"Meh."

Tim Burton’s Batman was the movie that comic book readers had been waiting for.

It was dark and gloomy: it had some of the best scenic design in a film since Metropolis. The music was great: it had Prince on the soundtrack(as any good movie should) and featured Danny Elfman’s incredible theme that would define the titular character for my generation.

Unfortunately, set design and music do not a good movie make. Although the film succeeded in thrusting mainstream America into the modern age of comics, the biggest factor that made Batman a success was the fact that Batman was in it. At the time, no one had seen such a grim representation of what the live-action super hero world might look like(Swamp Thing and The Punisher do not count). Audiences and long time fans took what they could get. By today’s standards a mere 20 years later, it’s not as great as it seemed.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine unfortunately suffers from a similar problem, and I suspect it will feel somewhat dated when the next 40k game comes out. After 20+ years of throwing dice and way too many strategy adaptations, Warhammer 40,000 fans were desperate for a chance to be a space marine. They were even tantalized by the mediocre Fire Warrior, a first-person shooter based on the Tau, one of the many alien species that battle the space marines in the 40k universe.

What fans got after all these years may have briefly whet their appetites. Make no mistake, it’s a polished product, but for someone who’s played a lot of action games, it’s kind of just another shades-of-grey shooter.

It was kind of awesome

Let me preface the rest of this review of Space Marine by saying that it was, without question, a game that made me want to finish it. I genuinely found myself caring for the characters in this game, and in an universe as dark as 40k’s, that’s a feat. The tone of the game is pitch-perfect.

The character design and dialogue of the inexplicably British-voiced members of the Emperor’s finest is fantastic. They’re larger than life, yet believable. Authoritative yet humble. The character work in this game captures the combination of humanity and demigod stature that easily could have been overlooked in favor of a mindless corridor shooter where you mow down waves of enemies.

But not.

And yet, that’s all the game really is. A corridor shooter set in a really cool universe(albeit one that shamelessly appropriates ideas from other intellectual property). Readers will know that I’m a fan of good shooters, but the level design in this game is really lacking. It’s a combination of gray semi-gothic corridors and brown trenches, and there’s honestly only one or two particularly memorable sequences in the entirety of the game.

Good single-player games give the impression of non-linearity, even if they’re totally linear, while still giving a good play a sense of direction. “The battle is raging on to my left, so perhaps I should move towards it.” Space Marine’s shoddy level design is of the type that necessitates a floating icon to direct you towards the “rails” that you have to hop on.

It must be said that the combat definitely has a “cool” factor because of the game’s melee system, but even the limitations of that system are quickly found by a skilled player.

Dueling the horde

Fighting “normal” enemies quickly becomes a hack-and-slash affair. The advanced moves that you can perform are, with the exception of the area-of-affect “ground pound” used to stun enemies, seldom useful. Doing an “execution” on a “normal” enemy will look really cool. But it will often get you killed. While the more challenging enemies do make the melee combat challenging and fun, the game never really lets you have the fun that you want.

In action/adventure games where melee is prominent, there are often particularly difficult enemies that might be presented to players like a normal enemy. Some of them aren’t quite bona-fide mini-bosses while some of them simply are. All of these enemies are set apart from the other enemies in the game that allows you to test your mettle against this one difficult baddie. The small frys are usually absent, and if they are present, there’s only a handful of them.

You know you love him.(Double Dragon's Abobo via Joystiq)

These baddies usually present a fun challenge for a skilled player, while not being hair-pullingly difficult. In my experience, they usually end up being fan favorites. A few examples of this include the Ball & Chain Trooper and Darknut from Zelda; the Shadowtroopers and Reborn from Jedi Knight II; and the beloved Bolo/Abobo of Double Dragon fame.

Not counting any distinctly video-gamey run-and-shoot bosses, these enemies are the most dangerous game. One that might actually defeat skilled players if they’re not careful. These fights are memorable because they allow the player to really test their abilities against a worthy opponent.

Space Marine doesn’t really let you do that. Whenever an oversized ork or maul-wielding denizen of chaos comes at you, it’s usually while he’s in the midst of about 30 other enemies. It’s seldom worth the risk to let this guy last. Although many gamers might have nostalgic memories about saving the big guy for last, gamers shouldn’t have to go out of their way to fight these mini-(mini-)bosses.

