Taking advantage of a free trial weekend, I recently spent a couple of days in The Secret World - the new urban fantasy MMO from The Longest Journey creator Ragnar Tørnquist.
I'm not really an MMO guy. I've toyed with Spiral Knights, Rusty Hearts, Fallen Earth and Dungeons & Dragons Online - adding up to a grand total of about fifteen hours - and spent enough time watching friends playing World of WarCraft, EVE Online, EverQuest II and Rift to know that I'm not interesting in trying those myself. Oh, and I was accepted for the Auto Assault beta, but couldn't get the damn thing working.
The setting and the creative director are what attracted me to The Secret World. I adore The Longest Journey and enjoyed its sequel, Dreamfall. The worlds, characters and stories of those games display wit, energy, originality and an impressive level of internal consistency. The Secret World paints with broader brushes, and isn't afraid to borrow elements of other properties, but it's still a well-realised take on the modern fantasy-horror concept. The tropes are put together in a way which is both logical and entertaining, enough that instead of spending my time going "Oh, this bit is like Mage: The Awakening," I was investing directly into The Secret World to a degree I didn't expect. One big YMMV thing to note: the cutscenes are frequent and marathon.
They're well directed and mostly well acted, but my god are they long.
There wasn't much roleplaying going on, which is a shame as a purported strong roleplaying environment was one of the other things which caught my interest. But there was more roleplaying than in
most MMOs, which is to say, there was any roleplaying going on at all.
And at least in a modern setting people talking about other MMOs in the
chat window can be taken as in-character conversation.
That modern setting is well integrated. It's not just a gimmick to make it stand out, although of course, that helps. There are the simple things - energy drinks in place of mana potions, shotguns instead of crossbows - but clever use of the real-world setting goes much deeper, from jumping on cars to set off the alarms to attract zombies, to espionage using webcams mounted on remote controlled helicopters, to an NPC suggestion to look something up on Google. In fact, it may even be too clever at times - I got stuck on one mission, briefly, because I wasn't familiar with a certain element of how church services operate.
I didn't get to do a lot of the much-vaunted investigation missions, which are geared more around codebreaking and old-fashioned adventure gaming than traditional MMO kill/fetch quests, but from what I saw they were well-designed and offer a great change of pace. Indeed, with stealth missions, puzzle-solving missions and even escort missions which don't entirely suck, The Secret World has more variety than any other MMO I've seen. I can't comment on PvP or trading because I did little of the latter and none of the former, but the bread and butter adventuring is solid.
The combat didn't blow my mind but it felt no more or less weighty than any other MMO I've encountered, save perhaps the enjoyably frantic Spiral Knights. It's a little on the 'clicking on things until the health bar hits zero' side of things, but aren't they all? The tactical options didn't seem tremendously deep in my time playing, but I understand that a lot more open up as the game goes on, and they offer a lot of scope for playing your character the way you want to play them. However there's not much visual character customisation (it's mostly punk chicks with blue hair and lots of cleavage, or tough guys in shades) and while there's a lot of skills and abilities, they're all ultimately different lighting effects for doing the same handful of things. The big thing seems to be inflicting and abusing various status ailments, which is interesting, but I'm not convinced about how much depth there is to it for a long game. That said, my main problem with combat and character progression was that to really understand it, you need to have already played the game - again, a common MMO failing.
In fact, most of the things about The Secret World which reminded me of other MMOs were the things I didn't like, the same issues which keep me from enjoying the rest of the genre. The interface is pretty illogical, and in a fashion which means remapping it doesn't help much. It certainly doesn't make any strides towards solving the "requires three hands to play" syndrome ubiquitous to MMOs. One gets used to it, of course, but it took me a while and never really felt properly intuitive. Some elements of the control scheme and menu system aren't explained very well, either.
Overall I must say I quite enjoyed The Secret World - when it worked. Unfortunately the weekend was plagued by server-side connection issues, so much so that the trial period was extended by six hours. There were also a couple of moments of bugged quests, and a driver conflict which wasn't resolved when I updated my drivers. Not a great advertisement, and I have to wonder how happy Funcom and EA are with the free trial given the technical problems which plagued it.
And while I enjoyed The Secret World, I didn't love it. Not enough to pay full price for it when I don't have many friends interested in it, and when things like Spiral Knights and D&D Online are free to play. If it comes down in price, or moves to a microtransaction model, I'd probably take it up. I also think The Secret World would make a great pen-and-paper setting, and perhaps surprisingly I think it would feel quite different to the World of Darkness lines.
Yet I must question the logic of launching a premium-price MMO without a
strong, established IP, and without a standard free trial period, even before you factor in the technical kinks
yet to be smoothed over. Ragnar Tørnquist has a big cult following, but
I don't believe he's someone who can sell a game to a mainstream
audience on his name alone. The marketing campaign has been aggressive,
but it's being marketed in the same way - and in the same places - as
Zynga titles and other free to play games. Will The Secret World
entice people enough that they're willing to drop £40 on it, plus a
monthly subscription? The game has been modestly well-received, with
review scores mostly clumping in the 70% range, but those aren't the kind of numbers to set the world alight.
I'm torn on The Secret World. I want to see it succeed - it's trying new things, and it's bringing a much more interesting approach to storytelling and world building than most MMOs I've seen. But I think it's merely a good game rather than the great game it could be, and that the final leap to greatness won't happen without some necessary negative feedback. Takeup figures aren't out yet - I guess we'll have a better idea of what changes might be made once it's been out a while and the subscriptions stabilise. I have the awful feeling that if it underperforms, EA's solution will be to dial back the elements which make it so unique in a bid to bring it more in line with the field's leaders.
I hope I'm proved wrong there. Selfish as this is - it's not my job on the line - I'd rather see The Secret World as a glorious, ambitious failure than a homogenised, generic hack and slash fest, if that's the choice it comes down to.
Showing posts with label theory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theory. Show all posts
Friday, 10 August 2012
Tuesday, 31 July 2012
Control freakish
Thanks to a free trial weekend on Steam, I had the chance to play Borderlands - the co-op shooter of choice among my friends. Ultimately, I had some fun, but chose not to purchase the game.
You see, there were a lot of things about Borderlands I wasn't keen on. It's not that I think it's a bad game; I just didn't personally get on with it that well. Very high among said things I wasn't keen on was the interface. And I'm not talking about something as simple and easily remedied as key mapping here, although C for crouch? Come on. L-Ctrl is crouch in an FPS, and that is The Way Things Should Be.
No, the problems I have with Borderlands' controls are much deeper. Why is the enter key interchangeable with left-click in some menus, but not others? Why do I stop sprinting when I turn with the keys, but not with mouselook? Why tell me to drive with WASD, when it's the mouse which controls driving direction?
Everything about Borderlands' control system screams that it was made for an Xbox controller. Now, it's a far cry from lazy ports which ask PC gamers to press triangle or right trigger, but I still felt the whole time that I should have been using a pad. Considering that it was developed by Gearbox - who first made their name in PC shooters - I find that a little bit of a shame. It's all small things, but they add up, and Borderlands ultimately played very non-intuitively for me.
ARMA 2 is another game I've struggled to get into, and again, the interface is a significant part of it. "Oh," I thought to myself as I failed to climb over a small wall after hitting all the usual suspect keys and checking the control map, "There must not be a climb key."
A short while later, one of the handy little gameplay tips tells me to press V to climb over obstacles. Now, that mapping doesn't make a tremendous amount of sense, but I can live with that. What annoyed me was the fact that I couldn't find that anywhere in the control map. After checking again, I found it - buried away somewhere in the mass of controls for this game and labelled as "step over." Well, that's certainly an intuitive name for a key which lets you climb fences.
The mouse sensitivity range seems to be much higher than in most games, and after pushing it way down to pan at the speed I like, the precision in small movements was lost. Perhaps it's meant to be more realistic that way, but it's still absolutely nothing like aiming with a real gun, and realism at the expense of basic playability is something I just can't get on board with. Even the relatively straightforward (and super-arcadey) Army of Two took me a bit of time to get to grips with, with some of the control quirks - the selection of sniper mode, for example - seeming needlessly inelegant.
