fifteen hours I end
up being far too busy to think about poor Wyatt and my fateful choice. I think
he’s mentioned again twice.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">###</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">When the end rolls around I am, as I’d assume is B.J., exhausted. We’ve
dashed about Europe as hard as any touring rock band - carrying about the same
amount of hardware - and it’s actually a relief to see him contemplatively roll
onto his back and call in the nuclear strike which may or may not release him
from his cycle of ever-escalating Nazi killun’. Half an hour earlier he’d
wrestled Wyatt’s jar-bound brain from a robot, ending the poor sod’s suffering
in much the same way he was now about to do for himself: with military
hardware.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">The other time someone evoked Wyatt’s memory was during a little speech
from Fergus. In it he’d bemoaned B.J.’s sentimentality in saving him, saying
that they were both men of the past and that his young counterpart would have
embodied a future where striking back at the incumbent regime <i>could</i></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: #444444; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span lang="EN-GB">have been successful. He’s upset because they are getting old and won’t
be able to hold their own for much longer - though they still look good for
fifty year olds, especially B.J. who remains buff as anything after sitting in
a chair for over a decade. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">Much of the game’s story, at least with Fergus alive, is preoccupied
with dismantling the action-hero archetype. It’s the end of the line for their
type of masculinity - the old-world military patriarchy - as they age and are
not replaced by equally square-headed gents, even if, for all intents and
purposes, the B.J. of <i>The New Order</i></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: #444444; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span lang="EN-GB">is as potent as the one in <i>Wolfenstein 3D.</i></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: #444444; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span lang="EN-GB">That it is only said somewhat diminishes the thrust of the sentiment -
and I’m almost certain that the bomb isn’t going to land on B.J., forcing any
future Wolfenstein projects to be fronted by New Strong Female of the moment,
Anya - but, to follow a sad line of thinking, at least it’s striving toward
something.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Once it’s all over - the whole sorry, jingoistic, frivolous affair (I’m
almost certain that these aspects of it are calculated and deliberate: a
derision of the series' thematic constraints, possibly) - I’m pushed, as is the
way with the post-credits videogame, back to the main menu. Navigating to the
“Chapters” section I’m confronted with two columns: the “Fergus Timeline”, all
decked out with names and little memory-jogging thumbnails, and a morose,
post-prophetically (if one can say that) empty “Wyatt Timeline”, reminding me
of what could have been.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">There’s no way to easily go back and pursue this train of thought. I
can’t hit a button and load right back to that decision which shaped, in what
I’d assume is a very superficial way, pretty much my whole experience of the
game. If I feel the urge to see what nineteen sixty Nazi-occupied Europe would
look like with Wyatt as ‘my boy’, I have to go right back. Back past The
Decision itself, back past B.J. being saved by a plucky soldier with a grenade,
back past the beaches and the shooting, back past the AA guns, back past the
late title card and back past the beginning of the game. To try again and see
the world from another perspective I have to do just that: there’s no
shortcut. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">So just like all those stupid evenings where you say you’ll go to bed
early but still end up staying up too late, thus making yourself extra
vulnerable to the effects of the libations you are to consume the following day
- at a special event that’s been planned for months - you are, essentially,
tied to your decisions whether you like it or not. No amount of grovelling
self-pity (we’re all just seeking personally-approved absolution if we’re being
honest) is going to change what we did. Whether we’re happy with our actions is
wholly irrelevant: we did what we did, we’re stuck.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">I’m glad <i>The New Order</i></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: #444444; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span lang="EN-GB">contains this little ‘fuck you’ to its players if I’m being honest. “If
you want to play the game again” I hear it say “then be my guest, but bugger me
if you’re doing it in an attempt to nurse your own personal guilt or re-imagine
my already re-imagined history: that isn’t the way this works.” Life is too
short to worry about the way you did things in the past, especially considering
you more than likely cocked it up spectacularly. <i>The New Order</i></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: #444444; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span lang="EN-GB">tells you that if you want to see how thing <i>‘could’ve
gone’ </i>then you’re more than welcome to; just be prepared to graft and
repeat yourself in order to sate your debilitating curiosity and self-loathing.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">I’ve personally done enough things I’d rather not relive to know better.