Bad level design will throw him at you in the midst of a horde of enemies and call it challenging. This isn’t fun though, because any smart player will spam their explosives to get rid of the horde. Suddenly the big bad is dead, and you aren’t allowed to have your fun.

Good level design(because that’s what this is really about) will deploy him during a lull of standard enemies and naturally give you a chance to test your skill against him. It’ll also give you an opportunity to note how good(or bad) the melee system really is. What happens when you push the rules of the game to its limits? Can you break them? Is the attack behind that cool animation actually any good?

To add insult to injury, the two major “boss fights” in this game don’t let you feel particularly heroic. The first character despite favoring melee falls into the previously mentioned “run-and-shoot” categoy. The final boss fight is an infuriatingly easy quicktime event prefaced by an annoying large mob of enemies. So much for being a third-person shooter with cool melee combat. This is not the glory that I signed up for.

Yet the Space Marine trope works

After the boring boss fight, the drama of a short and sweet final cutscene drops a bomb on you, letting the player take in how bleak this universe is. Even for the “good guys” of the story.

The funny thing about Space Marine is that out of all of the hundreds of “meh” shooters about a lone hero taking on hundreds and never faltering after being shot hundreds of times, this is one of the few games where letting that hero be a nigh-invulnerable herald of death makes sense.

There’s dozens of books that detail how not-human space marines really are in the universe of 40k. The amount of resources and training that goes into producing one in the fiction is mind-boggling. The “humans” in the game react to meeting Captain Titus, the player character in Space Marine, as if they were meeting a god in the flesh. Not even the genetically-engineered machismo of Halo has anything on the background of Space Marine in terms of justifying their character’s badassery.

There’s this thing called a dedicated server.

I suppose I should cut Relic a little bit of slack seeing as how they’re not used to producing netcode that’s more demanding than a strategy game, but they’ve been in this business way too long. I don’t cut other games slack, and I’m already giving this one way too much. Multiplayer suffers from the usual problems of contemporary shooters on top of atrocious netcode.

It’s extremely common for the game to pause while it migrates hosting to a new host. Rage quitting just got more obnoxious. Thanks Relic!

My hope

Anyone who’s seen Batman: The Animated Series or The Dark Knight knows that the 1989 Batman didn’t age well. As much as it was a success at the time, it is nearly as dated today as Adam West’s Batman was to the jaded fans waiting in line to see Michael Keaton keep his head perfectly straight for 90 minutes.

It is my hope that in a few years time, gamers will look back at Space Marine and think, “damn that game sucked” while they massacre the enemies of humanity in a far superior game.

A few months ago, I played the demo for Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine. It was a short, fun diversion that I finished in maybe an hour. Satisfied, I quit the demo and went about my business. At some point, I launched it again. I played it again. And again. And again. Based on the conversations I’ve had, I know I’m not the only person who played the Space Marine demo over and over. Yet, this wasn’t the first time I got attached to a demo.

Even though I’m still quite young, I grew up in a different age. An age of IDE drives. An age of sound cards. An age when a “3D Accelerator” was a new piece of hardware distinct from a video card.

An age where glossy pages were the primary source of information about gaming. An age of demo discs and, if you can believe it, demo disks.

I remember how, for a kid or any person of meager means, a demo disc was almost as good as getting a new game. And sometimes they simply were as good. 1 issue of PC Gamer or Electronic Gaming Monthly. 1 disc. 10+ demos. Hours of playtime. A demo was valuable. Not only was it a way to preview a new game, the demo was an end in itself.

Maybe that was the downfall of demos. Maybe desperate gamers, children and adults alike, clung to them too tightly. I know I did. I’m not sure how many times I played the Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II demo before I actually played the game. The same goes for No One Lives Forever.

The best demos had the artist’s touch of a short film, sometimes incorporating unique content(the first level wouldn’t always suffice) that gave the player a broad sense about the things they could do in the full game. They weren’t just promotional material. They were almost ends in themselves.

A Nostalgic Diversion

When my parents bought our first computer, we attended several small-town computer shows to find out what we could do with this fancy new machine. Enthusiasts and early adopters setup booths at these shows so that could thin out their aging collections. Foolish entrepreneurs were trying to peddle their counter-intuitive gun-shaped controllers(some things never change), and some would try to sell piles of software, legal or otherwise.

