Grand Theft Auto V is an unnecessarily violent facsimile of your boring life

I haven’t got to that torture bit yet, nor have I encountered a massive amount of misogyny in Grand Theft Auto V at this point. I won’t talk about that sort of thing anyway, because disgust/outrage often goes hand in hand with serious criticism of games at the minute, and I’ve proven time and time again that I’m not interested in - nor capable of - serious criticism at this stage in my life. That isn’t to say that I don’t appreciate examining a cultural product within its cultural context. As games become more aligned with mainstream entertainment they will clearly have to answer for their more childish, offensive, violent and sexist preoccupations. These topics need to be discussed, and the people who make games, especially the games aspiring to be - or simply finding themselves - as broadly enjoyed as more established forms of entertainment, need to accept their responsibility and act accordingly. At the same time, however, I think it is far too easy to single out these transgressions, write fifteen hundred words lambasting them, leave it at that and wait for the cheque and/or peer group congratulation ceremony. It’s completely valid, certainly, but it’s also numbingly obvious, and I think that there are already too many people repeating the same core concerns and ideas. They are important concerns, to be sure, but I’m a cynic and so find it terribly hard to believe that every one of these voices comes from an entirely altruistic place. Thus, I will leave this type of discourse to the individuals more suited to or happy to enter into it. They are already doing a good job of it as it is, me joining them isn’t going to speed up the changes that need to occur within the medium.

That out of the way, let us again explore my go-to topics of choice; the missus, video game mechanics and brewed under licence European lager.

Difficulty Mill - Bulletstorm

Polish developer People Can Fly has made numerous video games that are slavishly devoted to shooting things in quick succession. Much like Doom, Quake and PCF’s own Painkiller, Bulletstorm rewards its player for skilfully dispatching adversaries in a timely fashion. Bulletstorm makes this tried and true formula a little more interesting with Skill Shots, a series of violent challenges the player is tasked to complete in exchange for points. Simply shooting an enemy to death gains the player 10 points, for instance, while kicking him in the face and then shooting him in the crotch until he dies, for instance, spews forth a reward five times fatter. Once enough of these points have been accrued the player can reinvest them into ammunition replenishment, new weapons and upgrades. As each of the game’s seven weapons has a special fire mode - that usually deals more damage by orders of magnitude - Bulletstorm equips its players handsomely, making tackling the Skill Shots system very enjoyable.

As with most shooters of the modern day, the campaign takes between six and ten hours to complete, leaving you with an average play time of around eight hours. HowLongToBeat.com has an ‘average’ play through pegged at seven and a half, though to argue with that figure would be splitting hairs. As always, we’ll be looking at how difficulty settings affect enjoyment, completion time, self respect levels, repetition tolerance and visual fidelity. 

Robbing Peter to pay Paul or How Remember Me undermines its story to be a video game

This writing contains 'bare spoilerz' of the story of the video game Remember Me.

I barely feel the need to write about Remember Me because Darius Kazemi has already done it here, albeit without ever mentioning the game once. At its heart, Dontnod Entertainment’s depressing Neo-Parisian future-revolution simulation poses a very interesting question. How would humanity fare if memories could be digitised, edited and shared? Would a utopian society free from pain and suffering, or at least all evidence of them, be created, leading to unending peace and prosperity for all? Of course not, we’re postulating on the dangers of invasive technology here. What I did expect from RM’s admittedly solid premise was a moderately thoughtful exercise in examining the human condition, something akin to Binary Domain with a lighter touch, perhaps. What I ended up with was a video game that wants to make it crystal clear that it is a video game, often at the expense of its narrative and the world created to house it all.

Initial thoughts on Remember Me

I think I’m about half way through Dontnod Entertainment’s depressing Neo-Parisian future-revolution simulation Remember Me, and though it wise to jot down my impressions before I forget them all entirely. Har har har. The following words, then, will obviously touch upon aspects of the game that you won’t be familiar with if you haven’t played it yet. That includes the story.

I - The overarching concept - wherein memories have been digitised, commoditised and are widely abused - is a beautifully pessimistic take on the glaringly obvious problems of future tech. Much like the Jesse Armstrong penned The Entire History of You entry into the Black Mirror anthology, the game presents a pretty plausible future in which a seemingly helpful and benign technology could cause harm and misery. Initially developed as a way of sharing information held in memories, this technology has snowballed into a society-crippling/controlling monster. Junkies addicted to happy memories beg and steal for one more taste of the - literal and figurative - high life. We see them huddled in shacks living out their fantasies through the remembered actions of others. I’ve been surprised at the lack of allusion to sexual gratification though; surely a decimated society confined to undercity slums would be, at least in part, made up of quivering, perpetually-wanking wrecks?