Video Games

I’ve spent the past month or so playing through Fallout 3. I realize I’m a little late to the party, but here are some thoughts:

• Overall, I suppose I liked the game. Strangely, that sort of begrudging “it’s good, but meh…” response seems to be the general consensus – at least among the 3 folks I read (ok, so he was perhaps a bit less than “meh”) and watch. Honestly, when I first thought about posting on the game, I had the same “Yeah, it’s allright!” fake-out review as Yahtzee. But I did like the game enough to finish it and according to the game’s timer, I spent around 40 hours of time playing it. Considering that I never managed to finish Oblivion and indeed, gave up on it after just a few hours, that’s not so bad.
• Speaking of Oblivion, this game is pretty much exactly the same, but with a different setting. And shotguns. It’s the shotguns that really did it for me, as first-person sword fighting is kinda weak (and yes, I realize I could use some sort of long distance magic in Oblivion, but still).
• And with shotguns comes one of the game’s most vaunted features – the V.A.T.S. aiming system. Basically, when fighting, you can hit a button, and the game pauses and displayes your enemy along with various targets on their body and a percentage indicating how easy it is to hit. Hitting different areas has different effects. Hitting the legs will cripple your enemy, slowing them down. Hitting their arm might cause them to drop their weapon. And so on. When you attack using V.A.T.S., the game also shows you a variety of slow-motion animations of your attack. You’d think this would get old, but nope, watching a super-mutant’s head explode is always pretty awesome. There are limited “action points” though, so this system does sometimes force you to fire away in real-time (and as a standard FPS, the game is not quite up to par with the competition) or at least, run away and hide until your action points recharge. The system is basically a way to mix the traditional RPG turn-based strategy with FPS action. A lot of people hate this and think the game is bad at both, but I enjoyed it well enough. It’s not perfect and I think it could be improved a bit by increasing the action points (or their recharge rate), but it works and I’d be interested to see how this sort of gameplay will evolve.
• As storylines go, I guess it’s ok. Nothing particularly special, and the main thread makes sense and has some neat sub-quests (for some reason, I particularly enjoyed the Matrix-like simulation quest). Most of the side quests end up being “fetch” quests, but there’s still some fun to be had. Also, there are a TON of side quests and at 40 hours, I still feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface.
• One of the things that bothered me about the game is that I felt like I had to really have a sizeable chunk of time set aside to play it. I feel like the game requires at least 2 hours or so in order to have a productive session, and there were plenty of times when I played for 2 hours and felt like I didn’t get anywhere. There’s definitely something weird going on here though, because the game I’m playing now (Burnout Paradise) doesn’t require any such long periods of time, yet I find myself playing for longer than 2 hours at a time and not minding it at all. I’m guessing that’s because I actually accomplish something every time I play Burnout for more than 15 minutes.
• Whoever designed the concept of the metro system in this game needs to do some soul searching, because their game design skills are weak. Ok, so that’s a bit harsh, but the amount of time I spent lost in the metro system, just trying to find my way to the marker on the map, was truly frustrating. Every metro station looks the same, and the destinations don’t seem to match any reasonable geographic pattern. I would constantly find myself way off where I thought I was heading. Without the metro system, my experience with the game would have improved considerably.
• I don’t get the appeal of post-apocalyptic settings. Obviously, it can be interesting, but I feel like they’re overused these days…
• Games like this tend to bring out my pack-rat nature. I found myself chronically out of inventory space, which got kinda frustrating at times. Yeah, yeah, you’re not supposed to keep every gun type you find and you’re obviously not going to use all the components you find, but I have a compulsion. Seriously, the one time I got fed up and sold off a bunch of my stuff, I met up with some NPCs who told me that they needed a fission battery to escape… and I had just sold like 5 of them. All RPGs have to impose some limits on inventory, and Fallout 3 is actually pretty forgiving in this regard, but I still find myself constantly falling into the trap of collecting junk I don’t need. When I enter a location, I feel obligated to go through every path, inspect every room, and look in every box (half of which are empty). This is obviously more of an issue with me personally than with the game, but I find it interesting, as it seems to crop up in a lot of games (I had similar issues with Dead Space).