In some cases, people would just sell demo discs. Before the age of broadband, computer enthusiasts, who had been there and done that, realized thatthey could take the hundreds of shareware titles in their possession and shell out the cash to put these on a compact disc. What a wild idea. Just the word “shareware” would probably make today’s accountants at Activision and EA piss themselves.

When we got our first CD-ROM Drive, I think one of the first things we did was go to a computer show so that my brother could buy one of these epic collections.

One of these paid-for demo discs sticks out in my mind. It even had a title. ACES: The Critical Mission. Someone labeled it with a name as if it were its own game. And boy did we play the shit out of it.

For all of their shadiness, these rip-off collections were a gateway to a lot of old titles that I was too young to have otherwise known about. It was an education. A primer on becoming a PC gamer.

Demos were my first exposure to Spear of Destiny, the often forgotten sequel to Wolfenstein 3D. My first exposure to the Ghosts n’ Goblins knock-off Monster Bash. My first exposure to the original Alone in the Dark.

The die was cast. I was always going to be a gamer. Not just any gamer. A PC gamer, first and foremost.

A Concession

Maybe this whole post is just a fit of nostalgia. After all, consoles still get lots of demos through their marketplaces. Anyone with a TV or a computer has been unable to avoid EA’s advertising of the Mass Effect 3 demo for the past few weeks.

PC developers, as much as they like to talk about being at the center of innovation, don’t really like doing demos any more. It’s rare that you hear of one these days. One would think that any indie developer who believes in its product would be willing to give away a taste of their product for free.

Not Really

The problem is not unique to PC gaming. Nor is it unique to indie development. Less and less “blockbuster” games even bother anymore. Mass Effect 3 is almost the exception that proves the rule. When is the last time that you can recall a TV spot hyping a demo? Not just a demo, but a demo for a sequel in an established series. Maybe one of the Halo games? Those hardly count.

I think any developer who wants to remain relevant needs to start releasing demos again. Indie and “mainstream” alike. Not just an open-ended, bug-heavy beta either. A polished, tightly-constructed demo. In a time when piracy is rampant, giving gamers a chance to play a game without shelling out $50+ might be a sensible business move.

For the record, I eventually bought Space Marine. Demos still serve their purpose.

I’m not particularly good at finishing books. I start a lot of them, let them fall by the wayside(sometimes starting another book), and, realizing I’ve spent too much time away from it, start over. Rinse. Repeat.

The same goes for many good single-player games. That’s not to say that games(or books) which lose my interest are all inherently bad ones, it’s just that I sometimes get too busy with work, school, the holidays, or going out. With some games lasting as long as 100 hours, it’s not that hard to imagine. I lose sight of my goal to sit down with whichever piece of “literature” I’m currently working on as I get distracted by other things.

The irony is that I’m pretty good at buying books. A visit to a good used bookstore can be dangerous, even for someone who struggles to finish books like myself. A 50 year old hardcover of one of “the classics” for 5 bucks? Sold.

I’m not, however, “good at” buying video games. The difference between buying a new book and even a used or otherwise discounted video game, is a larger amount of money than my habits of consumption will allow.

A Literary Example

I loved Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City, but there’s no good reason for me to buy his newest book when an earlier one, Thunderstruck, is still sitting on my shelf half-read, begging to be finished. Why would I buy the newest  Larson novel when I already have one to work on?

Oh wait. I know why. Because books are cheap. Shop around and you’ll find a Half-Price Books that’s moving an In the Garden of Beasts hardcover of for 6 bucks. Shop harder and you’ll find it for less.

The same can’t be said of most big-budget video games.

The Cost of Gaming

I’m as susceptible to the insane sales on Steam as anyone who foremost calls his/herself a PC Gamer, but I tend to draw the line with any big-budget opuses that herald 10% off as an incentive. Don’t get me wrong.  I know that games cost money to make. Tons. I’ll be the first one to lose his temper in a discussion about games as art, and I really like supporting the artists that I like. That doesn’t mean you should expect me to get excited because *gasp* “Skyrim is on sale for $45 dollars!”

Exclusive DLC for launch copies of the game is not an incentive, by the way. If I was on the fence about buying a game at launch, all an announcement about such DLC does is ensure that I use my economic vote to tell developers that I’m not interested in supporting their business practices. If it’s a console game, I’m going to buy it used, borrow it from a friend, or maybe forget I was ever interested.

