Long Road Back

            The other night, I was discussing video games with a friend. With the year drawing to a close, it's normal for the subject to eventually turn to some sort of “year’s best” discussions. This friend and I rarely have much overlap in the games we play, which makes for enjoyable discussions. Usually, each of us comes away from a conversation with something new to check out.

            In discussing the games of the year, and what had really stuck with us, we discussed a lot of the bigger “Triple A” titles of the year. Among others, we talked about Mass Effect 3, and Borderlands 2, and Dishonored—games that we’d both played and enjoyed. However, none of these, we agreed, really struck us as “the best of the year.” At one point, I was scrolling through the games on my Playstation’s hard drive to find something to show him. While I clearly had plans to show him something, these plans were changed as soon as he asked “Oh, what’s Journey?”

            To be honest, Journey was a game that, while I’d finished it at release, I hadn’t gone back to since my first playthrough. I tried to explain the game to my friend, but quickly realized that a description of Journey wasn’t going to the game any sort of justice. A basic description of the game’s story (“there both is and isn’t one”), mechanics (“it’s a platformer”), or visual style (“you’re kind of a scarf-cape thing?”) wouldn’t do much to relate how special the game was. So, the only option I had was to simply start the game up and show my friend what it actually was. And, while he wasn’t entirely swept away by Journey, I certainly was.

            Despite my initial intentions to simply play 20 minutes or so of Journey merely as a means to introduce my friend to its aesthetic and gameplay, I ended up completing it for a second time. In one sitting. This isn’t a particularly huge achievement; Journey is only about two to three hours long. However, this second playthrough reminded me of just how beautiful Journey is. Graphically, Journey is a marvel. It’s about as close as I’ve ever come to simultaneously causing and watching an animated film. Though Journey’s gameplay is simple, it is functional and smooth. The game’s music is excellent and bears a great deal of the narrative weight with ease.

            After this latest playthrough, what has struck me most about Journey is the way it creates the majority of its story. Because it explicitly tells so little about its narrative, Journey deliberately creates a distance between itself and the player, a distance that is incredibly important to the game’s success.

            In Understanding Comics, author Scott McCloud posits that most of the action in comic books takes place in the “gutters” between panels. What he means is that the panels themselves act as signposts for the reader, whose mind fills the spaces in between. What is inferred by the reader between panels is the true action of comics. In Journey, the division between game and player is a similar space. In this space, Journey’s story is inferred by, and so exists for, each player. By forcing this kind of narrative inference from the reader, Journey makes the player a collaborator. In this way, each player reads a story in Journey that is very much their story.

            Journey provides beautiful imagery, wonderful music, simple (yet smooth) gameplay, and then forces the reader to develop their own story from these elements. In this way, Journey is a game that is very personal to each player. To say the least, one gets out what he or she puts in. Journey’s story can be as deep or as minimal as one desires. However, few games provide the possibility for narrative collaboration and subsequent depth as Journey.

             So, what’s Journey? Game of the year, I guess.  

#GOTY2012 #PS3 #Journey #Thatgamecompany

Troglodytes' gorilla

It's 1991.  Ayatollah Khomeini is in the wriggling throws of death. The Soviet Union has collapsed upon itself like a fusty and mouldering estate housing a desiccated clan of Havishams. I bear witness to the precipice of history itself, revolving around me, spokes akimbo and threatening to drag me feet first into the ambivalent chasm of passing time. Too bad I'm wearing velcro shoes and bumbling with otiose fingers at a keyboard that weighs more than I do. 

I'm playing the first video game I've ever played.  On a screen in front of me, two QBasic gorillas hurl explosive bananas in a vain attempt to destroy one another. It's the polar opposite of My Dinner With Andre and I love it. There's two commands to enter: the velocity of your banana, and the angle you fling it, underarmed and lustily, primeval as the newly risen sun. In a surrealistic turn, you can control the gravity of your playing field. You can destroy the buildings upon which you revel at your opponent. You can destroy the sun. With a banana. You are ruination reborn. 