Which is why I gave a little sigh at the sight of “Wyatt’s Timeline”, poured
one out for him and turned off the TV: it’s best to just let the past lie where
it is.</span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: #444444; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><o:p></o:p><br />
<span class="apple-converted-space"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: #444444; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><br /></span></span>
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<span lang="EN-GB">The above prose is proud to be associated with <a href="http://www.critical-distance.com/" target="_blank">Critical Distance</a>'s <i><a href="http://http//www.critical-distance.com/2014/12/02/december-2014-new-game-plus/" target="_blank">Blogs of the Round Table</a></i>, an initiative which seeks to bring the diverse voices of video game criticism together about the person of a once again monthly topic. I think it's dead good, and so do these lovely individuals:</span>
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<br />
<i>On a scale of one to ten how rewarding did you find the experience of reading what you just read? If you answered anything but five I'd say you probably had a good time, depending on which end of the scale I'm deciding is good at any given time. If you're thankful in any way for my free gift to you, maybe consider making it ever so slightly less free by donating to my lovely Patreon, </i><i><span lang="EN-GB">it resides here: </span></i><a href="http://patreon.com/ashouses"><i><span lang="EN-GB">patreon.com/ashouses</span></i></a><i><span lang="EN-GB">. Chrz.</span></i><i> </i> <br />
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<span lang="EN-GB"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
Leigh Harrisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09843099451159275743noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4159365708969067844.post-10396812486325192302014-11-21T12:20:00.000+00:002015-07-31T11:44:38.944+01:00Resident Evil 2 and the Little Corridor of Horrors<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 15.95pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
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There’s a little corridor in <i>Resident
Evil 2</i> which has stuck in my mind for what must be going on for
fifteen years. The last time I saw it was probably a decade ago but I can
still (and will) list off its most minute features. It is somewhere
under the police station and makes up part of - I’m assuming but can’t
remember any details - the needlessly sinuous route from Raccoon City’s
claustrophobic streets to its even more claustrophobic subterranean realm. It’s
a bit out of the way really, located as it is at the foot of a ladder down
the end of a recessed, open-air space which snakes around the back of the
municipal building's basement. Upon first approaching it you’re
set upon by dogs; enemies so fierce that I can still remember their
throaty, digitally processed barks and the relentlessness of their
enthusiastically murderous, seemingly nonsensical galloping. Perhaps
running this gauntlet is one of the reasons I so vividly remember what comes
after it. </div>
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<a name='more'></a></div>
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<span style="color: #444444; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">The corridor in question is
bedecked in thick polythene cascading from its concrete ceiling, which
ripples down the walls and gives the place the same unsettling atmosphere
of <i>recently cleaned up violence</i> that I associate with crime
scene tents. Leaning up against these undulating surfaces (I’m sure they
weren’t <i>actually</i> animated, but there’s a lot to be said
for the human imagination) is a collection of tools, cones and other
construction doodads. It’s lit dimly at one end by cold fluorescent bulbs, the light
from which plays off the scaffold beams that support everything - the police
station, the streets, the chaos - that I’ve already trudged through. At the far
end is a solid looking wall about seven foot tall (we insist on saying foot not
feet in Yorkshire) which falls a little short of properly reaching the ceiling.
Flush with this barrier, though spanning the full height of the passage, is a
chain link fence with a little tear in its upper right-hand corner. Peeking
through this, just above the top of the wall, is the moon, sitting peacefully
in the black, starless skies above the city.<br />
That is my memory of the place, anyway. Below is the actuality:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Not a bad effort, I reckon, though
maybe I’ve romanticised and embellished upon the place a little in the
intervening years, what did I say about that ol’ imagination, ey? What <i>is</i> important
though, is how I felt and continue to feel about this place. The unnecessarily
strong affinity I have for a pretty inconsequential corner of a sprawling game
comprised of its fair share of corridors. (As an aside: I always thought it
strange that, from a silly <i>grounded in reality vs. game design</i> standpoint,
each of the major areas of the police station all had wildly different
aesthetic and even architectural styles. <i>Of course</i> bits need
to be memorable enough to the player, but the formal differences throughout the
building are garishly abrasive.) I digress. The whole crux of that corridor’s
power lies in the foot or so gap between the top of the wall and where the ceiling
begins. Therein lies the video game embodiment of melancholy; the closest I’ve
ever come to feeling desperately, but not conventionally, sad whilst partaking
in play. </div>
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<span style="color: #444444; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Raccoon City is an oppressive
place. Its streets are narrow, always flanked by two, three and four </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: #444444; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">storey</span><span style="color: #444444; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"> buildings with warren-like alleys
running around and in between. This discomfort is made all the worse by the
detritus left to clog the already constricted byways. Crashed vehicles, impotent
barriers and lots of <i>stuff</i> on fire all
conspire to make the traversal from one street to the next a war of slaloming,
uncertain attrition. Once these have been negotiated there’s the police
station, then the rest of the game is pretty much set underground. Welcoming is
not a word easily associated with Resident Evil 2 or its locales. What feeds
this confinement is the way many of these already tight spaces are shown to the
player. Rather than looking at the world from the more modern third-person
perspective, where the player views the game from behind the shoulder of the
protagonist, we’re forced to survey each area from a fixed, second-person viewpoint.