Just this past fall, I, for the first time in my life, pre-ordered a console game. It was Forza 4, the collector’s edition. I pre-ordered it, knowing that my friends would eventually buy it, and we’d be able to compare race times. 3 months on, and I still haven’t been able to get my pre-order bonus code from Best Buy. So much for that.

Shut the Hell Up

Now that we’re on the subject of buying new games at launch, I’d like to take this opportunity to tell all of you to leave me the hell alone. I think it’s great that you’re all into Skyrim. Really. I am. However, I never finished Oblivion, or for that matter, Morrowind, and don’t think that slapping down $60 bucks on a game while other games in my collection need playing is a judicious use of my money(or my time for that matter).

“But Tim, it came out months ago. You should have bought it by now.” Guess what? The arrow-in-the-knee jokes aren’t going anywhere. Neither are the Foos-Roh-Dah videos of people pitching their cats. When I finally buy the game for $20 bucks(maybe less if I take forever finishing Oblivion), then I’ll have a wealth of played-out Skyrim jokes to choose from.

I’ll give you another example: L.A. Noire. My friends who’ve played it know I love detective stories, Police Quest-style problem solving, and plugging gangsters with a .45 caliber handgun; so I still occasionally hear comments about how I should buy this nearly year-old game. I never finished Grand Theft Auto IV or Red Dead Redemption. I don’t even own the latter, although I probably should. The bottom line is that I’m not going drop a lot of money(or perhaps any) on a game that I just don’t have the time to finish.

I’m OK; You’re OK

I’m in a good place with games. I have some really fun mutliplayer games that I play with friends, and I have plenty of single-player games that I never finished(or started, thanks to the holiday Steam sale). Even when I do decide to buy games when they’re still “new”, I usually end up getting a crazy deal a few weeks after the game comes out. Battefield 3? $30 bucks on Amazon a month and a half after release. Portal 2? Gamestop had the PC copy for $30 three weeks after release. I’m in no hurry to buy any games at launch.

Unless it’s Half-Life 3. Then I’m pre-ordering it.

I’m guilty. I like first-person shooters. Despite having countless pseudo-intellectual discussions about the root of “what’s wrong” with the gaming industry having something to do with mindless violence, I’m still a sucker for a well-executed shooter. Especially multiplayer ones. The best multiplayer shooters are at once casual stress relievers and the platforms for competitive leagues where winning teams can win millions.

One of the things I love about multiplayer shooters is that they’ve historically been really easy to pick up and almost immediately put back down. Because of the “addictive” quality of action games, this might sounds counter-intuitive to some, but for me, it’s actually their biggest appeal. Unfortunately, games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, are departing from design that lends itself to this style of playing.

More to Life Than Gaming

Whether I’ve been busy with school, work, social life, or all three I usually don’t have the time to settle in with a game. There’s been times in my life when I played only once a week or *gasp* less than that. Even when I was as young as 14, I was aware of the appeal of playing a game that required little commitment. It’s satisfying to be able to play Quake, Unreal, or Counter-Strike for just an hour or even a half hour at a time.

This isn’t as true of many role-playing or strategy games out there. Strategy games expect players to complete an entire match. To end the game early is unsporting. Role playing games sometimes expect players to do the same, or worse, spend time levelling up.

This isn’t just a matter of the format of a game. It’s also about the skill ceiling of a game. With many shooters, a capable player can play for an hour and do well or, at the very least, they can hold their own and have a good time. In any game, there’s bound to be players who are scary good, but a well-designed shooter will use its mechanics to limit(or increase) the range of skill in its userbase. That is, it limits the difference between the best and the worst players of a game. A very competitive game will have a very high skill ceiling. A casual game will have a low one.

I won’t get into skill ceiling too much(Robert and I could write several posts on the matter), but it’s worth mentioning here because the skill ceiling is artificially increased in games that use a levelling system like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, creating a false sense of competition. This ruins the game for players who don’t play very often.

Call of Duty Ruins Everything

I don’t need to remind most of my readers that the sequels to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare are the fastest grossing media products of all time, but it bears mentioning here because anything that these games do are inevitably what, on some level, all other shooters attempt to do.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare(ironically the last Call of Duty game I liked) helped popularize the concept of a persistent RPG-esque character in a multiplayer first person shooter. This can take the form of unlocking better items for a character or it can just mean a stronger, more powerful character.

What this means is that players who spend more time playing a game have increased potential to do well in a game. This leads to a player winning a game for virtue of having played more as opposed to being the more skilled player.