In the same year that the SNES was released, and that legions of children would be battle-toading and riding coloured dinosaurs, I stared at a DOS prompt and embraced a kafkaesque vision of the earth's future: one riddled with gorillas, bent on destruction. I think it's an understatement to say that this game would forever shape how I viewed gorillas, and more importantly, bananas.

Play it here.

Nuclear Winter

So I say to Mike I says "what's the story with this Metro 2033 game?"

And so he lends it to me.

Oh, son. This game is like a first person shooter for the OCD ultrarealist with no connection to realism.

But it is fun. Give me a couple more days with it and I'll put together something a little more developed.

Here's a quick Coles' notes version.

The game, based on Dmitry Glukhovsky's novel of the same name, is set in a post-apocalyptic Moscow. The player guides young protagonist Artyom through this bildungsroman into the Metro tunnels that snake below the city's bombed-out streets to reach new Metro stations. Or... towns. Well, people live in them? So, maybe it's just like real-life today Russia? But maybe nicer.

Anyways, stealth's a big part of the game. Sneak around, shoot out lights, don't step on those broken plates (for real! so modern!) or those nazis might hear you. The weapons have a fun, junkyard feel to them. Currently, I'm enjoying the air-rifle that you can overpump to the point that it will put a ball-bearing through a monster's chest cavity.

The game also loads up the controller enough options to have almost every possible button combination mapped out. Seriously, there is a command to do almost everything. But, it's fun and adds to the atmosphere that not only do you have a flashlight and gasmask, but you have to wind up a dynamo to power your light and conserve filters for your mask. It's currently my favourite hobo-simulator on 360.

Jokes aside, I'm enjoying Metro 2033 a lot. The game is atmospheric, scary where it needs to be, competent at telling an interesting narrative, and well-designed enough to keep you playing.

Don't play it if you want anything other than a huge downer, though. It's full of Russians who are all more depressing and gloomy than the real thing.

Major bummers.


Expect a full write-up later this week.

#Metro2033 #GloomyRussians #hobosimulator

Lifeless Infinity

It’d been a while since I had sat down with either of the Dead Space games. A few days ago I was struck by the urge to head back onto the USG Ishimura and blast apart some Necromorphs. In retrospect, it’s odd that what I remembered about the game was its action element, because that’s not its most striking aspect by far.

After a couple of hours running protagonist Isaac Clarke around his outer-space haunted house, it was clear why this game had struck such a chord with me the first time through:

This game is terrifying.

At first glance, the game is a bit of a splatterfest. But, like film, gore without reason isn’t frightening. Thankfully, developer Visceral Games put just as much effort into their story, art direction, sound and level design as they did into their controls and combat mechanics.

Cramped quarters

As I navigated the cramped corridors of the Ishimura, I still felt the same sense of dreadful claustrophobia that I had during my first playthrough. I remember having originally faulted the game for what I thought was a small environment that had me constantly backtracking through the ship.

This time through I tried to understand how the game was telling its story instead just going along for the ride. The cramped size of this dead space ship isn’t a cop-out on the part of developers—it’s a conscious choice.

The constant backtracking through this ruined ship needs to happen. It’s supposed to be frustrating. It’s easy to tell a player that they’re trapped on a spaceship with no way out and monsters closing in. But this is how you make the player feel it. If the team at Visceral had wanted to make the Ishimura bigger, they would have. The fact that Dead Space’s final section takes Isaac off the Ishimura shows that there was room in the development period to build more than just the few decks Isaac sees.

No one can hear you scream

Space is silent, but the decks of this dead ship groan and creak with every step. The sound design of this game deserves massive praise. Some enemies are just telegraphed enough, with the sound of a scream or a crash coming a second before some bladed monstrosity appears. While at other times, the atmosphere is deepened considerably by the infrequent whispers of hidden speakers, or the lonely ringing of some tool knocked off a workbench by ... something.

The Music pulls its fair share of weight in this game as well. While not as overbearing or memorable as some games' scores (i.e. zelda, mario, etc.), Dead Space's score is subtle, but strong. Underpinning some incredibly harrowing moments, the music swells with strings and horns, pushing you to even greater heights of mashing the A button to get whatever bladed, undead monster is about to eat your face. However, the music also works also stays low and tense, building atmosphere as you move through certain sections.