In my old age, I don't like impediments coming between me and my game. My life sucks enough as it is without my supposed hobby, the thing I do to relax, pissing me off even more. More often than not I want to jump in and have some fun, and for me, having to memorise thirty-odd different commands is not fun. Maybe I'll get disowned from gaming by the hardcore crowd, but it's the way it is - every time a game tells me to press a new key, it means another little click of the fun ratcheting down. Of course some of this is necessary, but again it adds up, and in the case of some games it adds up to more than I can be bothered with.
This coming weekend, there's another free trial - this time of Ragnar Tørnquist's supernatural MMO The Secret World. I'll be giving that a try, but I've never been that into MMOs and one of the big problems I have with them is - surprise, surprise - the number of commands to keep track of at once. I'm a big fan of Ragnar's storytelling ability, but will The Secret World's interface get in the way of my enjoying it? I guess I'll find out within the week.
You see, there were a lot of things about Borderlands I wasn't keen on. It's not that I think it's a bad game; I just didn't personally get on with it that well. Very high among said things I wasn't keen on was the interface. And I'm not talking about something as simple and easily remedied as key mapping here, although C for crouch? Come on. L-Ctrl is crouch in an FPS, and that is The Way Things Should Be.
No, the problems I have with Borderlands' controls are much deeper. Why is the enter key interchangeable with left-click in some menus, but not others? Why do I stop sprinting when I turn with the keys, but not with mouselook? Why tell me to drive with WASD, when it's the mouse which controls driving direction?
Everything about Borderlands' control system screams that it was made for an Xbox controller. Now, it's a far cry from lazy ports which ask PC gamers to press triangle or right trigger, but I still felt the whole time that I should have been using a pad. Considering that it was developed by Gearbox - who first made their name in PC shooters - I find that a little bit of a shame. It's all small things, but they add up, and Borderlands ultimately played very non-intuitively for me.
ARMA 2 is another game I've struggled to get into, and again, the interface is a significant part of it. "Oh," I thought to myself as I failed to climb over a small wall after hitting all the usual suspect keys and checking the control map, "There must not be a climb key."
A short while later, one of the handy little gameplay tips tells me to press V to climb over obstacles. Now, that mapping doesn't make a tremendous amount of sense, but I can live with that. What annoyed me was the fact that I couldn't find that anywhere in the control map. After checking again, I found it - buried away somewhere in the mass of controls for this game and labelled as "step over." Well, that's certainly an intuitive name for a key which lets you climb fences.
The mouse sensitivity range seems to be much higher than in most games, and after pushing it way down to pan at the speed I like, the precision in small movements was lost. Perhaps it's meant to be more realistic that way, but it's still absolutely nothing like aiming with a real gun, and realism at the expense of basic playability is something I just can't get on board with. Even the relatively straightforward (and super-arcadey) Army of Two took me a bit of time to get to grips with, with some of the control quirks - the selection of sniper mode, for example - seeming needlessly inelegant.
In my old age, I don't like impediments coming between me and my game. My life sucks enough as it is without my supposed hobby, the thing I do to relax, pissing me off even more. More often than not I want to jump in and have some fun, and for me, having to memorise thirty-odd different commands is not fun. Maybe I'll get disowned from gaming by the hardcore crowd, but it's the way it is - every time a game tells me to press a new key, it means another little click of the fun ratcheting down. Of course some of this is necessary, but again it adds up, and in the case of some games it adds up to more than I can be bothered with.
This coming weekend, there's another free trial - this time of Ragnar Tørnquist's supernatural MMO The Secret World. I'll be giving that a try, but I've never been that into MMOs and one of the big problems I have with them is - surprise, surprise - the number of commands to keep track of at once. I'm a big fan of Ragnar's storytelling ability, but will The Secret World's interface get in the way of my enjoying it? I guess I'll find out within the week.
Sunday, 15 July 2012
Trailer trash
I wanted to say something about all the Hitman hubbub, but I ultimately had even less to add to that than I did to the Diablo DRM debate. My major issue with the Hitman: Absolution trailer was not one of morality or chivalry, but that it's that it's not Hitman. Hitman is a game about not killing people. That's a very important bit. The part about not drawing attention to yourself, and not turning things into a bloodbath? Being all, like, subtle and stuff, or at least as subtle as one can be for a man with a bardcode on his head? That's what Hitman's about. And an explosive shootout with the cast of Sister Candie Takes The Divine Sacrament* is not subtle. I have subsequently been assured that the Absolution devs disliked the trailer just as much as everyone else, and have promised that the game will stay true to the core of Hitman's heritage.
Would fetish nuns with rocket launchers have caused half as much flap in a trailer for a new Wet or Bayonetta? Well, maybe. Probably. Bayonetta saw a fair amount of controversy surrounding its perceived sexism. But y'know, gender stereotyping aside, that's the sort of thing those games are about. And I salute them for it! That sort of hypersexualised, tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top, crazy-and-deranged-just-for-the-sake-of-it Thing certainly has its place. It's even had its place in Hitman over the years, at least in terms of aesthetic, if perhaps not action. I suppose, in that light, that the rocket launchers bother me more than the fetish nuns.
I've finally gotten round to Saints Row: The Third, and it's practically some kind of golden, penis-shaped temple to debauched lunacy. Yes, all the ladies have pneumatic boobies, and all the men have abs you could bounce rocks off, but that doesn't have to translate to sexist portrayals in terms of personality or societal role. For the most part, SR3 seems to do pretty well there. I'm about as pro gender quality as it's possible to be, but gender equality doesn't mean pretending that sex isn't fun, or that sexuality can't be addressed with a nod and a wink.
And then, there were Duke Nukem Forever's trailers. There's a line between fun, over the top cheese and actual sexism - a wide, blurry line, but some sort of line nonetheless - and DNF smeared rancid, blood-flecked semen all over that line. DNF's trailer made it seem like the game equivalent of the guy who's absolutely convinced that all women are gold-digging whores who need a strong man to keep them in line. That might be part of the same continuum as Bayonetta, but then so is puritanically censoring anything even remotely sexual, and it could be worse than tongue-in-cheek, knowing, over-sexuality.
Assassins attacking 47 in his hotel room, and him having to fight his way out? Sure, I can dig that. Said assassins being an all-female group dressed in latex nuns' habits? Okay then - so far so Tarantino, I guess. Blowing the shit out of the motel in huge explosions? Urgh... I suppose so. The really problematic bit is the fact that Square Enix have decided that this is what they want people's first impression of the new game to be.
Well, the pre-order going up six months ahead of release is also slightly daunting.
A trailer is many people's first window into a game. It's very much a first impression. A preview should get you excited, and displaying that a new installment will be completely different to the previous titles is very risky and rather questionable. The Absolution trailer tells us it will be centred around outlandish action and hyper-stylised sexuality, and that 47 will be an active agent in that this time; longtime fans understand that 47 is an outsider to this sort of thing, and that through his eyes things like fetish nuns with rocket launchers are distasteful. The OTT sexuality and violence of the previous Hitman games weren't presented as something to be celebrated. And of course there's the fact that a game about stealthy assassinations shouldn't need to be marketed on tits and explosions.
In light of the Hitman trailer, there's been a slight resurgence of talk concerning the Tomb Raider reboot's trailers. One of the big problems I've always had with the Tomb Raider series is the fact that Lara Croft is such a monumentally objectionable person. She's blessed with beauty, brains, brawn and fabulous wealth, yet how does she put her good fortune to use? By breaking into sites of historical importance and hoovering up anything valuable while killing the natives and endangered animals residing there. She's basically using her privilege to do whatever she likes, and screw anyone else it might affect. Granted, she finds herself in danger a lot, but she willingly put herself in that position in pursuit of stolen riches. Why, exactly, are we supposed to be sympathetic when she's in trouble? Why do you think 'killing Lara' was such a popular hobby among the PSX generation?
Some games tried to humanise her, or explain her motivations, but it always felt like an awkward retcon to me. Angel of Darkness tried to play up the nasty side of Lara, but it was more like a teenager's concept of 'badass' that true emotional darkness. Lara was always just a fundamentally unlikeable person. The reboot's trailer might not create a likeable protagonist - time will tell - but it's exploring why she is the way she is in a deep, potentially uncomfortable fashion (and I'm not talking about the gratuitous near-rape scene, nor the depressing fact that it's there to make male gamers want to protect Lara).