For a lovely examination of the perspective please look to <a href="http://normallyrascal.com/2014/10/31/project-zero-2s-projector-room/">this</a>
by Stephen Beirne.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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In an attempt to not repeat those
who have gone before me, I’ll simply say that by dictating exactly <i>how</i> the player views each of its areas,
the game fundamentally shapes our understanding of them. For instance, out on
the city streets - which are, as I’ve said, among the roomier of the game’s
locations - we’re regularly shown things from quite narrow medium and high-angle
shots. This not only acts as a disorientating force - they are often
uncomfortably skewed, tight or move disconcertingly to follow the protagonist -
but it further condenses our sense of space, channeling our eye into, rather
than <i>across</i>, a particular scene. What
were already oppressively cramped tracts of land are constricted even further,
effectively to choking point: <i>compelling </i>the
player, through sheer discomfort, to rush through the game’s precious few open
environments and into the mirage of safety lying behind the police station’s
door. In this way we’re coerced into <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scream_(1996_film)">running up the stairs
instead of out the front door</a>, provoked, through fear, into immediate
action which ensures that we bowl headlong into our own oblivion, <i>not</i> away from it.</div>
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<span style="color: #444444; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Which brings us back to the
corridor. It’s one of the few places in the game where we can see any
meaningful distance without our view being interrupted by a wall. It’s also one
of the rare occasions where we can see the sky, with the exception, to my
memory, of the approach to the police station (used to show the building’s vast
size) and another lovely ‘shot’ of the moon as one exits the factory late in
the story. Finally, it’s also an area entirely devoid of enemy encounters,
which, combined with the heavily artificial light and the plastic on the walls,
makes the corridor’s safety feel inviting in an eerily loaded way. In the world
of Resident Evil 2 this small subterranean passageway represents the safest and
calmest place it is possible for us to find our way into. It also provides us
with a </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: #444444; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">tantalising</span><span style="color: #444444; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"> glimpse
at an unattainable escape: the thought that if our character was lithe enough
we could have them through the gap in the fence and out into the shimmering
moonlight, running full-pelt through the fields and the hell away from Raccoon
City. My corridor is a false promise: safety -but to no end. It is the stinging
reminder that inaction is often more dangerous than its alternatives. That
we’re already in <i>far too deep</i> to
simply walk away, or even stay put, despite all the reasonable-to-assume dire consequences
we’ll bring upon ourselves. That </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: #444444; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">realisation
of inescapable finality</span><span style="color: #444444; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">, as a metaphor for pretty much all
aspects of life, upset my still-optimistic child self. It kind of still does. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #444444; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">There’s just one slight problem.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: #444444; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">There appears, you see, to have
been a wee misunderstanding between myself and Resident Evil 2, one which has </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: #444444; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">coloured</span><span style="color: #444444; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"> my opinions and memories of my
corridor for years, which has made me completely wrong about everything. There
is no moon hanging watchful in the sky. There is no melancholic promise of an
unachievable </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: #444444; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">absconsion</span><span style="color: #444444; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">.
There’s not even anything remotely interesting beyond that two foot gap between
ceiling and wall. There’s just another corridor. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimDWauORAPkTB4giyV8Bp8aTvsrinXH6y7mJL2wCZ7yiPcCEpMSRPHrBdT_OvDaUgsIvY2pLEJGfXOyTb-2DpaacxGyfy8u9MXlSYF-voJfWI8Ivlut0kUUa-vVo0-DqbTkmjK25KSGA2k/s1600/RE2_04.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimDWauORAPkTB4giyV8Bp8aTvsrinXH6y7mJL2wCZ7yiPcCEpMSRPHrBdT_OvDaUgsIvY2pLEJGfXOyTb-2DpaacxGyfy8u9MXlSYF-voJfWI8Ivlut0kUUa-vVo0-DqbTkmjK25KSGA2k/s1600/RE2_04.jpg" /></a></div>
<br /></div>
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<span style="color: #444444; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">You are, I suppose, meant to play
the game twice to really get the whole story. Much like its progenitor it has
two heroes running around inside it, in this case a rookie cop called Leon
“Rookie Cop” S. Kennedy and Claire “Sister of Chris from the First One”
Redfield. Their stories are very much their own, largely self-contained things,
where they each run around the same locations conveniently missing one another
in largely the same way as <i>Shrek 2</i>
used to justify its abysmally lazy existence. So while these two adventures do present
somewhat different experiences, they weren’t offering little me <i>enough</i> diversity back in the year two
thousand, so I ended up just playing the Leon campaign. Which is kind of where
I went wrong, I reckon.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #444444; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">If I had been bothered to play as
both characters I’d’ve seen the corridor for what it is: just a corridor. And
not even a good one really, seeing as how its end wall - what up until writing
this I thought of as a harbinger of my emotional awakening - acts as an
annoying and very <i>video gamey</i>
barrier, arbitrarily dividing two adjacent spaces for seemingly no logical
reason and necessitating <i>lots</i> of
dicking about in order to circumvent. If I had played all the game I wouldn’t