So yeah, I liked it, kinda, and I might even play it again as a more “evil” person (my character this time around was a goody-goody guy), but not anytime soon…

Thanks to my recent interest in video games and with the end of one of my favorite movie podcasts, I’ve been looking to video game podcasts to augment my time. Alas, the pickins are somewhat slim. Still, there have been a few bright spots and I’ve found some other promising prospects as well.

• Listen Up! – This podcast (formerly known as “1up Yours”) is put together by the fine folks over at 1up.com and can be quite entertaining. There are generally about 4 people on the program at any given time – the regular lineup seems to change up semi-frequently (though at the beginning of the year, several people left 1up to work for other publications or even game companies), but there seems to be a pretty constant core 3 people right now, with a rotating 4th person. Each episode runs about 2 hours or so and has a similar format. Each person talks about what games they’ve been playing that week (which generally takes up about half the show), followed by a segment or two on news, interviews, or questions from their audience. These guys play a lot of games (it is, after all, their job), probably wayyy more than you or I do, but I’ve found it to be somewhat interesting even when I’m not that familiar with the games they’re talking about (which is most of the time). Since they’re reviewers, they will often be playing games and giving impressions about them before release (this can be annoying when they say they played a game but can’t talk about it because of a press embargo or something). All in all, it’s a solid podcast, and they put out a large amount of content on a regular schedule. This has become one of my two main podcasts every week (the other being Filmspotting).
• The Brainy Gamer Podcast – The companion podcast to Michael Abbott’s excellent video game blog, it often features interviews and commentary with prominent journalists or video game professionals. A typical episode runs about 1- 2 hours or so. There’s no set format really, so you can get an in depth discussion or a series of smaller discussions. Abbott is an intelligent guy and a decent interviewer, and the show often tackles subjects in ways you don’t normally associate with gamers. New episodes seem to be published once a month, towards the beginning of the month. Depending on what’s going on, it could be a single episode or multiple episodes (for instance, during the GDC conference, he published a couple of episodes at once, and he had a nice 3 part holiday edition as well). It’s not as regular as Listen Up, but it’s high quality stuff.
• Out of the Game – This one’s a bit of a cheat since it doesn’t focus exclusively on video games, but I gather it’s put together by several former video game journalists who like to get together and talk about interesting stuff. There’s no real set format for the show, but they seem to come to each episode with a plan and that seems to work out well. It seems to be something of a media diet type show, where each person talks about what they’re reading/watching/playing… though it covers other topics as well (and often, they’ll discuss interesting ideas that are presented in the book/movie/tv show/game rather than just doing the standard review). The episodes come out around every other week and are typically somwhere between 1.5 and 2 hours long. This has become another of my favorite podcasts, perhaps because the people on the show are always discussing ideas and concepts that are really interesting…
• A couple of now-defunct podcasts I like are Game Theory (no website anymore) and the long defunct Mastercritic (which was mostly movies, but was put together by people who worked on video games and who did occasional video game episodes).

It remains to be seen whether or not any of these will spur video game playing the way Filmspotting (then Cinecast) spurred moviewatching, but so far, I wouldn’t say that it has (perhaps because video games take so much longer to play – it’s much easier to keep up with a movie or two a week than it is to play 10 games a week.) Still, I find these podcasts pretty interesting and so long as they continue, I’ll be listening…

I recently wrote about Flower, a game which I think qualifies as art while losing none of it’s inherent entertainment value. Indeed, as I had mentioned in this old guest post by Kaedrin friend Samael, I have a pretty broad definition of art and have no issue seeing a wide variety of video games as art. However, it’s rather interesting that many of the people working in the field don’t see their efforts as art. In Sam’s post, he references an interview with Hideo Kojima (who, in Sam’s words, “is one of the most significant forces in video games today, the creator of Metal Gear”), who says “I believe that games are not art, and will never be art.”