While it wasn’t the first game to use this mechanic, Call of Duty 4 and the cultural phenomenon it has since spawned has set the tone for most big-budget multiplayer shooters ever since.

In some free-to-play games, where publishers make profits based off of microtransactions to unlock items, this can, at its worst, lead to players actually paying their way to achieve these high-performance levels quicker.

There’s Some Hope

Not all first-person shooters do character levelling wrong. Some do it rather well.

In Battlefield 3 there’s a mix of good and bad implementation of multiplayer levelling. It’s fitting for a series that has an equally spotty record for integrating fair levelling systems into a multiplayer game. It’s vehicular combat in particular is where newer players are most disadvantaged. Flying aircraft is a simple matter of paying your dues long enough until you have a “press-to-kill” button installed in your cockpit.

Fortunately, Battlefield 3 places a greater emphasis on infantry than past games. The infantry combat in the game has a very forgiving levelling curve and a balanced selection of equipment, each weapon having its own pros and cons with different players having their own preferences. You’ll actually see some of the most experienced players on a server using the game’s starting equipment.

Team Fortress 2 is another game that makes great use of this idea, although to a much better effect than Battlefield. Valve has managed to work in various kinds of “levelling” by making any changes to characters and equipment purely cosmetic or, in the case of positive effects, balanced out by negative effects. Whether it’s a goofy hat that does nothing or a powerful weapon that holds less bullets, there’s a keen attention to design underneath the insanity of Team Fortress 2.

This is the ideal way to work a levelling mechanic into a shooter and, in this time-strapped gamer’s opinion, the only way it should ever be implemented. Also, I like hats.

I was going to post this theory as a comment on a certain gaming blog that I won’t name. Then I remembered that I didn’t have commenting privileges on this blog that I won’t name. Then I was sad. Of course, then I remembered that I have this blog.

This teaser was shown at the Spike TV Video Game Awards, which is really not an awards show. It’s more of a big circle jerk, but I won’t get into that. I want to talk about the teaser I embedded above.

The teaser doesn’t let you know much of anything, except the implication that it might be post-apocalyptic. Everyone seems to be speculating wildly on what this game will be about, but after visiting the website for about… 30 seconds, I think I have it figured out. No. I just do.

It’s a zombie/”Crazies”-based collapse of civilization with the source of infection being(what a twist!) a fungus.

We're all Screwed.

When you initially visit the website, it displays a video of a leaf. If you click on the video of the teaser the splash screen in the background changes to a closeup of a fungus “colony” growing on an ant. If anyone is wondering whether or not it’s a fungus, just view the properties of the image on the website.

Every so often you hear the same headline in the “offbeat” section of a mainstream news site talking about “zombie ants” infected with a parasitic fungi, Ophiocordyceps, that takes over their brains.

Cue hackneyed Night of the Living Dead reference, often accompanied by a corny lead. It’s the same story every time.

The fungus pops up in discussions about zombies pretty frequently, with every reddittor or forumgoer thinking they’re the first one to make the comparison(if memory serves me right, it was mentioned years ago in Resident Evil 4).

It’s been ripe for use in a work of fiction for a really long time now, and I’m surprised it’s taken this long to work it into a movie or video game.

Haters Gonna Hate!

Yesterday, Luke Plunkett, a games journalist whom I think fairly highly of, wrote a piece on Kotaku, telling Call of Duty haters everywhere to give it a rest.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: I’m not opposed to first-person shooters. Certainly not “realistic”, military-themed shooters. Anyone who knows me knows that I can geek out about guns, paintball, and room-clearing tactics with the best(worst?) of them. I do have a ton of issues with a lot of shooters out of the market today, but I’ll save the nitty-gritty of those rants for another post on another day. I’m not attacking the gaming industry today.

I’m attacking the games journalism industry today.

I don’t think Call of Duty haters are just “haters”. Games journalists love to talk about having the medium taken more seriously, but I’m not sure they mean it. A story I’ve seen popping up all over today is about the possibility of Metacritic “trolls” who are skewing the user ratings of Modern Warfare 3. It might just be the Ron Paul Effect, but I think that these Metacritic “trollers”(and annoying commenters) might be, in a way, giving games journalists a taste of their own medicine.

I think that these Call of Duty “haters” are concerned, empowered consumers, who are letting their voices be heard in the face of lapsing journalistic and editorial standards.