have seen a beautifully evocative vista embodying sorrow, hope, longing and
learned resignation, I’d’ve seen this:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioOUCQTjS6AeJQYPSjzf-Qnsl1L5IjGoiuhatNQlSygHIt6QAsV10ndt80WYPzHkMylSldYD-UGbmcuOc4XmKM90niIBrQd0hYSULMFioSxhyphenhyphenA0xY_DC5zdCFLh-FUlAuKHvxPFNcMyK6I/s1600/RE2_05.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioOUCQTjS6AeJQYPSjzf-Qnsl1L5IjGoiuhatNQlSygHIt6QAsV10ndt80WYPzHkMylSldYD-UGbmcuOc4XmKM90niIBrQd0hYSULMFioSxhyphenhyphenA0xY_DC5zdCFLh-FUlAuKHvxPFNcMyK6I/s1600/RE2_05.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: #444444; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">a wall at the end of a corridor
which separates it from another corridor, both of which are lit by a bare bulb
hanging from the ceiling - of a corridor. A pointless corridor that never had
anything near as interesting to say as the things I ascribed to it. A place
that doesn’t actually embody anything more meaningful than the deliberately
awkward design philosophies of a load of people working almost twenty years
ago, people who thought making a player traipse back and forth picking stuff up
and putting stuff down and walking for <i>twenty
minutes</i> to get around a wall that in the real world wouldn’t even exist
because it doing so<i> doesn’t make sense</i>
was a fair enough deal. I used to think my corridor <i>meant</i> something - but it doesn’t; it never did. However, finding
out that it <i>doesn’t</i> mean anything
actually makes me feel the same emotions about it as I did when I thought that
it <i>did</i>, indeed, mean something. So in
the end I’m not sure if it ever really matters if the things we see in, and in
turn feel about, games actually exist or not. It’s more our articulation of
them, our ability to talk others through our experiences and, ultimately, make
a convincing enough tale out of it. If people - ourselves included - listen and
<i>believe</i>, it doesn’t really matter if
any of it happened in the first place. So while my corridor probably isn’t,</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: #444444; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"> as I once assumed,</span><span style="color: #444444; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"> a metaphor for any sort of
childhood </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: #444444; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">self-realisation</span><span style="color: #444444; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">, it
- and by extension my long relationship with it - maybe <i>is</i> convincingly a metaphor for something: criticism. </span><br />
<span style="color: #444444; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><br /></span>
<br />
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###</div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">The above prose is proud to be associated with <a href="http://www.critical-distance.com/" target="_blank">Critical Distance</a>'s <i><a href="http://www.critical-distance.com/2014/10/02/october-2014-masks/" target="_blank">Blogs of the Round Table</a></i>, an initiative which seeks to bring the diverse voices of video game criticism together about the person of a once again monthly topic. I think it's dead good, and so do these lovely individuals:</span>
<br />
<br />
<iframe frameborder="0" height="20" mce_src="http://www.tinysubversions.com/bort.html?month=November14" src="http://www.tinysubversions.com/bort.html?month=November14" type="text/html" width="600"></iframe>
<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
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<br />
<i>I’m going to make it
my life’s work to tear down all the walls (man) that we don’t need in video
games. It’s going to be a costly endeavor, so maybe consider supporting me via the
Patreon. It’s probably only a little bit less worthy a cause than whatever you
usually spend your money on and</i><i><span lang="EN-GB"> it resides here: </span></i><a href="http://patreon.com/ashouses"><i><span lang="EN-GB">patreon.com/ashouses</span></i></a><i><span lang="EN-GB">. Chrz.</span></i><i> </i> <span lang="EN-GB"><o:p></o:p></span>
<br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="color: #444444; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"> </span><span style="color: #444444; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
Leigh Harrisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09843099451159275743noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4159365708969067844.post-26918533840651233492014-10-31T12:45:00.000+00:002015-07-31T11:44:24.688+01:00Who on Earth is the DARPA Chief Donald Anderson?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWeV8Eux1mrxl5N3XyOkxogJpBNpqtxIcCVyDgNVUtDeIfIiaPkeA9DBEkwQMZIGzZKiddMXoyQ3SbQPjEGc4uUxsZLedWU32FgfDrXVkAT8sjjCpInpCimBFa7DLvQPCqFJpa1hknv5KJ/s1600/01_12AngryMen_BW.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWeV8Eux1mrxl5N3XyOkxogJpBNpqtxIcCVyDgNVUtDeIfIiaPkeA9DBEkwQMZIGzZKiddMXoyQ3SbQPjEGc4uUxsZLedWU32FgfDrXVkAT8sjjCpInpCimBFa7DLvQPCqFJpa1hknv5KJ/s1600/01_12AngryMen_BW.jpg" /></a></div>
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You know
the person, I know you do. That person who’s choosing to watch somebody else
play video games live over the Internet. That person who enjoys games so very
much that when they’re not playing them themselves they like spending (some of)
their time digitally peeking over the shoulders of others whilst <i>they</i> play. That person who is electing
to forgo personal input into a participatory form of entertainment in the
pursuit of an alternative means of consuming said entertainment. That person
who <i>must</i> accept all of these things
in order to arrive at the destination at which they find themselves, yet <i>still</i> feels the need to tell the object
of their scopophilic attentions that they are <b><i>“playing it all wrong?!!!??!”</i></b>
You know the type.</div>
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<a name='more'></a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaZ0cLT-5hvMRV8dXSEOf_z-N3xnxKaixjBrW9YhFB9RlQYYdtaDIK49dkJ2kiVgHg3Pj-wTy-VIFwiZw4ENh-AqABzwD9TAlmN5a_dO8TLnF0GwemV0H5bv0qcDgJJFL_npPp093VCJRB/s1600/02_Metal_Gear_Solid_(PSX)_28_BW.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaZ0cLT-5hvMRV8dXSEOf_z-N3xnxKaixjBrW9YhFB9RlQYYdtaDIK49dkJ2kiVgHg3Pj-wTy-VIFwiZw4ENh-AqABzwD9TAlmN5a_dO8TLnF0GwemV0H5bv0qcDgJJFL_npPp093VCJRB/s1600/02_Metal_Gear_Solid_(PSX)_28_BW.jpg" /></a></div>
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Anyway...</div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">The first