Last week at GDC, there was a panel featuring three highly respected game creators, including Fumito Ueda, lead designer and director of Shadow of the Colossus. My recent video game kick was set into motion by my purchase of a PS3, but I’ve also spent some time discovering and revisiting games for other systems… and one of the games I revisited was Shadow of the Colossus. It truly is an intriguing game and a wonderful idea. The game starts off typically enough – a lone rider approaches a temple with his dead lover in the hopes that the spirits that live in the temple will revive her. The rider is met by a disembodied voice, which tells him that he must defeat a series of Collosi before he can be reunited with his lover. This is where the game starts, but it’s also where the surprises start coming. There are no fantasy game or RPG staples like towns or NPCs and aside from the Colossi, there are no other “enemies” in the game. You spend a fair amount of time travelling through the expansive world the game has created, but the pretty landscapes are not broken up by small battles or other characters. To be sure, even the Colossi aren’t an enemy so much as they are an obstacle to your ultimate goal. Fighting the Colossi is also unusual in that each one has its own set of weaknesses and thus each one must be approached in a different manner. It’s more of a puzzle game, forcing you to observe the environment around you and the actions of the Colossus before acting. It’s very much a game that relies on the player’s ability of probing (i.e. the exploration of the game world and its possibilities).

This is an elegant idea for a video game. A game that basically features a series of 16 boss fights that are won or lost on the basis of thinking rather than brute force. Visually, the game is quite pretty. As I mentioned before, there are times when you must navigate through the game world… and nothing happens during that time. You simply ride your horse towards the next Colossus. There are occasionally mini-puzzles you must solve before getting to the Colossus, but for the most part, you are given a lot of time to think while riding around on your horse. The landscapes are sufficiently pretty and epic that they never become boring, and the game seems to relish these downtimes in order to give the player time to think about what they’re doing.

A Colosssus

I actually haven’t finished the game yet, and I have to admit that there are times when I’ve had to resort to a walkthrough to figure out how to defeat a few of the Colossi (in this and a couple of other areas, the game could perhaps use some work – however, this post is not about that), but I do find the game fascinating, in part because of the relatively silent moments navigating through the world. Even though I’m not at the end of the game, I have an inkling of what’s going to happen. I’m fairly certain that the spirits of the temple are misleading my character, and that there will be some sort of betrayal in the end. I seriously doubt my character will be reuinited with his lover, except possibly in death.

The reason I’m thinking this is how it will end is that the game’s story has all the earmarks of a traditional tragedy. What I’m seeing is a man motivated by the loss of a loved one. He is so blinded by his loss that he doesn’t recognize that he’s destroying these gigantic, beautiful creatures (some of whom are admittedly aggressive). I just can’t see this ending well. I have to admit that this feeling isn’t entirely based on the game itself. It’s been out for a while, and the way everyone talks about the game seems to indicate an unhappy ending. It seems that people who review the game try their hardest not to spoil the ending, but skirting around the issue is difficult and the game itself does point in that direction.

The interesting thing about this, to me, is that my feelings on the game are predicated on art. In this case, it is dramatic literature or more specifically, tragedy, that is informing my feelings for the game. While I have gleaned some idea of this from reading about the game, a lot of it came from the time for reflection that is seemingly built into the game. It seems to me that the makers of the game really did want players to take that time to think about the story of the game.

Interestingly, when asked about the game during the panel mentioned above, Ueda had this to say:

The second and final question, lauded Shadow of the Colossus as the posterchild of “games as art”, but Ueda disagreed. “My team and I are making a game which is close to art — that’s what people say. Personally I don’t think that way.”

“We’re making a game to entertain people. Sometimes my personality and my team’s might be reflected on the game, and it might look like art, but it is a game to entertain people. That kind of feedback is welcome but it’s not what I’m trying to achieve.”

What is going on here? Why is it that such prominent game creators are so reticent to call their games art? The answer seems to be that they are more focused on entertaining players of video games than engaging in artistic enterprises. I suppose there is something to that idea. In my mind the best art is also entertaining, and a lot of people who set out to create art often end up making something that is difficult to relate to or understand. Some artists see this difficulty as an ends unto itself and end up producing truly impenetrable works. However a lot of successful artists try their best to avoid such pitfalls. In my previous entry, several people asked author Neal Stephenson about how he comes up with various ideas or what he thinks his books represent, and his response to such questions is generally something about how he’s not that introspective about his work and that perhaps thinking to hard about such things would make his work worse. I think perhaps there is something to that.

Another idea was brought up by Emil Pagliarulo (lead designer of Fallout 3 among other games):

Pagliarulo took up this point in comparison to the film industry. “Early films were meant to entertain and became art along the way as part of that process… I think the whole Roger Ebert ‘are games art’ thing gets taken a little too far.”