My beef.

Plunkett’s article, however well put together it may be, is one that I need to take issue with. He argues that the haters who post comments negative comments in any Call of Duty-related article are in the wrong. That they’re not contributing anything relevant to the piece. In most cases he’s right. He’s certainly right in the sense that haters of any entertainment product don’t need to pollute comment threads of news sites with disparaging remarks about a new game, movie, or album. Haters gonna hate, trolls gonna troll, and it’s usually safe to dismiss these kinds of comments.

Plunkett also nailed the notion that self-proclaimed “gamers” can’t “own” gaming as a whole. He’s right. They can’t pretend video games are exclusively for some kind of geeky elite. What he fails to mention is that some gamers are old enough to recall a time when they could make this claim or, at the very least, claim that games journalism and criticism had some relevance to them and their tastes.

Older gamers will know that there was a time when so-called blockbuster games were capable of getting less-than-9 out of 10 scores. A game could have garnered a considerable amount of hype, and then be considered a critical if not financial failure. Anyone remember Daikatana? I do. It’s a classic failure stories of the gaming industry. And yet, it’s a classic success story of the games journalism industry. In some ways, it’s the first time games journalism was taken seriously.

Critics and their Responsibility to Consumers

Critics of arts & entertainment have a responsibility to their readership. Like journalists who watchdog the government and big business, these writers are accountable for their actions to consumers.

Criticism, of course, is subjective, but if Roger Ebert started writing glowing reviews of every single Michael Bay or Jerry Bruckheimer film he watched, then I suspect that his days writing for the Chicago Sun-Times would be numbered.

A critic, by definition, is considered a kind of elite. An editorial staff makes the decision to hire a film or book critic based on his or her writing ability and, more importantly, refined tastes. On the subject of tastes, food critics/writers(a distinction that I won’t get into here) are similarly chosen for their knowledge and savviness on all things that aren’t McDonald’s.

There is an understanding that critics of arts and entertainment are refined in their tastes. If these standards ever applied to the games journalism industry, they no longer do. I know that it’s unfair to point the finger at games journalism at large, but some of you might remember a negative game review that cost an editor their job. You don’t really hear about this kind of thing outside of the gaming industry. Unless, of course, you’re watching Citizen Kane.

Metacritic and RottenTomatoes both make a distinction between user ratings and critic ratings, so I know that curation isn’t totally dead. This doesn’t mean, however, that aggregation isn’t a problem.

The Perils of Aggregation

In this age of news aggregation, aggregate ratings are increasingly becoming the litmus test that people use to decide whether or not they’re going to consume a piece of media. I personally often use RottenTomatoes to get a broad sense of whether or not an upcoming movie is worth watching. However, there’s something reckless in having blind faith in aggregation.

On the subject of movies, I have about 3 or 4 critics that I really trust. I happen to know that one of them seldom shares the same opinion as I on the subject of horror movies, so I know to take his comments on horror with a grain of salt. As a consumer, I’m constantly curating what information is relevant to me.

There was a time when gamers could perform this same self-relevance check, but it’s becoming increasingly more difficult. As consumers’ attention spans further shorten, driven by rapid, mobile-friendly compartmentalization of media, consumers are forgetting the value of curation and good ol’ fashioned reading.

As more and more people use services like Metacritic to determine whether or not they’ll buy a game, they gradually are losing sight of what’s relevant to them, and, in turn, lowering their own standards for what a game not only should be but could be.

Even Kotaku, the source of this piece, doesn’t regularly do bona fide reviews. While the transparency of their “gut check” is commendable, the value that they place on aggregation above devoting the resources to proper reviews betrays how little they value a meaty if verbose review.

I Digress.

I really don’t want this to be a Kotaku-hating piece, because I admire Kotaku and really appreciate the staff’s polemic role in challenging the values of gamers and also giving exposure to a lot of great writers who deserve to be heard.

I have a feeling that the staff gets a lot of pressure from Gawker to churn out lots of content. Any longtime readers of any Gawker site will see that they produce a lot more than they used to, and the result is arguably a less relevant publication.

Robert and I have been AWOL for awhile, and we really feel badly about it. We humbly offer up the top eight things we’ve been doing instead of writing about games.

Working - Employment has a funny way of getting in the way of playing games, much less writing about games. The irony is that we can now afford them (sort of).