and only time I completed <i>Metal Gear
Solid</i> I called upon the assistance of a <a href="http://www.psillustrated.com/psillustrated/hard_rev.php/261/xplorer-fx-playstation.html">Blaze
<i>Xplorer FX</i></a> cheat cartridge. ‘Cos
I was eight or nine at the time, I wasn’t really of the mindset to try
particularly hard with ‘adult games’, though I of course wanted to appear as
mature as possible around my friends, hence the imperative to play <i>MGS</i> to its almost certainly thrilling
and undoubtedly not-for-kids finale. My boxy deciphering chum had helped me out
on countless earlier occasions, not least the time it granted me infinite lives
in <i>Croc: Legend of the Gobbos </i>(I’ve
never understood them in non-coin-op games - they just add hollow, unnecessary
stress and make me anxious). Even with all the help I still never bested that
hot-ticket adventure; it just seemed to go on forever, with only palette-swaps
and ever more bottomless pits to signal my progress through its swampy
offering. <br />
The Xplorer’s help with <i>MGS</i> proved to
be much more potent, granting me the wonderful items one gains from completing
the game two (!) whole times. There was a bandanna which gave me infinite ammo,
great for the few instances you’re forced into combat, and an invisibility suit
which served its purpose the rest of the time. Basically I had the <b><i>ESPIONAGE
</i></b>and <b><i>ACTION</i></b> aspects of the game <i>locked-down</i>,
to the point where the <b><i>TACTICAL</i></b> part withered into
insignificance, which was just the way I wanted it: less game in my game, if
you like.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">There was,
of course, a downside to my imprudent and less than reverential handling of the
game. It’s worth stressing though that it wasn’t in the obvious <i>robbing-myself-of-the-experiential-aspect-of-playing-one-of-the-more-celebrated-games-of-the-last-twenty-years</i>
way you may at first expect. I’ve been back a few times over the intervening
years and never fail to deem the controls clunky as a box o’ rocks, so I’m
pretty confident in saying that my young self didn’t actually sacrifice <i>that much</i> in not straight up playing it
properly. No, my Xplorer reliance had much further reaching - some might even,
quite rightly, say <i>damaging</i> -
consequences. It killed all of the cutscenes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Instead of
bobbing about leisurely amidst hours and hours of non-interactive story
sequences - remember, the series is <i><a href="http://mgsforums.com/topic/7644188/1/">renowned</a></i> for its liberal
implementation of <i>put-the-controller-down-for-a-bit-and-watch-<b>this</b></i> sections - I was left with
glitchy messes comprising of skipping video and garbled audio. For a game I was
‘playing’ entirely for the story, I really was cutting my nose off to spite my
face at that point. But still I persevered, blindly convicted of the thought
that if I finished <i>MGS</i>, even without <i>any</i> knowledge of its story with which to
use as evidence of my achievement actually occurring, I would still be able to
hold my own amongst my peers. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXXnek73oCwLOuGl89u_u76cM05AT05g93V8D4O-SBV-noIuqGhK6eXaOKCD0U_LAJk50pPeA8YEeDfvNDXPHJfxg0LMPCVweB5Qhm5AaQzBK8dRWqHSBrvl0sIXx4N328wBW7GSnG5kzs/s1600/03_Decoy_Octopus_BW.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXXnek73oCwLOuGl89u_u76cM05AT05g93V8D4O-SBV-noIuqGhK6eXaOKCD0U_LAJk50pPeA8YEeDfvNDXPHJfxg0LMPCVweB5Qhm5AaQzBK8dRWqHSBrvl0sIXx4N328wBW7GSnG5kzs/s1600/03_Decoy_Octopus_BW.jpg" /></a></div>
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Through a
rigorous system of feigned memory loss for the minutia and strategy guide consumption
for the general stuff - I pored over my <i>MGS</i>
copy of <i><a href="http://www.oldgamemags.com/consoles/playstation/powerstation/">PowerStation</a></i>
magazine - I think I got away with my audacious ruse. I’ve since further
familiarised myself with the happenings of the game, to the point where I
actually <i>feel</i> like I’ve played it
properly at some point in the enshrouded past. Take me back to nineteen ninety
nine and ask me who Donald Anderson or Decoy Octopus are, however, and I’d be
hard pressed to give you anything more than a remarkably swiftly delivered
rebuttal. I certainly wouldn’t be able to indulge you in the involving tale of
how <b>the former was accidentally (or
otherwise) dispatched by a gun-swinging, duster wearing, surprisingly well
coiffed cowboy/terrorist/military deserter, and that the latter used his
uncanny mimicry abilities - supposedly learned whilst he was a jobbing actor in
<i>Hollywood </i>of all places - to don a
mask of sorts and impersonate the deceased in an attempt to bluff weapon activation
codes out of the protagonist.</b> I couldn’t say any of this because <b><i>a)</i></b>
I couldn’t physically follow much of the story at all and, more upsettingly, <b><i>b)</i>
</b>my backup magazine turned out to only cover the back half of the game,
leaving me mentally hobbled like so many hastily written heroes. (I’d actually bought
it for a guide to <i>Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko</i>,
a game I probably have fonder memories of than any <i>Metal Gear </i>I’ve ever tried to play.)</div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Anyway…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">In my
childish impatience to appear the master of <i>MGS</i></span>
I basically achieved very little. I can of course still say I’ve played it to
its feverish crescendo, but I, and now you, will forever know of the
compromised nature of this besting. Likewise, <i>That Person</i> calling for a more clinical and hardline approach from
the broadcaster behind the stream they’re part of is similarly missing the
point. Most games are no longer simply cases of binary win/lose states - even
if underneath all the superficiality many still kind of <i>are</i>. Brute force mainlining a game with even the most cursory
interest in its own world building and storytelling, I feel, is a waste of your
time. </div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZtUIIMy1l2Ze04EyPbgS_QHRcR2ICrvveigg16cHLBvNF7GDVreKwU5B5rj2690CtD1Fx9naMAXcF_WEFZKwU5M68plx1LNJtWvdnUURlVXABKDD6Xcd5CWXfXkBBdZSfabYeQqtFuzPS/s1600/04_KingOfKong_BW.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZtUIIMy1l2Ze04EyPbgS_QHRcR2ICrvveigg16cHLBvNF7GDVreKwU5B5rj2690CtD1Fx9naMAXcF_WEFZKwU5M68plx1LNJtWvdnUURlVXABKDD6Xcd5CWXfXkBBdZSfabYeQqtFuzPS/s1600/04_KingOfKong_BW.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.destructoid.com/blogs/Eric+Nicholas+Reed/why-2010-sucked-upping-the-difficulty-192778.phtml">http://www.destructoid.com/blogs/Eric+Nicholas+Reed/why-2010-sucked-upping-the-difficulty-192778.phtml</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<br />