“We’ll come into our own. We don’t have to push the issue. Who are we trying to impress? I think game developers should concentrate on making good games. The art thing will happen naturally.”

I think he’s on the right track there. I don’t know the answer, but I do wonder how early filmmakers thought of movies. Did D. W. Griffith consider himself an artist? When Sergei Eisenstein started formulating his theory of montage, did he consider what he was doing to be art or was he simply a craftsman figuring out how to use various tools? Was that even a question that was asked back then? This is something I’d have to look into more before saying for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Griffith or Eisenstein did not consider themselves artists. The interesting thing about video games is that they are such a young medium and that they’ve come a long way in such a short time. In the quote above, Pagliarulo mentions that the art thing will happen naturally, as if it hasn’t happened yet. Again, I find this confusing. I’ve pretty much always considered video games art, in at least some ways.

There is a lot more to this subject than I’ve written about in this post (for instance, Pagliarulo made reference to Roger Ebert’s infamous stance that video games can’t be art), but what I wanted to explore was why video game creators tend to shy away from the artist label… The question that keeps popping up in my head is whether or not entertainment can be art. To me, the two have always gone hand in hand. You can’t have entertainment without art and most art is meant to entertain (or at least, engage the consumer) in some way or another. I suppose there is a distinction to be made between entertainment and art – you can certainly be entertained by something that is bad art, or bored to tears by something that is good art. In the end, of course, it’s all subjective, but I still say that games are artistic and am not really sure why some people are so hesitant to call games art.

The games I’ve played for the PS3 include Assassin’s Creed, the Resistance games, Call of Duty 4 and Dead Space. One thing all those games have in common is that they’re very violent. For crying out loud, the core gameplay of Dead Space is advertised as “strategic limb dismemberment.” Now, I’m not inclined to say there’s anything particularly awful about violent video games, but it can get to be a bit much. Enter Flower.

Instead of playing a grizzled space-marine or an assassin, you control… the wind! As you pass flowers, you cause them to bloom and you start to collect a trail of flower pedals. The flowers are arranged in various patterns and as you complete the series, you transform the environment or create a new windflow, among other results. These transformations are oddly satisfying. The landscapes change as you progress through the game, and strangely enough, there’s something of a narrative to the progression. Of course, there’s no exposition at all, which leaves the “story” (such as it is) open to interpretation, but there are some thrilling momemnts and even surprises in the game (including one “twist” about halfway through the game).

Controlling the wind is done by using the much-maligned Sixaxis tilting functionality of the PS3 controller, and pressing a button (any button) to “blow” the wind forward. Strangely enough, its exactly the sort of game you’d expect to see on the Wii… but it works just fine on the PS3. This game is a PS3 exclusive… and I have to admit that the visuals of the game are indeed very impressive. I’m not sure the game would work as well with the Wii’s graphics. Also worth mentioning is the music. As you pass each flower, you trigger a sound, usually some sort of chime, and in some situations you’re flying past flowers at a fast rate, chiming along with the background music.

The game is relatively short (3 or 4 hours), but it really is a fantastic game that brings about feelings I’m not used to getting from games. It’s a relaxing game. The simple gameplay style allows you to just sit back and enjoy what you’re seeing and hearing, even as you control what’s happening. However, don’t let the simplicity fool you. There is more depth here than is apparent at first glance. The game does have PS3 trophies, and some of them are rather complex (of course, some are rather simple, but there are tough ones as well). I would think that this is a game that most gamers would enjoy. I’d be really interested to see how non-gamers or casual-gamers would react to this game – much of what I’ve heard about the game comes from the typical hardcore gamers (not that they don’t like it, but I wonder if it’s the sort of game that could transcend gaming).

Now, I’m not as in love with the game as Brainy Gamer, but I like the game a lot, and it’s nice to play a game whose color palette goes beyond black, gray, brown, and muzzle-flash. I’m really glad I bought it (if you have a PS3, you can download the game in the PSN store for $9.99) and will most likely keep playing it fairly regularly.

ArsTechnica thinks the game is art and that it extends the conversation of what games are:

Whether or not Flower has a story is up to what you think is going on, and I’m unconvinced that the most topical explanation for the events in the game is the right one, or even the only one. Games are interactive in more ways than one, and playing Flower before it is released is actually something of a handicap; part of the draw of this game is going to be the discussions that it spawns across the gaming blogs and forums.