Most of us have to sympathise, psychologically, with someone who's been through a traumatic experience. But we don't have to like them. That creates an emotional and narrative tension. It's a simple trick, but it works. It was a key element of Analogue: A Hate Story; The Pale Bride went through unspeakable things, but as much as we might feel sorry for her, she's still pretty awful. James Bond went through unspeakable things in the Casino Royale remake, but they don't alter the fact he's an arsehole.
So it is with Lara in the new Tomb Raider trailer. She's beaten, subjected to appalling cicrumstances, and watches her friends get killed. Is that why she becomes the emotionless monster she is in later life? I may very well dislike the new Lara - time will tell - but I feel that there's a good chance I'll dislike her in an interesting way, and not just despise her for being a pantomime murderer. Then again, a lot of gamers have said good things about the old Lara, praising the fact she's a stone cold, unflappable badass. Ick.
Personally, what's gotten me most excited is perhaps the most minimalist preview around. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Audiosurf Air! Fun fact: Audiosurf is my joint third-most played game on Steam, tied with Psychonauts at 35.6 hours (yeah, it took me that long to complete Psychonauts. Don't... don't ask. I'm ashamed). All that's been revealed of Audiosurf Air is the name and three screenshots, and as the website dryly notes, the graphics are not final and "other things are also not final." But it's enough - there will be a new Audiosurf, and it will not be about fetish nuns with rocket launchers. Score!
I've also been enjoying the videos Stainless put out during their successful Carmageddon Kickstarter campaign. Even compared to Double Fine's videos, the Carmageddon videos are amateurish as hell (one of them features one of the developers dancing around to Trololo for about four minutes, for fuck sake) but I for one actually like that. Nobby and Simista come off as people you could go down the pub with. They're the kind of people I trust with a game like Carmageddon, which was - in essence - a fun pisstake. An accomplished, boundary-rewriting pisstake, but even so.
I wanted to close with something on the previews from Nintendo's new spy-catching game for the 3DS, but... rather embarrassingly.... I can't for the life of me remember what it's called. And this is looking very long and meandering as it is, so I'd better sign off. Bai bai.
*Just be thankful that I couldn't think of a good transubstantiation joke.
Would fetish nuns with rocket launchers have caused half as much flap in a trailer for a new Wet or Bayonetta? Well, maybe. Probably. Bayonetta saw a fair amount of controversy surrounding its perceived sexism. But y'know, gender stereotyping aside, that's the sort of thing those games are about. And I salute them for it! That sort of hypersexualised, tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top, crazy-and-deranged-just-for-the-sake-of-it Thing certainly has its place. It's even had its place in Hitman over the years, at least in terms of aesthetic, if perhaps not action. I suppose, in that light, that the rocket launchers bother me more than the fetish nuns.
I've finally gotten round to Saints Row: The Third, and it's practically some kind of golden, penis-shaped temple to debauched lunacy. Yes, all the ladies have pneumatic boobies, and all the men have abs you could bounce rocks off, but that doesn't have to translate to sexist portrayals in terms of personality or societal role. For the most part, SR3 seems to do pretty well there. I'm about as pro gender quality as it's possible to be, but gender equality doesn't mean pretending that sex isn't fun, or that sexuality can't be addressed with a nod and a wink.
And then, there were Duke Nukem Forever's trailers. There's a line between fun, over the top cheese and actual sexism - a wide, blurry line, but some sort of line nonetheless - and DNF smeared rancid, blood-flecked semen all over that line. DNF's trailer made it seem like the game equivalent of the guy who's absolutely convinced that all women are gold-digging whores who need a strong man to keep them in line. That might be part of the same continuum as Bayonetta, but then so is puritanically censoring anything even remotely sexual, and it could be worse than tongue-in-cheek, knowing, over-sexuality.
Assassins attacking 47 in his hotel room, and him having to fight his way out? Sure, I can dig that. Said assassins being an all-female group dressed in latex nuns' habits? Okay then - so far so Tarantino, I guess. Blowing the shit out of the motel in huge explosions? Urgh... I suppose so. The really problematic bit is the fact that Square Enix have decided that this is what they want people's first impression of the new game to be.
Well, the pre-order going up six months ahead of release is also slightly daunting.
A trailer is many people's first window into a game. It's very much a first impression. A preview should get you excited, and displaying that a new installment will be completely different to the previous titles is very risky and rather questionable. The Absolution trailer tells us it will be centred around outlandish action and hyper-stylised sexuality, and that 47 will be an active agent in that this time; longtime fans understand that 47 is an outsider to this sort of thing, and that through his eyes things like fetish nuns with rocket launchers are distasteful. The OTT sexuality and violence of the previous Hitman games weren't presented as something to be celebrated. And of course there's the fact that a game about stealthy assassinations shouldn't need to be marketed on tits and explosions.
In light of the Hitman trailer, there's been a slight resurgence of talk concerning the Tomb Raider reboot's trailers. One of the big problems I've always had with the Tomb Raider series is the fact that Lara Croft is such a monumentally objectionable person. She's blessed with beauty, brains, brawn and fabulous wealth, yet how does she put her good fortune to use? By breaking into sites of historical importance and hoovering up anything valuable while killing the natives and endangered animals residing there. She's basically using her privilege to do whatever she likes, and screw anyone else it might affect. Granted, she finds herself in danger a lot, but she willingly put herself in that position in pursuit of stolen riches. Why, exactly, are we supposed to be sympathetic when she's in trouble? Why do you think 'killing Lara' was such a popular hobby among the PSX generation?
Some games tried to humanise her, or explain her motivations, but it always felt like an awkward retcon to me. Angel of Darkness tried to play up the nasty side of Lara, but it was more like a teenager's concept of 'badass' that true emotional darkness. Lara was always just a fundamentally unlikeable person. The reboot's trailer might not create a likeable protagonist - time will tell - but it's exploring why she is the way she is in a deep, potentially uncomfortable fashion (and I'm not talking about the gratuitous near-rape scene, nor the depressing fact that it's there to make male gamers want to protect Lara).
Most of us have to sympathise, psychologically, with someone who's been through a traumatic experience. But we don't have to like them. That creates an emotional and narrative tension. It's a simple trick, but it works. It was a key element of Analogue: A Hate Story; The Pale Bride went through unspeakable things, but as much as we might feel sorry for her, she's still pretty awful. James Bond went through unspeakable things in the Casino Royale remake, but they don't alter the fact he's an arsehole.
So it is with Lara in the new Tomb Raider trailer. She's beaten, subjected to appalling cicrumstances, and watches her friends get killed. Is that why she becomes the emotionless monster she is in later life? I may very well dislike the new Lara - time will tell - but I feel that there's a good chance I'll dislike her in an interesting way, and not just despise her for being a pantomime murderer. Then again, a lot of gamers have said good things about the old Lara, praising the fact she's a stone cold, unflappable badass. Ick.
Personally, what's gotten me most excited is perhaps the most minimalist preview around. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Audiosurf Air! Fun fact: Audiosurf is my joint third-most played game on Steam, tied with Psychonauts at 35.6 hours (yeah, it took me that long to complete Psychonauts. Don't... don't ask. I'm ashamed). All that's been revealed of Audiosurf Air is the name and three screenshots, and as the website dryly notes, the graphics are not final and "other things are also not final." But it's enough - there will be a new Audiosurf, and it will not be about fetish nuns with rocket launchers. Score!
I've also been enjoying the videos Stainless put out during their successful Carmageddon Kickstarter campaign. Even compared to Double Fine's videos, the Carmageddon videos are amateurish as hell (one of them features one of the developers dancing around to Trololo for about four minutes, for fuck sake) but I for one actually like that. Nobby and Simista come off as people you could go down the pub with. They're the kind of people I trust with a game like Carmageddon, which was - in essence - a fun pisstake. An accomplished, boundary-rewriting pisstake, but even so.
I wanted to close with something on the previews from Nintendo's new spy-catching game for the 3DS, but... rather embarrassingly.... I can't for the life of me remember what it's called. And this is looking very long and meandering as it is, so I'd better sign off. Bai bai.
*Just be thankful that I couldn't think of a good transubstantiation joke.