Older games, I’m thinking arcade and early console ones, were simple enough
that they could be considered <b>cumulative
experiences</b>. By that I mean that they are wholly collections of mechanics
and challenges that can be fully mastered through repetition and thus a
steadily increasing proficiency. Take the mapping out of <i>Donkey Kong</i> levels (see the picture) as seen in the film <i>The King of Kong</i>, where players derive
all of their pleasure from the slow and deliberate trudge towards unpacking and
ultimately <i>understanding</i> the very
building blocks of the challenge. These games don’t offer us stories or
trinkets in an attempt to pull us through them, they simply <i>exist</i> - their purity of experience being
their entire <i>raison d'être</i> - whether
we sidle up and accept their proposition or not. <br />
Contrast this with more contemporary fare; games which are much more
experiential in nature: I’d deem these to be <b>aggregate experiences</b>. That isn’t to say that these games don’t
hold challenge as a fundamental constituent part of their design (though some
of them don’t), rather that it is indeed a <i>part</i>
of a larger composite. Story, place, lighting, traversal, dialogue, music and
countless small distractions are all commonplace within the makeup of the
modern big-budget game, with no single aspect of a production dominating - contrary
to what we saw in the earlier games of the medium’s formative years. The merits
or otherwise of this shift from a focused, challenge-based design to the
sprawling affairs of escapist entertainment we know today is a discussion for
another time; it is enough to simply acknowledge this occurrence.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
Trying to play an aggregate game as you would a cumulative
one is a fool’s errand. Whether it be a lazy young me with <i>Metal Gear Solid</i> or an upstart livestream viewer urging the host to
hurry up because they themselves have already played the game in question and
so know the path of least resistance, you’re going to come up short. Many, many
modern games, especially the kind you buy in a box or leave downloading
overnight, are not designed to ever be mastered in the historical sense. This
would require a purity of focus which is simply not present in most big-budget
games, ‘specially those aimed at the console market. Simply put: running
headlong at the end credits in the most efficient way possible is going to
bring disappointment.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlbEd_VIaxC_0w6J_P0b6bIFr5cXR1GfMAKV-8owqfPTDC39GRlNRQz8Lsr_3xGBprIL4wyvbkdx3W4rVqrDFM8wR6utP4vZewpvn8TaicoSLmHP3B0oVT_lpYialATyIsyvTmnEYDNUJ9/s1600/05_FunHouseLorry_BW.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlbEd_VIaxC_0w6J_P0b6bIFr5cXR1GfMAKV-8owqfPTDC39GRlNRQz8Lsr_3xGBprIL4wyvbkdx3W4rVqrDFM8wR6utP4vZewpvn8TaicoSLmHP3B0oVT_lpYialATyIsyvTmnEYDNUJ9/s1600/05_FunHouseLorry_BW.jpg" /></a></div>
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I’ll leave you with this. I once went into a fairground fun
house, the kind filled with ball pools, revolving barrier doodads, wobbly floors
and slides. So excited was I that I ran through the whole thing trying to grab
a piece of everything at once, taking about a minute to get from start to
finish. Once I stepped outside the fun was over, with the burly proprietor
waving me past in the same swift, blasé motion he used to flick the ash from
the deliciously <span lang="EN-GB">smouldering
end of his Lambert & Butler. I went, in a terribly dejected fashion, over
to my Mum and asked her why I felt so short changed after paying to run through
that lorry full of painted plywood and gaffer tape. Her response was typically
grounded: “because, Leigh, you didn’t spend enough time playing in that lorry
full of painted plywood and gaffer tape. Next time - if there is a next time -
you’ll know to appreciate it more.” I reckon everyone could learn a little from
her pointed assessment of that particular situation. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">The above prose is proud to be associated with <a href="http://www.critical-distance.com/" target="_blank">Critical Distance</a>'s <i><a href="http://www.critical-distance.com/2014/10/02/october-2014-masks/" target="_blank">Blogs of the Round Table</a></i>, an initiative which seeks to bring the diverse voices of video game criticism together about the person of a once again monthly topic. I think it's dead good, and so do these lovely individuals:</span>
<br />
<br />
<iframe frameborder="0" height="20" mce_src="http://www.tinysubversions.com/bort.html?month=October14" src="http://www.tinysubversions.com/bort.html?month=October14" type="text/html" width="600"></iframe>
<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
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<i>If you’d like to help
improve the dangerous vehicular fairground ride that is my social standing
within the world of serious, legitimate, respectable</i><i> <span lang="EN-GB">games criticism, please
consider donating to my peerlessly altruistic Patreon-based cause. I’ve heard
that the more financially dependent one becomes on donations the better a
writer you are. It resides here: </span></i><a href="http://patreon.com/ashouses"><i><span lang="EN-GB">patreon.com/ashouses</span></i></a><i><span lang="EN-GB">. Chrz.</span></i> <span lang="EN-GB"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Leigh Harrisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09843099451159275743noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4159365708969067844.post-82703760133246068172014-10-15T16:57:00.000+01:002015-01-15T14:08:41.806+00:00You’re on your own: Telltale’s The Walking Dead grows up<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEib4peTLt2Dw59UO0OoYuQvQHYdOk-t_YfG2HpP2HM7NDNGOxMTbth4iA5tKC4mQ2FBfGxFYrB5SOq1LiNO0PkO2HjOpCBrlQufAdmkKCDVoe_aV2llJyJ5pT3kDCAAlvY8vY0dSkOj1Nyq/s1600/KidsInAmerica_BW.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEib4peTLt2Dw59UO0OoYuQvQHYdOk-t_YfG2HpP2HM7NDNGOxMTbth4iA5tKC4mQ2FBfGxFYrB5SOq1LiNO0PkO2HjOpCBrlQufAdmkKCDVoe_aV2llJyJ5pT3kDCAAlvY8vY0dSkOj1Nyq/s1600/KidsInAmerica_BW.jpg" /></a></div>
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I’m going
to tell you a story, if I may, about Clementine, the protagonist of Telltale
Games’ The Walking Dead: Season 2.