There will be some that simply don’t get it, and that’s OK. There will be some that don’t care for it; this is a game that isn’t for everyone. There will be others, and I am one of them, that will hear the game whisper to them when they close their eyes.

A while back, I posted a guest entry by my friend Samael (aka Roy) where we discussed video games as art. Sam and I pretty much agreed on a relatively broad definition of art… one that included the possibility of games. He distills the debate well:

The problem mostly seems to be that we’re asking the wrong questions. We shouldn’t be asking “are video games art” any more than we’d ask “are movies art.” It’s a loaded question and you’ll never come to any real answer, because the answer is going to depend completely on what movie you’re looking at, and who you’re asking. The same holds true with games. The question shouldn’t be whether all games are art, but whether a particular game has some artistic merrit. How we decide what counts as art is constantly up for debate, but there are games that raise such significant moral or philosophical questions, or have such an amazing sense of style, or tell such an amazing story, that it seems hard to argue that they have no artistic merrit.

And I firmly believe that Flower is one of those games. Furthermore, there is a stereotype for “artistic” games that they focus on the artistic side of the game so much that it isn’t fun to play… but for me, Flower is a clear repudiation of that argument. It’s gorgeous and it’s fun, and it is most definitely “art.”

A couple of other games that I’ve played for the PS3 lately:

• Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare: Remember when I said that most FPS games are set in WWII or some sort of futuristic Alien Invasion? Well the Call of Duty franchise is one of those WWII series. I played one of them once, but I don’t remember which one because they’re pretty much all the same. You kill Nazis! Well, CoD4 is set in the present day and features contemporary enemies… a setting that is surprisingly underused. Usually, game designers try to spice things up with zombies or aliens or other paranormal crap. Off the top of my head, the only game I can think of with a similar setting is Operation Flashpoint. But while that game was so realistic and complicated that a single shot from an enemy would probably kill you (though I still like the game, I eventually gave up on OF when I got to the squad based missions, which were just unplayable), CoD4 goes for more of an arcadey feel, and it’s a lot of fun.

  The game’s developers have crafted a surprisingly well balanced game. There are, of course, all the standard FPS tropes here, and these sequences are well balanced. However, what sets CoD4 apart from the crowd is that it managed to break up the gameplay every now and again, and in more ways than just the standard vehicle portion. For instance, there is a level where you take the gunner’s seat on a C130 and basically rain down destruction upond your enemies in coordination with a ground assault. Another standout is a sniper mission, which is optimized to actually let you use your sniper rifle (a feature that is surprisingly absent from most FPS games). In terms of weaponry, what you get is mostly standard and realistic.. but the weapons you use are generally pretty satisfying to use and like the sniper level, the game is relatively good about creating set-pieces that require the use of a certain weapon to get through.

  In terms of story, you’re mostly following around a British SAS squad and some US Marines, and there’s some story about Russians and terrorists who have a nuclear bomb, etc… It’s all very standard, but well executed. The single player game is really short and ends in a bit of an abrupt manner. Despite perhaps wanting some more closure than I got, I’m not sure the length is really that bad. What’s in the game is fantastic and I suspect that making the game longer would basically mean making it repetitious, which would have made the game seem more muddled. The game has a very deep multi-player mode that I’ve only really started to use (and, of course, got my arse handed to me). All in all, an above average FPS game with fun, balanced gampelay (if a little too short).

• Dead Space: A third-person shooter and survival horror game that takes place on a large interstellar mining ship that is stationed around an alien planet. Of course, they’ve uncovered some sort of alien artifact that begins infecting the crew and turning them into monsters called Necromorphs. You play Isaac Clarke (a not-too-subtle nod to classic SF authors Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke), an engineer sent to help retake the infected mining ship. The game features an off-center, over-the-shoulder third-person view, and the interface tries something different by putting all the various readouts in the environment rather than some sort of HUD. Of course, most of these make no sense. For example, your life meter shows up as a series of bars accross your spine… So while you as the player can see it, Isaac would never be able to see it (he wears a helmet, so it’s conceivable that he has a HUD… but then, why advertise how weak you are to your enemies?) I know this is a nitpick, but that’s really just an indication that the game failed to fully immerse me in the gameplay. For a survival horror game, immersion is crucial, and this game consistently knocked me out of the world it was trying to create. There’s a lot to like about the game, but there were a few key elements that are just inexcusable. Chief among them is save points. All of the games I’d played for the PS3 up to this point have had really nice checkpoint/auto-save style systems. Ultimately, the save points are spaced close together and you never go too long without having an opportunity to save… which just begs the question of why they’re needed at all? Save points are a relic – David Wong perfectly summarized the issue years ago:
  