Frolicking in the summer weather - Yeah, this one is total bullshit. I think we deserve a free one.

Researching active volcanoes to throw ourselves into before Modern Warfare 3 comes out - Active volcanoes are extremely difficult to predict, and a significant amount of our leisure time goes toward staying on top of this. We were hoping to make a dramatic display of protest by timing our leap with an eruption, but unfortunately, we missed our window. Crap.

Playing League of Legends - We’re a little late joining the party on this one, but it’s been something of a timesink for the both of us. This is more of a Robert excuse, since I’m not as high of a level as he is. JAX IS OP. Shut up, we know we’re nerds.

Watching Breaking Bad on Netflix instant queue - Talk about a first world problem. As if my instant queue weren’t big enough, Netflix goes and adds the award winning series to their online catalog. When did watching TV become a chore?

Playing Team Fortress 2 – I run the risk of sounding like a Valve fanboy when I say that whenever free time is at a premium, Team Fortress 2 often takes priority. The irony about the game we’ve all stayed up too late playing before is that it’s still one of the easiest to pick up and put back down. Playing 30 minutes of video games at a time is seldom so satisfying, unless it’s TF2.

Getting over my horrible depression following the short-lived Tactical Intervention beta - The problem wasn’t that the beta was so bad. The problem was that I couldn’t personally play it. The new tactical shooter by Minh “Gooseman” Le, one of the developers of Counter-Strike, has been long-awaited by die-hard fans of his classic mod, myself included. Unfortunately, I was never able to get the thing to work. The servers were constantly at capacity for the first weekend-only beta of the game, and I was never able to get the game running in the first place. I didn’t even get to make fun of it first-hand.

Enduring creative malaise - We’ve known for a while now that we’re bad writers, and right before dropping off the Internets we received a lot of hate mail for our posts on Gonzo Gamer. Someone even tried to buy us out(not a joke). All of the stress of running an up-and-coming gaming blog stressed us out so much that we didn’t know if we’d ever pick up a keyboard again.

Despite all of this, too many awful games have recently come out for us to stand idly by while our once trusted gaming news outlets become less and less relevant. Alright, not all of the games were that bad. Some were… tolerable. Be that as it may, we are still opinionated gamers masquerading as writers! We’re tired of listening to each other’s opinion and demand a captive audience! Gird up your RSS feeds, bitches, because Gonzo Gamer is back.

This game is hot like Judge Nancy Grace. It’s terrible. The controls are mushy, the graphics are unimpressive, and the missions are boring. Support is terrible. NVIDIA gives this game to sites reviewing their cards because it has special code to unfairly compare to ATI. Do not buy this game.

Ubisoft is not a whizz-bang publisher. Not only have they been using crazy DRM that requires a constant Internet connection, they’re also French. To top it off, when you buy games from them (including this free HAWX 2) you only have 30 days to download the game unless you buy extended download insurance. I found that out after I reformatted my hard drive. Don’t worry about backing this one up, though. You may regret it.

To the goods.

Code 1) 2NAWGETC 2) KMW56GGW 3) V3K7G6NV
Add the game to your cart and use a code at checkout.

PC Gamer has a longer review that makes it clearer how bad the game is. They gave it 30/100.

And because that was so bad, here are two Steam codes to upgrade your Civilization 5 to Civ5 Deluxe: 1) 7952D-BPFST-24EFV-4X8LF-LA297 2) 7952D-BLZ9S-VZM64-SXJWV-JDLSA. Unfortunately, there’s more where this came from.

Scary.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent, on the other hand wasn’t as easy for me to complete. The game’s deliberate pacing and deceptive sound design makes otherwise mundane tasks grueling and tiring for the player. It’s also less than half the price of Dead Space’s original retail price.

Let me preface the rest of my musings by disclosing two things about my personal tastes:

1) I’m a very big fan of horror as a medium-spanning genre. Consequently, I am slightly less susceptible to many horror tropes that make other people uncomfortable.

2) I find the far-flung future aesthetic of the Dead Space universe very difficult to engage as a scary place. Poor lighting does not a scary game make. This is not an outright criticism of the series or its visual design. Because of my own personal tastes, I’d have a similar difficulty being scared by an episode of Star Trek, even if it were written by Stephen King.

Moving on.

Dead Space is a fun, but unscary game
Dead Space is an enjoyable game, and I would argue with anyone who says otherwise. It combines several famous gaming mechanics like gravity guns and slow motion, creating a very fun leveling combat system that gives players incentive to hoard and sell items in an RPG-like fashion.