All the players on stage

Claustrophobic levels, nightmarish enemies, and doom-laden sound-design lay a solid foundation for Dead Space's general atmosphere of horror. However, the pre-scripted, set pieces raise that level of horror. Visceral clearly did their homework, mining a broad spectrum of horror films for a number of "jump-scares." While a number of these are your typical "something pops out of an airvent/floor grate/whatever," enough of them are pretty original that they really hit home. The first time I saw a live (?) crew-member smashing his head into obliteration against a bulkhead I actually had to put the controller down for a minute. These are the moments that not only help break up what could be 8 hours of hear-tearing tension, but help give Dead Space an individual kind of horror.

It's fair to say that Dead Space does borrow heavily from other "space horror" works, mainly Alien and Event Horizon. However, it does an adequate job of carving out its own place through narrative. While you can point to certain aspects of the game and cry "plagiarism!", I'm sure the designers would argue the game as more homage. Honestly, the game does a good enough job of standing on its own two feet, and to nitpick its obvious influences seems a little nitpicky.

Summing up

I love this game. 4 years later and Dead Space still holds up. The scares still scare, the environments still make you feel trapped, and the combat still gets the heart rate up. On top of all that, the story the Visceral started here is still compelling. Although in this first outing Isaac is more a carte blanche, his story is still effecting.

I didn't think that I would still enjoy Dead Space, having been spoiled rotten by last year's sequel. But, this game is still fantastic. More than that, this might be the only really successful horror/survival-horror game on the current generation of consoles.

I figured that this article would be a bit of a one-off, but expect an update after I've made my way through Dead Space 2 in the next couple of months.

Those necromorphs won't dismember themselves.

#Dead_Space

Greetings, Starfighter! You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the Frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada!

   



     If the current state of the gaming industry is what I fantasized about as a kid: glorious, multiplayer, bug-hunts in high resolution, then why do I find myself returning to the games of my youth? And if you thought it had to do with aesthetics or nostalgia, you'd be wrong. I'm returning to the games of my childhood for three reasons: namely, simple mechanics, straight-forward plot, and non-negotiable difficulty.

     When all you had for inputs where the d-pad, start, select, A, and B, you were forced to transgress your limitations - a frame of mind that truly inspires creativity. I could be wrong in feeling this way, but I can't help but feel like limitless potential is more often stifling and constricting, than the opposite. Sandbox games claiming that you can "do anything" are often way off the mark, and utterly banal and boring - I don't think I need to expand on why my lowest video gaming moment came to me when I was taking an NPC out on a date in GTA IV.
     Let's not even get into the notion of difficulty related to perceived reward, because without challenge, there is none! Every game tries to play off the argument that decreased difficulty is about experiencing the story, but frankly, I'm finding myself less interested in immersive story and more interested in gameplay. Obviously, difficulty is another concept right up there with retro-graphics on the trendy scale, but I seem to lose interest without something to test myself against.
   


     I suppose, that deep down, all I want is for Centauri to drive up to my mobile home and...

v1.0

First posts are hard things, folks.

What first? Something strong right out of the gate? A visual breakdown of all 8-bit's merit? A lengthy piece on interpolation in modern gaming narratives? A charming biography on me and my long, rich history with gaming?

I've deleted like four drafts of that kind of stuff already.

Like I said, first posts are hard.

So, let's just get this over with and get down to business.

A quick intro:

I came to video games relatively late in life. As one of those kids whose otherwise lovely parents are born against home consoles, I just never really had a system around the house. So, I never really got into games as a serious hobby until the start of the 360 era.

I say serious hobby because I obviously did play games before then. I mean, what kind of portly high school nerd would I be if I didn't play games? Mostly PC. A bit of N64 at friends' houses.

But let's just say I started late and had to work backwards; do my homework.

Anyways, I like video games. Mainly because they're fun and mostly because they're just starting to come into their own as a storytelling medium.

We'll discuss.

Anyways, Hi.

I'm James.