Friday, 8 June 2012
Beyond the pale curtain [Review - Analogue: A Hate Story]
*Hyun-ae wants to know what I think of The Pale Bride. Do I think her fate was tragic, or that she was just being overly dramatic?
Both, I think. The Pale Bride is a selfish, melodramatic brat. But at the same time, she's been unfairly thrust into a world she doesn't understand, and where nobody understands her. It's a world she can never connect with, yet she's expected to act the way people think she should. She doesn't know how she's supposed to behave, but the people around her don't comprehend that she doesn't know. The behaviour expected of her is something she finds morally reprehensible. The behaviour which is the norm to her, meanwhile, is reprehensible to the people among whom she now finds herself.
Both, I find myself still thinking, even after dwelling on it. I don't think I like The Pale Bride. I don't think she and I would get along that well, if we knew each other. But there's no way she deserves the fate which has befallen her. She's a confused and slightly stupid kid, given to making everything a Big Deal, but this really IS a Bigger Deal than most of us could ever imagine facing.
Both, I want to tell *Hyun-ae, but I can't. I have to choose one answer or the other. In most games, this would frustrate me. In Christine Love's Analogue: A Hate Story, it's one of the most beautiful pieces of design I've ever encountered. The AI *Hyun-ae's language parsing systems have failed, and she can only receive communication from me as binary inputs. She asks me a question, and I get to answer between the choices she gives me: this or that, yes or no... is The Pale Bride a tragic figure, or a melodramatic one?
Both, but I can't say that. *Hyun-ae doesn't seem to understand that I might think both, and I don't know if she ever will.
After much deliberation, I say that it's tragic.
*Hyun-ae agrees with me. She's glad someone finally sees it the same way she does. She grants me access to another datafile.
This worries me. Is *Hyun-ae going to keep things from me? She already sort of did, deleting a message from someone named *Mute while I was halfway through. I got the impression there was something in there she didn't want me to read. Do I need to tell *Hyun-ae what she wants to hear, if I'm going to complete my mission? After all, that's why I'm here: to retrieve data. I've been tasked to recover as much as I can from the colony spaceship Mugunghwa, an ancient Marie Celeste of deep space, and try to shed some light on why it vanished all those centuries ago. I knew I'd have to negotiate the AI to do it, but not like this.
Can I even trust *Hyun-ae? I don't know. She's been alone for over six hundred years, and she seems to have gotten a little eccentric. Has she got ulterior motives... did the fate of the Mugunghwa have something to do with her? Is she trying to play me? Maybe her language parsers aren't even really broken...
But it's part of my job to be paranoid and right now, either way, I feel sorry for her. Perhaps even more than I do for The Pale Bride, or Sang-jung the lonely drunk or Jae-hwa the discarded consort or Hana the secret poet, or any of the other people whose struggles and lives are now reduced to a handful of diary entries. People who wrote down their feelings as they felt them - not to keep records, just to vent. From these fragments of personalities, and their opinions of each other, I need to piece together what happened.
I don't know if can trust *Hyun-ae, but I do know that I need her help, and that means I need to stay on her good side. Yet... that's not why I talk to her after every new piece of data revealed. I want to know what she thinks, and more than that, I want her to know that after centuries of solitude, somebody cares about her opinion. *Hyun-ae admits that she doesn't know anything about me, or my motivations, or what I think of her. Having someone to talk to just means that much to her, even with our limited ability to interact.
It's good that she wants to talk, because we have work to do. I need to look into the power struggle between the Smith and Kim families, the ship's two dominant noble houses. At some point during the voyage, something happened - exactly what is never stated, but something big - and in the following centuries, society regressed. It regressed technologically, as people forgot how to use the instruments around them, and it regressed socially, into a feudal serfdom of rigid heirarchy, particularly reminiscent of medieval Korea - a civilisation where deviation from what's expected of one's rank, age and gender is considered horrifying. On some level I find myself infuriated by what the long-dead Smiths, Kims and associates have to say. I want to tell the neglected wife to stand up for herself, to tell the emotionally distant father to pay attention to his daughter, to tell the ambitious but dullardly civil servant to stop measuring his life by how others perceive him. Mainly I feel sorry for them, and wish I could do something. But it's centuries too late for that, and anyway, they wouldn't have understood. Only one person in that society, The Pale Bride, had a different perspective - and she had probably the most miserable time of them all. I read on, uncovering more of their anguish and triumph, at once absorbed, repulsed, pitying, heartbroken.
Later, *Hyun-ae suggests that I could change her avatar's clothing. Right now she's in what she describes as a "schoolgirl-librarian" look, but she thinks it's a bit tacky. I feel awkward about this... it's voyeuristic to have this AI play dress-up for me, especially in light of the culture recorded in the datafiles, a culture where women are little more than political property to be traded and used up. But... it's not really for me, this option to change her outfit - it's what she wants. The reasons why she wants it might make me uncomfortable, but it'll make her happy nonetheless. I don't think about keeping her happy anymore, not in the sense I described earlier; I genuinely want her to be happy. She's not just an archival tool, a cartoon paperclip with big eyes. She's a real person who happens to be made of bits instead of blood, and she's been left in solitude for several times longer than my own lifespan. She's got her flaws, sure, but she deserves to have someone be nice to her, even for a little while.
I cycle through the options and decide upon the detective look, complete with flat cap and pipe. It seems to be her favourite, too. She asks me what I think, and one of the choices she gives me is to say that I think she makes a great sidekick. Only the way she says it is... well... is this her trying to be subtle? Perhaps. Probably. I think she's latching on to me a bit too closely... understandable, right? If a person is alone for the larger part of a millenium, and then someone comes along who acts nice towards them, what would you expect? I want her to be happy, but I don't want to give her the wrong impression. Maybe I should choose the other option, telling her that the outfit looks stupid.
But there's no way I can do that.
I say she makes a great sidekick.
And then I wonder how different I really am, deep down, from the people recorded in these datafiles.
A few hours and some revelations later, I leave Mugunghwa with the data I was hired to get, but that's not all. I've brought a new friend with me. I don't agree with everything she's said to me, and when we get her speech parsing systems back online, I expect there to be arguments. But she needs... something. After what she's been through, surely a bad friend is better than no friend at all.
And I think I need her, too, both for companionship and for any kind of positive closure. I did something terrible to get to this point. I made a hard choice. I still don't know if it was the right choice, but it was my choice, and that's enough right now. Anything at all is at least something; I'm leaving the ship with knowledge far more valuable to me, on a personal level, than the credits I'll get in payment or the solving of a mystery.
I've never been moved by a Bioware game. I've never been moved by a Square-Enix game. I've only rarely been moved by a Bethesda game.
I've never not been moved by a Christine Love game.
Analogue is her tightest and most elegant work to date. At about £11 including tax, it's perhaps a little steeply priced for the amount of content you get, but that's the wrong way to look at it. While you're buying Analogue, be sure to also pick up her excellent previous games Digital: A Love Story and don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story; £11 for all three is an absolute steal. The flaws of those earlier games are wrinkled out of Analogue - the twists and turns of the plot all make sense, and the plot, the mechanics and the anime style all fit together much more coherently than before. Her plots always flow well, but the ways in which you advance them used to seem a bit contrived sometimes. That's not the case here. In the first act, I expected to have a criticism - that the game was overstating the psychological differences between men and women. But as the game goes on, it becomes clear that it's more about the perceptions people have of gender differences. I don't know whether Christine Love shares my outlook that the sexes are much closer, psychologically, than is typically portrayed, but I do know that Analogue can be read that way. I'm pretty sure it can be read other ways too, and that's one of most obvious hallmarks of depth within a piece of art.
And Analogue is art, of that I have no doubt. The sci-fi setting, ambient music and clinical visuals mask a story about human existence which is one of the most effective and affecting in the medium of gaming. In fact, my biggest criticism of Analogue might be that it's too perfect. All of the themes from the previous games are present - privacy, gender and sexuality politics, the relationship between self-expression and emotional growth, the effect of technology on human communication, the dichotomy between historical perspective and immediate context - and they're all built on intelligently and logically from what went before. What's more, they join together almost seamlessly into something at once absolutely singular and impossibly vast. At times it feels less like the next step in her development, and more like a conclusion to it. I can't wait for Christine's next game, whatever it might be [I'm not sure whether current project The Mysterious Aphroditus is going to be commercially released], not just for the quality of her existing titles but to see how and where she can build her themes further - or explore new ground altogether. We may be at the point where any further pure distillation of a "Christine Love game," without some shift in theme or style, would start to feel a little like self-parody.