The scariness of the game suffers, however, from many of the same problems that Hollywood struggles with, using the same crutches to overcome them. An example is a predictable use of jump scares. Anyone familiar with horror movies probably won’t lose their composure when an enemy inexplicably appears behind you. They’ll defeat the creature outright and be disappointed.

Then there’s the problem of gore. Given that I am a huge fan of the movie The Thing, I flirt with hypocrisy by saying that Dead Space reduces the “gross” factor of good creature design to a hackneyed gimmick. Many of the game’s creatures are gross the first few times, but what little fear factor they have wears thin. The game overstimulates the senses in a way that cheapens any shock value of the creatures by the game’s halfway point.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent
It seems like the words Lovecraftian and abomination are often thrown around willy, nilly to describe any large, nigh-invincible creature with a tentacled maw. To be more accurate, a Lovecraftian horror would be a horror which draws from one’s own imagination. Lovecraftian fear plays off of fear of the unknown. That’s a powerful, universal emotion that is not only more frightening than gore, but more difficult to execute.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent has its fair share of scary things to show you, yet some of the scariest moments of the game are less eventful. Early in the game, Amnesia establishes the existence of an extremely aggressive water-dwelling monster. Later on in the game, the ambient sounds of a water-filled area purposefully mimics the creature’s “kersplash” footsteps, turning an otherwise 10 minute puzzle into an hour of painstaking venturing between dry sanctuaries, when in reality nothing is there.

It also helps when there’s no combat system to speak of. The game creates a tension between the desire to run and your desire to hide. Sticking to the shadows and extinguishing your lantern makes stealth easier, but this makes a “sanity meter” ebb away, cuing not only visual effects typical of “sanity” game mechanics, but making the game increasingly difficult to control. The result is a stealth system that rewards caution while still encouraging decisiveness.

I’ll Pass
Although reviews and the recommendations of friends are telling me to drop $60 on Dead Space 2, I’m going to pass. At least at its current price.

Penumbra Overture, on the other hand, has caught my interest. A spiritual predecessor to the more recent Amnesia, Penumbra Overture comes from the same developer, Frictional Games. The main reason I purchased the Humble Indie Bundle this year was for Penumbra Overture. The game costs $10 on Steam.

If someone were willing to buy me a copy of Dead Space 2 for PC or XBOX360, I’d be more than happy to review it here on Gonzo Gamer.

Minecraft, a game by indie Swedish game maker Markus “notch” Persson, is a sleeper hit born on its unassuming graphics and “sandbox” gameplay. The game doesn’t give players objectives, it just sets them in a randomly generated world of boxes that can be combined and arranged to make specific items – or whatever the players want.

The media has covered many angles to the game. Persson started work on the game on his own, but it has sold 1,180,851 copies and is officially still in Beta. Persson was invited to Valve Software’s headquarters, interviewed by countless publications and has been given a handful of awards for the game. Since he is now rich, he hired a few more friends to work on more indie games with a similar barebones approach. The games are simple designs with simple ideas. Quick turn-around, low budgets, high returns.

Persson has said the game industry’s blockbuster games approach and the low cost of entry into PC game development has left a huge hole for indie developers like himself to make games that take risks and appeal to the gamers between the Call of Duty’s and World of Warcraft’s.

Minecraft is the YouTube of video games. It doesn’t just have a similar appeal, it owes much of its fame to YouTube. Friends make their worlds and invite others to see what they’ve made. Much of its user base uses YouTube and makes videos of their creations. Most people first heard about Minecraft because of YouTube videos of impressive creations like the scale model of the USS Enterprise, a man accidentally burning his house down, or the 16-bit code-running machine. People have gotten jobs from these creations, too. They actually matter!

While most players just make humble empires in their worlds, I think people are inspired by knowing that the sky is the limit* – they can make whatever they want, and no matter how silly or nerdy it is, it might just be awesome.

Minecraft is a very social game, and it has that twang of user-generated, “endless” gameplay. But with no narrative, it has no drive except what you put into it. It’s fun to see a new feature work the first few times, but after the utilitarian in us wears out, we can get bored easily and we have to reinvent ourselves.

*It is 64 blocks from sea-level to the “roof” of the sky, at which point you hit a glass ceiling.