  This is a throwback to the arcade/NES days when physical limitations in the system wouldn’t allow you to save your progress just anywhere. There is no reason for this now. None. We’re busy. We’ve got work, appointments, phone calls. We shouldn’t tolerate an inability to save our progress in any piece of software.

  Half Life 2 did this perfectly–it auto-saved every few minutes, behind the scenes. You didn’t have to worry about it and you didn’t have to re-fight enemies you had already defeated.

  There are people who say that preventing saves adds to the “tension” of the game. Sure, in the sense that the fact that your 360 could catch on fire at any moment also adds to the tension. Face it, if the only way you can think of to add suspense to your game is to disable a feature of the hardware, then you suck at making games.

  Like I said, most of the games I’ve played on the PS3 so far were fantasic about this. They auto-saved every time something meaningful was accomplished. All Dead Space‘s save points serve to do is ruin immersion and remind you that you’re playing a game rather than fighting off the undead alien hordes. Again, the survival horror genre requires this more than any other type of game, so I’m baffled as to why they would choose to have save points.

  One of the neat things about the game is that killing the enemies require more than just shooting at them – you have to shoot them in such a way as to remove their limbs in order to kill them. This is an interesting way to differentiate the game mechanics of a standard shooter, and the weaponry is suited to this sort of cutting task. Unfortunately, the variation in weaponry is pointless. You would be fine if you only used the first weapon you come accross, the Plasma Cutter. Indeed, one of the PS3 trophies for the game is to complete the whole game with the Plasma Cutter – and I think that would be an easy trophy to earn (if I were willing to play the game again). Some of the other weapons are somewhat neat, but they’re also mostly unnecessary. Unlike the Resistance games or even CoD4, there’s nothing that is optimized for a specific weapon. Sure, the Line Cutter is great for taking out both legs in one shot, but it has a much slower fire rate. The Ripper is pretty neat and I’ve heard some people say that it’s overpowered, but I always had trouble with it. And so on. In any case, the core gameplay of fighting Necromorphs is pretty fun and one of the better things about the game.

  There are several other gameplay elements in this game – there’s a kinesis module that lets you move stuff around (though it’s generally used for stuff that would seem simpler if you could just use your arms), there’s a time-slowing mechanic that I always forget I even had, and the actually neat mechanic of zero-space maneuvering. There are a couple of interesting gun turrent style sequences that I enjoyed playing as well. Some mini-game style stuff shows up as well (i.e. zero-g basketball). So the various “strategic limb dismemberment” sequences are mixed up with various other tasks that require these other gameplay elements. Sometimes this is fun, sometimes it just seems rather pointless. All these different abilities also mean that the controller scheme is more complicated than usual, though for the most part, I didn’t have many problems.

  The atmosphere can be effective at times, what with the spooky noises and music and all. There are also lots of “boo” momeents when a body you thought was dead actually jumps up and attacks you, which generally leads you to stomp around on dead bodies just to make sure they’re really dead. Ultimately, like movies that overuse “boo” moments, they become progressively less effective as time moves on. There’s more to horror than just a startling moment, so when you add in the gameplay elements that take you out of the story (like the save points), the game becomes less effective. Story-wise, there’s not much going on. Isaac Clarke never actually talks during the course of the game, which is kinda weird and makes it a little difficult to tell what’s going on… his wife was apparently on the mining ship and is missing.. and the game tries to tease you by showing glimpses of her (or her voice) throughout the ship. One thing I will say is that the very end of the game (the last cutscene) was actually pretty great – I was glad I stuck with the game until the very end.

  For all my gripes, this game is actually pretty competent. It’s got some unique elements that perhaps make it worth playing, but there are several flaws that prevented me from loving the game. I pretty much agree with Yahtzee’s review of the game as well. Competent, but bland.

That’s all for now.