Specifically a story about her curious ability, as a child, to make for
a more empowering lead than a strong, dependable, burly man’s man named Lee.</div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">!#!SPOILERZ
WARNING!#!DO NOT CROSS!#!SPOILERZ WARNING!#!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">I’m covered
in viscera, edging my way cautiously through a bloody big mob of the walking dead
(<i>Season 2, Episode 3: In Harm’s Way</i>).
It’s a tense affair. I’m dressed up like a walker (zombie) in an attempt to
fool them into thinking I’m one of their own. My head is lolled a bit to the
left which accentuates my double chin more than I’d like. I’m gargling with the
phlegm I keep nestled in my throat. I’ve got a bit of poo dripping slowly down
my forehead, ready to, in about a minute or so, plop off the end of my nose and
maybe, God forbid, land on my slightly extended lower lip. I’m running the risk
of eating walker poo for one very simple reason: I don’t want to become walker
poo. Not today at least.</span> </div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"></span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB">The plan is
working too (!). I’m about half way through this massive herd of the undead and
having a right time of it. I put on a little limp as a creative flourish,
dragging my right leg just a tad as I go. I’m a really, really good walker
understudy it seems. Maybe they sense this overconfidence in some unnerving and
all too human way, because they begin to pay more attention to me. The limp was
one step too far. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Before I
can even attempt to rein in my act I’m busted, with walkers all around me
turning in place to get a better look, much like a smelly, fleshy satellite
array. They’re all at it: zoning in on my equally drenched cohorts with
surprising accuracy, if not similar levels of speed. In the space of five or
six, maybe seven seconds we’re all buggered; the walkers now fully aware that
we were being highly deceptive and maybe a little rude towards them. I break
into a comfortable jog, casually batting that poo away from my person. ‘Phew,
close call’ I think, wholly ignorant of the <i>out
of the frying pan…</i> qualities of my predicament. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">This bliss
doesn’t linger, however, as I hear the pained screams of my companion Sarita
ringing out from nearby. Slaloming gracefully through the mass of animated
corpses I find her with ease. Upon our making eye contact I feel instantly
strange, as if my body is somehow singing with energy. Time slows to a
standstill, while the sounds of screaming and scratching and the tearing of
flesh are replaced with - and this is going to sound <i>insane</i>, but stay with me - dramatic music. I’m not sure whether it
is adrenaline or some perverse personal enjoyment I’m gaining from the grisly
sight, but the instant I witness Sarita with a walker chomping down
enthusiastically her on her arm, I feel so uncontrollably alive.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">What to do
in a messy situation such as this? Well thanks to my exalted state of mind I
have all the time in the world to contemplate our, Sarita and I’s, quandary. I
stand there, humming gently to my internal <i>Apocalypse
Now</i>-esque soundtrack for what seems like an hour, already knowing exactly
where my course of action will take the two of us. <i>Thwack</i>, I chop clean through (it takes me a couple of goes) the
stricken cow’s arm, saving her from a fate worse than death with not a moment
(except the couple I just spent savouring the atmosphere) to spare.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">I am effing
bad ass, I think to myself in a restrained-yet-entirely-pleased-with-myself
way. Lee wouldn’t have been so heroically decisive; he’d have tried to talk
Sarita out of her corner. But I’m not Lee, am I? I’m Clementine. Hair cut
short, puffer jacket clad, hatchet wielding, spur-of-the-moment decision taking
Clementine. Eff y’all haters.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">THE END<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">###<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">There's a
sense of liberation to be found in the second season of <i>The Walking Dead</i> that wasn't present in its forerunner, at least
the way I ended up playing them both. I spent much of my time with Lee as a
selfless mediator, attempting to keep my group together for the good of
everyone. At least that’s what I told myself at the time. Looking back I was
anything but: I made almost all of my decisions - many times taking them for
people I deemed incapable of making their own - in an utterly self-serving
fashion. In that season Clementine and her safety were my top, maybe only,
priority, and in being placed as her protector I was invariably looking out for both her and Lee's
best interests first and foremost. That bond, I suppose, was the fundamental
emotional hook running through the whole story, powering every other response
it elicited from me. While it's not a particularly sophisticated one at heart,
I can't argue that the pairing didn't work its manipulative magic as intended.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">With Lee
gone the dynamic of the second season is markedly different. Along with her
guardian, everyone barring Kenny is dead or presumed so, leaving Clem(entine)
with little connection to her past. Without this I quickly began, likely aided
by her now being the playable protagonist, to view her as less of a child -
though maybe it’s better to simply say less vulnerable, less passive. The leap
from her being a moral compass/emotional engagement figure occurred quickly and
seamlessly: she was now alone and had to rely upon herself; a fundamental
change in her character had begun and would need to reach its culmination
quickly. Even before the cold open had ended the game was testing my
understanding of this: would I stop and help my last companion, Christa, escape
a posse of bandits or leave her to fend them off alone? Essentially, would I
accept Clementine’s new position as a participant in the world rather than as someone