But it's unfair to judge Analogue on the merits of some hypothetical future release. On the merits of itself, Analogue is one of the best games I've played in years, and I can't recommend it enough.
Both, I think. The Pale Bride is a selfish, melodramatic brat. But at the same time, she's been unfairly thrust into a world she doesn't understand, and where nobody understands her. It's a world she can never connect with, yet she's expected to act the way people think she should. She doesn't know how she's supposed to behave, but the people around her don't comprehend that she doesn't know. The behaviour expected of her is something she finds morally reprehensible. The behaviour which is the norm to her, meanwhile, is reprehensible to the people among whom she now finds herself.
Both, I find myself still thinking, even after dwelling on it. I don't think I like The Pale Bride. I don't think she and I would get along that well, if we knew each other. But there's no way she deserves the fate which has befallen her. She's a confused and slightly stupid kid, given to making everything a Big Deal, but this really IS a Bigger Deal than most of us could ever imagine facing.
Both, I want to tell *Hyun-ae, but I can't. I have to choose one answer or the other. In most games, this would frustrate me. In Christine Love's Analogue: A Hate Story, it's one of the most beautiful pieces of design I've ever encountered. The AI *Hyun-ae's language parsing systems have failed, and she can only receive communication from me as binary inputs. She asks me a question, and I get to answer between the choices she gives me: this or that, yes or no... is The Pale Bride a tragic figure, or a melodramatic one?
Both, but I can't say that. *Hyun-ae doesn't seem to understand that I might think both, and I don't know if she ever will.
After much deliberation, I say that it's tragic.
*Hyun-ae agrees with me. She's glad someone finally sees it the same way she does. She grants me access to another datafile.
This worries me. Is *Hyun-ae going to keep things from me? She already sort of did, deleting a message from someone named *Mute while I was halfway through. I got the impression there was something in there she didn't want me to read. Do I need to tell *Hyun-ae what she wants to hear, if I'm going to complete my mission? After all, that's why I'm here: to retrieve data. I've been tasked to recover as much as I can from the colony spaceship Mugunghwa, an ancient Marie Celeste of deep space, and try to shed some light on why it vanished all those centuries ago. I knew I'd have to negotiate the AI to do it, but not like this.
Can I even trust *Hyun-ae? I don't know. She's been alone for over six hundred years, and she seems to have gotten a little eccentric. Has she got ulterior motives... did the fate of the Mugunghwa have something to do with her? Is she trying to play me? Maybe her language parsers aren't even really broken...
But it's part of my job to be paranoid and right now, either way, I feel sorry for her. Perhaps even more than I do for The Pale Bride, or Sang-jung the lonely drunk or Jae-hwa the discarded consort or Hana the secret poet, or any of the other people whose struggles and lives are now reduced to a handful of diary entries. People who wrote down their feelings as they felt them - not to keep records, just to vent. From these fragments of personalities, and their opinions of each other, I need to piece together what happened.
I don't know if can trust *Hyun-ae, but I do know that I need her help, and that means I need to stay on her good side. Yet... that's not why I talk to her after every new piece of data revealed. I want to know what she thinks, and more than that, I want her to know that after centuries of solitude, somebody cares about her opinion. *Hyun-ae admits that she doesn't know anything about me, or my motivations, or what I think of her. Having someone to talk to just means that much to her, even with our limited ability to interact.
It's good that she wants to talk, because we have work to do. I need to look into the power struggle between the Smith and Kim families, the ship's two dominant noble houses. At some point during the voyage, something happened - exactly what is never stated, but something big - and in the following centuries, society regressed. It regressed technologically, as people forgot how to use the instruments around them, and it regressed socially, into a feudal serfdom of rigid heirarchy, particularly reminiscent of medieval Korea - a civilisation where deviation from what's expected of one's rank, age and gender is considered horrifying. On some level I find myself infuriated by what the long-dead Smiths, Kims and associates have to say. I want to tell the neglected wife to stand up for herself, to tell the emotionally distant father to pay attention to his daughter, to tell the ambitious but dullardly civil servant to stop measuring his life by how others perceive him. Mainly I feel sorry for them, and wish I could do something. But it's centuries too late for that, and anyway, they wouldn't have understood. Only one person in that society, The Pale Bride, had a different perspective - and she had probably the most miserable time of them all. I read on, uncovering more of their anguish and triumph, at once absorbed, repulsed, pitying, heartbroken.
Later, *Hyun-ae suggests that I could change her avatar's clothing. Right now she's in what she describes as a "schoolgirl-librarian" look, but she thinks it's a bit tacky. I feel awkward about this... it's voyeuristic to have this AI play dress-up for me, especially in light of the culture recorded in the datafiles, a culture where women are little more than political property to be traded and used up. But... it's not really for me, this option to change her outfit - it's what she wants. The reasons why she wants it might make me uncomfortable, but it'll make her happy nonetheless. I don't think about keeping her happy anymore, not in the sense I described earlier; I genuinely want her to be happy. She's not just an archival tool, a cartoon paperclip with big eyes. She's a real person who happens to be made of bits instead of blood, and she's been left in solitude for several times longer than my own lifespan. She's got her flaws, sure, but she deserves to have someone be nice to her, even for a little while.
I cycle through the options and decide upon the detective look, complete with flat cap and pipe. It seems to be her favourite, too. She asks me what I think, and one of the choices she gives me is to say that I think she makes a great sidekick. Only the way she says it is... well... is this her trying to be subtle? Perhaps. Probably. I think she's latching on to me a bit too closely... understandable, right? If a person is alone for the larger part of a millenium, and then someone comes along who acts nice towards them, what would you expect? I want her to be happy, but I don't want to give her the wrong impression. Maybe I should choose the other option, telling her that the outfit looks stupid.
But there's no way I can do that.
I say she makes a great sidekick.
And then I wonder how different I really am, deep down, from the people recorded in these datafiles.
A few hours and some revelations later, I leave Mugunghwa with the data I was hired to get, but that's not all. I've brought a new friend with me. I don't agree with everything she's said to me, and when we get her speech parsing systems back online, I expect there to be arguments. But she needs... something. After what she's been through, surely a bad friend is better than no friend at all.
And I think I need her, too, both for companionship and for any kind of positive closure. I did something terrible to get to this point. I made a hard choice. I still don't know if it was the right choice, but it was my choice, and that's enough right now. Anything at all is at least something; I'm leaving the ship with knowledge far more valuable to me, on a personal level, than the credits I'll get in payment or the solving of a mystery.
I've never been moved by a Bioware game. I've never been moved by a Square-Enix game. I've only rarely been moved by a Bethesda game.
I've never not been moved by a Christine Love game.
Analogue is her tightest and most elegant work to date. At about £11 including tax, it's perhaps a little steeply priced for the amount of content you get, but that's the wrong way to look at it. While you're buying Analogue, be sure to also pick up her excellent previous games Digital: A Love Story and don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story; £11 for all three is an absolute steal. The flaws of those earlier games are wrinkled out of Analogue - the twists and turns of the plot all make sense, and the plot, the mechanics and the anime style all fit together much more coherently than before. Her plots always flow well, but the ways in which you advance them used to seem a bit contrived sometimes. That's not the case here. In the first act, I expected to have a criticism - that the game was overstating the psychological differences between men and women. But as the game goes on, it becomes clear that it's more about the perceptions people have of gender differences. I don't know whether Christine Love shares my outlook that the sexes are much closer, psychologically, than is typically portrayed, but I do know that Analogue can be read that way. I'm pretty sure it can be read other ways too, and that's one of most obvious hallmarks of depth within a piece of art.
And Analogue is art, of that I have no doubt. The sci-fi setting, ambient music and clinical visuals mask a story about human existence which is one of the most effective and affecting in the medium of gaming. In fact, my biggest criticism of Analogue might be that it's too perfect. All of the themes from the previous games are present - privacy, gender and sexuality politics, the relationship between self-expression and emotional growth, the effect of technology on human communication, the dichotomy between historical perspective and immediate context - and they're all built on intelligently and logically from what went before. What's more, they join together almost seamlessly into something at once absolutely singular and impossibly vast. At times it feels less like the next step in her development, and more like a conclusion to it. I can't wait for Christine's next game, whatever it might be [I'm not sure whether current project The Mysterious Aphroditus is going to be commercially released], not just for the quality of her existing titles but to see how and where she can build her themes further - or explore new ground altogether. We may be at the point where any further pure distillation of a "Christine Love game," without some shift in theme or style, would start to feel a little like self-parody.
But it's unfair to judge Analogue on the merits of some hypothetical future release. On the merits of itself, Analogue is one of the best games I've played in years, and I can't recommend it enough.
Tuesday, 21 June 2011
Correlation: Good Graphics = Bad Graphics
Much has been written about the poor quality of the graphics in the new Alice game, Alice: Madness Returns. Indeed, it seems to be about the only thing concerning the game which has been discussed in any depth. Now, I haven't played it. But I still know what it looks like courtesy of screenshots and YouTube. And to say this game is ugly is utter bunk. Not only those uncharitable (or hopelessly rose-tinted) souls who've claimed it wouldn't look out of place on the original PlayStation, but anyone who's dismissed this game for not having cutting edge graphics: you're kidding, right?
Remember the advent of true 3D? Remember when dynamic lighting was the brand new in thing? Or curved textures, bump mapping, per-pixel shading, HDR lighting, particle effects processing? All of those things were new once. And all of them improved gaming, but - here's the thing - only as much as the developer's care in applying them. Advanced visual technology used intelligently to enhance gameplay, that's great. Enhanced visual technology for the sake of waving your engine's dick in other developers' faces is a waste of development resources which could have been spent on something else. More draw distance in a game with a sniper rifle, smoke effects which obscure the battlefield, lighting which alerts you to an enemy's presence via shadows: YAY! These are all Good Things. Yet those things don't preclude a bit of style. Too many games - even some great games, with Gears of War instantly springing to mind - expend vast resources on (apparently) making games look as grey, bland and repetitive as possible to no discernible gameplay effect.
This has always been a problem - think back to the "too brown" Quake - but the trend seems to be on the rise with every generation. Even games which by today's standards have a striking visual flair are often murky to the point of eye strain, with that plasticy clingfilm look to them. Consider: Arkham Asylum, Bayonetta, any recent Lego game. Technology moves on and one era's photorealism is the next's retro kitsch; truly great graphics come from imagination and art.
Although that might be a bad thing, if reception to Alice is anything to go by. Apparently for a big chunk of gamers, if it doesn't feature all the latest graphical wizardry then it's an archaic throwback not worth another joule of thought beyond the first screenshot. It seems that this is the same crowd who dismiss anything with the slightest bit of artistry or originality, or which contains more colours than Grey, Brown, and A Different Brown, as 'casual' - that catch-all word of contempt for anything which isn't the latest edition of Like Halo But In WWII, or of course its spinoff, Like Modern Warfare But In Space. Oh the crippling irony. I can't blame them for the bitterness of it being lost on them, though; after all, they're used to swallowing Bobby Kotick's semen.
Sadly, these people who think that 'hardcore' means dutifully sucking down whatever garbage IGN tells them to like represent not only a major proportion of the buying power in the market, they also represent a major proportion of the population of message boards and review sites out there. Graphical fidelity shifts units and encourages hype. Innovative gameplay and artistic flair do too, but not half as much. It's a common complaint that nobody's innovating in games anymore; well, lots of people are, just not on the cardboard standees in HMV.
By all accounts, Alice is a pretty mediocre, bland game once you look past the visuals. But those visuals are stunning. As with the original, this is a game with a huge sense of style, a huge commitment to showing you sights you've never seen before. So what if they're not taking full advantage of modern processors? Does that really matter that much? Some people have actually called Alice's graphics 'criminal.' That's insane. It looks better than any FPS released yet this year, latest technology be damned. So can these people physically not play games more than a couple of years old without feeling sick? Show 'em Wasteland or the original Civilization and what, will they have an anuerysm?
I'd better stop now before I ask even more rhetorical questions. But suffice it to say, I'll take graphics which are technically outdated but inventive and stylish over graphics which are cutting edge but creatively moribund, any day of the week.
Remember the advent of true 3D? Remember when dynamic lighting was the brand new in thing? Or curved textures, bump mapping, per-pixel shading, HDR lighting, particle effects processing? All of those things were new once. And all of them improved gaming, but - here's the thing - only as much as the developer's care in applying them. Advanced visual technology used intelligently to enhance gameplay, that's great. Enhanced visual technology for the sake of waving your engine's dick in other developers' faces is a waste of development resources which could have been spent on something else. More draw distance in a game with a sniper rifle, smoke effects which obscure the battlefield, lighting which alerts you to an enemy's presence via shadows: YAY! These are all Good Things. Yet those things don't preclude a bit of style. Too many games - even some great games, with Gears of War instantly springing to mind - expend vast resources on (apparently) making games look as grey, bland and repetitive as possible to no discernible gameplay effect.
This has always been a problem - think back to the "too brown" Quake - but the trend seems to be on the rise with every generation. Even games which by today's standards have a striking visual flair are often murky to the point of eye strain, with that plasticy clingfilm look to them. Consider: Arkham Asylum, Bayonetta, any recent Lego game. Technology moves on and one era's photorealism is the next's retro kitsch; truly great graphics come from imagination and art.
Although that might be a bad thing, if reception to Alice is anything to go by. Apparently for a big chunk of gamers, if it doesn't feature all the latest graphical wizardry then it's an archaic throwback not worth another joule of thought beyond the first screenshot. It seems that this is the same crowd who dismiss anything with the slightest bit of artistry or originality, or which contains more colours than Grey, Brown, and A Different Brown, as 'casual' - that catch-all word of contempt for anything which isn't the latest edition of Like Halo But In WWII, or of course its spinoff, Like Modern Warfare But In Space. Oh the crippling irony. I can't blame them for the bitterness of it being lost on them, though; after all, they're used to swallowing Bobby Kotick's semen.
Sadly, these people who think that 'hardcore' means dutifully sucking down whatever garbage IGN tells them to like represent not only a major proportion of the buying power in the market, they also represent a major proportion of the population of message boards and review sites out there. Graphical fidelity shifts units and encourages hype. Innovative gameplay and artistic flair do too, but not half as much. It's a common complaint that nobody's innovating in games anymore; well, lots of people are, just not on the cardboard standees in HMV.
By all accounts, Alice is a pretty mediocre, bland game once you look past the visuals. But those visuals are stunning. As with the original, this is a game with a huge sense of style, a huge commitment to showing you sights you've never seen before. So what if they're not taking full advantage of modern processors? Does that really matter that much? Some people have actually called Alice's graphics 'criminal.' That's insane. It looks better than any FPS released yet this year, latest technology be damned. So can these people physically not play games more than a couple of years old without feeling sick? Show 'em Wasteland or the original Civilization and what, will they have an anuerysm?
I'd better stop now before I ask even more rhetorical questions. But suffice it to say, I'll take graphics which are technically outdated but inventive and stylish over graphics which are cutting edge but creatively moribund, any day of the week.
Friday, 27 May 2011
Totes radness, for the bro-est of bros [Review: Christine Love's interactive fiction]
I've been hellaciously ill for a few weeks now. I think I must have coughed up my own body weight in phlegm, most of which was - pleasantly - the lurid yellow of a safety jacket. I'm making it through, just about. Still got a cough and a blocked nose, and a bit of dizziness, but at least I can talk again, which is an improvement over the start of the month. For speeding along my journey to recovery, I am eternally indebted to my girlfriend, Lemsip, chicken soup and Christine Love.
No, my girlfriend is not named Lemsip. You read that wrong.