in need of protection from it? I stayed of course, not that it, naturally, made
much of a difference.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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The vignette immediately following Clem’s separation from
Christa further hammers home the importance of her being strong and
independent. After hunting around in a trashed campsite with a friendly dog,
she eventually jimmies a can of food open, a can which I was more than happy to
share with my new canine friend. I had images running through my head of all
the adventures the two of them might one day get themselves into, running
around the remains of modern humanity and taking care of one another. But no,
the greedy mutt jumps at her the minute the lid is off, giving her a right gash
on the arm for good measure, shortly before they have a tussle that leads to
the scrounger getting its comeuppance-impalement on a dirty-big umbrella. A few
minutes later she’s locked in a shed by a group of suspicious survivors (she <i>might</i> have been bitten) sewing her arm
up with pilfered supplies, a vice and an awfully high tolerance for pain. Her
transformation is complete.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s not as though she just turns into a withdrawn
survivalist type or anything, and past these early didactic sections everything
calms down in this regard. Once it becomes clear Clem isn’t bitten she’s
invited to join this new group, which largely returns everything to the conversation/action/aftermath
structure of the first season. So while she’s largely as physically vulnerable
as she was previously, there are ample opportunities for social situations
where she’s able to exert some of her newfound strength. This manifests in many
ways: from her being canny and evasive when she would previously have been
truthful; to times where she’ll recklessly get lippy and eventually physical
with aggressors; and many, many times where she’ll tell people to shut the hell
up rather than listen to any more petty arguments.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Having played Lee as purer than the driven snow I don’t know
how aggy he could become, though that’s not really the point. That I chose to -
was compelled - to make Clementine a more brash and forthright character is
what’s important. Lee had to be pragmatic because he was the only thing between
Clementine and death; I <i>made</i> him make
all those decisions because Telltale told me that was the case (honest, it’s
never even up for discussion). Playing as Clem is different by virtue of that
no longer being the message. Lee died because of his generous belief in putting
others, chiefly Clem, before himself. She’s never in that position largely
because she never builds such concise, clear-cut relationships. Even her
surrogate Clementine-figure, Sarah, presents a more complex challenge than Clem
ever did to Lee, mainly because she’s often crippled by fear and is ultimately <i>less worthy</i> of the sacrifices being made
for her. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As the makeup and dynamic of her new group changes over the
course of the series Clem befriends and alienates in equal measure, occurrences
which are largely a product of her never being treated as anything but an equal.
Characters interact with her much like they do with everyone else, as if Lee’s
absence removes a focus on her added vulnerability, leaving her to be viewed
more similarly alongside her companions: important but never indispensable.
Through this leveling of the social playing field Clem is given the freedom to
develop in more interesting directions. While in the past she was largely a
plot device, now, by virtue of no one valuing her above themselves, she is free
to exert her own will, interacting as she seems fit, often in dark and profound
directions not afforded to, or at least not deemed appropriate for Lee.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In being stripped of the symbolism of the Lee/Clementine
dynamic Telltale manages to transform her character in an astoundingly short
time whilst retaining a sense of believability. It hints at an inherent
strength largely overlooked in the first season, one that was overshadowed
because of her associations with others and not through any fault of her own. In
excising this social closeness Clem becomes a fascinating protagonist, one with
which - for the first time in a long while - I felt compelled to take decisions
based on their actual merits, rather than to pursue a sense of obligation to
the characters and the monstrous concept of the ‘right way to play’. While I
was harangued into making Lee a selfless fool, I feel that season two has given
both me and the character of Clementine just enough breathing room for us to
create something much more compelling. For a game so deeply interested in the
ambiguities of the human condition,<i> Season
Two</i> of <i>The Walking Dead</i> seems to
be the first time it has fully embraced it for its protagonist, to great
effect. </div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
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I’d like to thank a good friend for a couple of solid
conversations about this topic, without which I’d never have been able to form
this into something approaching coherence.<br />
<br />
<i>As it happens, those discussions were an expensive
</i><i><span lang="EN-GB">endeavour, incorporating many beers and untold cigarettes. These costly
facilitators of critical thought don’t come cheap however, so I’ve set up one of them Patreon pages wot a
lot of other writers have got themselves these days. If you like my thought
process I’m unfortunately going to need more of these intelligence-catalysts,
subsequently, please consider donating to my peerlessly altruistic cause. It
resides here: </span></i><a href="http://patreon.com/ashouses"><i><span lang="EN-GB">patreon.com/ashouses</span></i></a><i><span lang="EN-GB">. Chrz.</span></i><i><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> </span> <o:p></o:p></div>
Leigh Harrisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09843099451159275743noreply@blogger.com