Unlike the game-stories of Christine Love which, according to the author herself, one can't 'read wrong'. Or as Love herself puts it, "...author intent isn’t worth shit. All that matters is how you interpret it. If something doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work, and intent doesn’t ever excuse that. Period. Don’t ever accept any argument that claims otherwise." A unique and interesting stance for a game developer - but then, she makes extremely unique and interesting games, and what's more, she's genuinely interested in improving her work, as evidenced by opening dialogues with her game's fans and starting feedback topics for them on her blog. She's taken herself to task, critically (and openly) analysing what she feels were the successes and failures of her titles. It's an admirable mark of honesty and passion, and it's refreshing to see an indie game creator who's happy to publicly deconstruct their own work. I may not agree with all of her stances, but I don't need to - I still applaud the fact that she's willing to share them.
Her best known work to date is Digital: A Love Story, which has the smart and slightly audacious hook of playing out entirely via a replicated Amiga workstation desktop. It's set in the late 80s and the tech level is commensurately primitive, with most of your interactions with other people relying solely on bulletin boards and email. It's superficially similar to Introversion's classic hacking sim Uplink, and Digital features a few very nice puzzles based around deciphering passwords and downloading software-cracking applications. It also sadly relies on long distance calling codes far, far too much, something which is fun at first but becomes a serious chore by the third act. Gaining access to an autodialler app halfway through would have improved matters considerably. It's a testament to how powerfully involving the narrative is that I wanted to keep playing.
Superficially, the game is about cracking sites to uncover a mystery; from a more narratological standpoint, it's about a trapped, lonely girl named Emilia who expresses herself through poetry posted onto internet bulletin boards. But really, the game is about agency; in a brilliant stroke, you never see your own character's messages. How 'you' replied is inferable only from the context of the replies you're sent back. The suppositions we impose on our videogame avatars are front and centre of this one. Are you in love with Emilia? Do you care about her platonically, and is she reading too much into your friendship? Are you just humouring her because she's clearly depressed? Are you the one who's misreading the signals? The correct interpretation of the game's events is the one you assume as you play.
Her latest game - don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story (best title ever, like, f'reals) - is... well, first off, game is an awkward word for it. It's interactive fiction. It's a visual novel. I'll admit I've never had much truck with visual novels; as don't take it personally itself notes at one point, the average visual novel rarely does anything beyond Super High School Pantie Adventure Six and the few which do always seem to cast you as a stupidly-named swordsman saving a stupidly-named kingdom from a stupidly-named dark wizard, using a stupidly-named magic sword.
don't take it personally is set in a near-future high school, and yes, there are panties. But like Digital, it's really a metafictional piece about the concept of a protagonist. You play John Rook, teacher, who finds himself drawn into the love lives of his students via access to their private messages on the school's intranet. The dichotomy is clever - you, the player, are advancing the story and seeing what happens next, but you are also John Rook and you are spying on your students. Although you (mostly) get no choice in the matter of whether or not to pry, which rather lessens the impact of the voyeuristic unease, some of the branching choices depend on how close you want to risk coming to admitting that you've been reading your students' private conversations. At this point the railroading makes sense. You're not playing a cipher for yourself; you're playing John Rook, and the question is what he would do. And what he would do is spy.
It helps that the characters are engaging and believable, each with their own tics and subtleties and contradictions. Perhaps don't take it personally would fail if you didn't care about what was going to happen to these kids, but they're so well-realised it's hard not to. There are multiple endings depending on your choices, and those choices are not simplistic Bioware-esque Good/Bad Guy deals; these are real choices, made by real people, and you know that whatever you decide, someone's probably going to get hurt.
Bridging the two chronologically, Cell Phone Love Letter is an actual, straight-up visual novel with absolutely no gameplay-mechanical elements. However, it still uses the interactive medium pretty darn smartly considering the only thing you ever do is click to advance the text. As with don't take it personally, the author shows a fantastic grip on the teenage mindset, with the characters laying bare their neuroses, their insecurities and their self-obsession both overtly and subconsciously. The three titles form something of a loose trilogy. They're all tangentially connected via references and reappearing characters, but more importantly, they all revolve around the theme of how burgeoning telecommunication technology affects how we relate to the people around us, and they all experiment with the possibilities of storytelling in an interactive medium to a degree rare in this industry. Love probably already qualifies for auteur status; her short body of work is already as identifiably idiomatic as any major league developer you care to name.
Both Digital and don't take it personally sadly suffer from a similar big flaw - third-act twists which, while agreeably provocative, are signposted way in advance and handled clunkily with big dollops of exposition. For my money Digital's is the more successful, but the game doesn't really address the implications of the twist in much detail. By contrast, don't take it personally's twist is just plain nonsensical and left many players with a bitter taste. The game contradicts its own mythos, and while it suggests that the characters are desensitised to implications of the twist, it's hard to believe that in just fifteen short years - give or take - society could have changed so much that [SPOILER]ing a [SPOILER] [SPOILER] just to [SPOILER] a [SPOILER] could be seen as anything but completely batshit friggin' mental. Perhaps it's meant to be a cautionary warning about the accelerating pace of societal change? Or maybe it was rushed to meet the NaNoRenO deadline. Either way.
But you know what? No games are perfect, and judging these by the standards of indie shorts with a one-woman development team, they are remarkable. Relatable emotional depth, boundary-exploring narrative, characters you can truly invest in... Christine's games may have many faults, but they have many more successes. She's rapidly become one of my favourite developers for her sheer disregard for convention. Even her parodic 'action' game, beat-em-up Lake City Rumble, is a character-driven and text-based piece.
Some professional studio really, really needs to get Christine on board. She needs a budget, a proper development cycle, an editor, an idea filter; almost every major development house needs someone who can write characters and plots worth giving a damn about. Seems like an obvious match to me.
No, my girlfriend is not named Lemsip. You read that wrong.
Unlike the game-stories of Christine Love which, according to the author herself, one can't 'read wrong'. Or as Love herself puts it, "...author intent isn’t worth shit. All that matters is how you interpret it. If something doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work, and intent doesn’t ever excuse that. Period. Don’t ever accept any argument that claims otherwise." A unique and interesting stance for a game developer - but then, she makes extremely unique and interesting games, and what's more, she's genuinely interested in improving her work, as evidenced by opening dialogues with her game's fans and starting feedback topics for them on her blog. She's taken herself to task, critically (and openly) analysing what she feels were the successes and failures of her titles. It's an admirable mark of honesty and passion, and it's refreshing to see an indie game creator who's happy to publicly deconstruct their own work. I may not agree with all of her stances, but I don't need to - I still applaud the fact that she's willing to share them.
Her best known work to date is Digital: A Love Story, which has the smart and slightly audacious hook of playing out entirely via a replicated Amiga workstation desktop. It's set in the late 80s and the tech level is commensurately primitive, with most of your interactions with other people relying solely on bulletin boards and email. It's superficially similar to Introversion's classic hacking sim Uplink, and Digital features a few very nice puzzles based around deciphering passwords and downloading software-cracking applications. It also sadly relies on long distance calling codes far, far too much, something which is fun at first but becomes a serious chore by the third act. Gaining access to an autodialler app halfway through would have improved matters considerably. It's a testament to how powerfully involving the narrative is that I wanted to keep playing.
Superficially, the game is about cracking sites to uncover a mystery; from a more narratological standpoint, it's about a trapped, lonely girl named Emilia who expresses herself through poetry posted onto internet bulletin boards. But really, the game is about agency; in a brilliant stroke, you never see your own character's messages. How 'you' replied is inferable only from the context of the replies you're sent back. The suppositions we impose on our videogame avatars are front and centre of this one. Are you in love with Emilia? Do you care about her platonically, and is she reading too much into your friendship? Are you just humouring her because she's clearly depressed? Are you the one who's misreading the signals? The correct interpretation of the game's events is the one you assume as you play.
Her latest game - don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story (best title ever, like, f'reals) - is... well, first off, game is an awkward word for it. It's interactive fiction. It's a visual novel. I'll admit I've never had much truck with visual novels; as don't take it personally itself notes at one point, the average visual novel rarely does anything beyond Super High School Pantie Adventure Six and the few which do always seem to cast you as a stupidly-named swordsman saving a stupidly-named kingdom from a stupidly-named dark wizard, using a stupidly-named magic sword.
don't take it personally is set in a near-future high school, and yes, there are panties. But like Digital, it's really a metafictional piece about the concept of a protagonist. You play John Rook, teacher, who finds himself drawn into the love lives of his students via access to their private messages on the school's intranet. The dichotomy is clever - you, the player, are advancing the story and seeing what happens next, but you are also John Rook and you are spying on your students. Although you (mostly) get no choice in the matter of whether or not to pry, which rather lessens the impact of the voyeuristic unease, some of the branching choices depend on how close you want to risk coming to admitting that you've been reading your students' private conversations. At this point the railroading makes sense. You're not playing a cipher for yourself; you're playing John Rook, and the question is what he would do. And what he would do is spy.
It helps that the characters are engaging and believable, each with their own tics and subtleties and contradictions. Perhaps don't take it personally would fail if you didn't care about what was going to happen to these kids, but they're so well-realised it's hard not to. There are multiple endings depending on your choices, and those choices are not simplistic Bioware-esque Good/Bad Guy deals; these are real choices, made by real people, and you know that whatever you decide, someone's probably going to get hurt.
Bridging the two chronologically, Cell Phone Love Letter is an actual, straight-up visual novel with absolutely no gameplay-mechanical elements. However, it still uses the interactive medium pretty darn smartly considering the only thing you ever do is click to advance the text. As with don't take it personally, the author shows a fantastic grip on the teenage mindset, with the characters laying bare their neuroses, their insecurities and their self-obsession both overtly and subconsciously. The three titles form something of a loose trilogy. They're all tangentially connected via references and reappearing characters, but more importantly, they all revolve around the theme of how burgeoning telecommunication technology affects how we relate to the people around us, and they all experiment with the possibilities of storytelling in an interactive medium to a degree rare in this industry. Love probably already qualifies for auteur status; her short body of work is already as identifiably idiomatic as any major league developer you care to name.
Both Digital and don't take it personally sadly suffer from a similar big flaw - third-act twists which, while agreeably provocative, are signposted way in advance and handled clunkily with big dollops of exposition. For my money Digital's is the more successful, but the game doesn't really address the implications of the twist in much detail. By contrast, don't take it personally's twist is just plain nonsensical and left many players with a bitter taste. The game contradicts its own mythos, and while it suggests that the characters are desensitised to implications of the twist, it's hard to believe that in just fifteen short years - give or take - society could have changed so much that [SPOILER]ing a [SPOILER] [SPOILER] just to [SPOILER] a [SPOILER] could be seen as anything but completely batshit friggin' mental. Perhaps it's meant to be a cautionary warning about the accelerating pace of societal change? Or maybe it was rushed to meet the NaNoRenO deadline. Either way.
But you know what? No games are perfect, and judging these by the standards of indie shorts with a one-woman development team, they are remarkable. Relatable emotional depth, boundary-exploring narrative, characters you can truly invest in... Christine's games may have many faults, but they have many more successes. She's rapidly become one of my favourite developers for her sheer disregard for convention. Even her parodic 'action' game, beat-em-up Lake City Rumble, is a character-driven and text-based piece.
Some professional studio really, really needs to get Christine on board. She needs a budget, a proper development cycle, an editor, an idea filter; almost every major development house needs someone who can write characters and plots worth giving a damn about. Seems like an obvious match to me.
Monday, 9 May 2011
That's a lot of the letter V
Steam is really annoying sometimes. This morning it asked me for my date of birth to view a product with violent content; I accidentally brushed the enter key too soon and now the damn thing is convinced that I'm only two months old. And I have no idea how to undo that. The online help pages certainly don't have any intention of telling me.
I was one of the first wave of users, and the lag, bugs and lack of support were so bad that I ws driven from it and therefore, sadly, Valve products in general. After completing Half-Life 2 the first time around, I barely touched Steam. I mustn't have so much as clicked the icon in stretches of, lordy, two years at a time.
When convinced by friends to take up Steam's chat service a couple of months ago, for the purposes of voice comms during Minecraft sessions, I found myself pleasantly, if mildly, surprised. Everything is well laid out, it's fairly smooth and fairly fast, and there's a brilliant selection of games. There are still faults - the damn thing seems to spend its entire existence updating, for a start - but it's a world away from the poorly-implemented service I knew and just about tolerated (for a brief time, anyway) back in 2004.
And whatever faults Steam has I can overlook for one simple, joyous thing: it's made demos cool again. As recently as four or five years ago, most devs had seemingly given up on playable demos. Some blame the nature of sandbox games or the further rise of cross-console releases, but those things didn't stop people in previous generations; I'm pretty sure it's just a case of greedy publishers not wanting to give away even the slightest bit of content for free. And that's one of the many reasons why I fell out of love with gaming. Being unable to try before I might buy meant that... well... I didn't buy, more often than not.
But Steam, as well as championing indie games, has made the distribution of demos not only feasible but commercially viable once again. No more having to scour shady download repositories or wait for magazine coverdisks, which was how things worked a decade ago; now, if a game intrigues me, I can give it a try on my own terms, and if I like what I see I can buy the full version then and there. This is a truly marvellous thing.
To younger gamers this must all sound like the confused rantings of a hopelessly out of touch old man. Well, I am what I am, but over the last few days I've been young again, playing demo after demo in a state of rapt enthrallment. Especially indie games; I here and now stake my claim for the right to, whenever anybody starts complaining that nobody is doing anything new in the gaming medium, punch that person in the face. And then make them play Eufloria or VVVVVV.
The latter is especially brilliant. It's a platformer with no jump key - your commands are left, right, and switch direction of gravity. Yes, switch direction of gravity. Instead of jumping over a pit of spikes, you pull yourself onto the ceiling, walk past it, and then drop down again. Genius. Like Portal, the game is very clever about how it uses this, making it essential to the gameplay and not just a gimmick. And like Portal, while Prey technically did it first, VVVVVV does it much better. It's also extremely cute and - helped out by the retro-styled graphics - even a little emotive.
Designer Terry Cavanagh (of Distractionware) is also responsible for the haunting Don't Look Back, an 80s-ish platform retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Of all the games out there which require you to shoot Cerberus up the arse with a handgun, it's quite possibly the best (did any of the Devil May Cry games ask that of you? I can't rightly remember off the top of my head).
A couple of other intriguing little art-piece puzzle-platformers found on Don't Look Back host Kongregate, referenced a few times in the comments field for that game, are Loved and The Company of Myself. The former succeeds more as artistic statement than game; it's short but quite beautiful, visually, and contains some interesting musings on a range of subjects connected to dominance, servitude and - in terms of both ownership and overbearing creepiness - possession. Sadly the game side of things is twitchy and unresponsive at times; perhaps that's why creator Alexander Ocias identifies it primarily as a short story. The Company of Myself is built around an absolutely remarkable concept - using the main character's past lives as tools to get through the game. Think Super Meat Boy's end of level replays, redone as the core mechanic. Maybe I'm envious because I had a similar idea myself recently, and Company does it better justice than I ever could.
But Company also stands out for the weaving of the story into the mechanics. That many-lives gimmick is richly explored by the narrative and not in the way you might think. Rare is the game which truly moves us; rarer still is the game which moves us when we're not even doing anything tactile yet, while we're advance-mapping out a level and suddenly we realise the impact of what we must do to progress. But exactly that happened to me this morning. It's a sensitive, intelligent story which also happens to include one of the, and I am not kidding here, most overwhelmingly excellent mechanical gameplay devices I have encountered in literally years.
I was heartened to see that all three of these games have received reams of positive feedback and favourable community ratings. But the negative feedback is just as telling.
Naturally, some of the negative comments come from those complaining that they Don't Get It, or that these games don't contain enough gore and explosions, or that the graphics are stupid and the music is gay (they're not, and it isn't). Not to stereotype or anything, but these definitely tend towards the less literate of posts. But there's also another layer to the poor responses. There is, it seems, a small but fervent minority who actively oppose the use of games as an artistic platform, who find the very concept of narrative-led gaming pretentious and argue that Having Something To Say is best left to other, less visceral media. This reaction, I must confess, was a bit of a shock.
I know there are plenty of gamers who simply don't care about games as art, or games as story. I don't mind that at all. But the idea that games as art is actively detrimental to gaming is one I hadn't really considered before. Maybe it's spinning out of the old narratology vs ludology debate from way back when, when games were only just breaking into the academic consciousness? The idea that individual games have been hampered by their story, or by artistic pretensions... yes, certainly. But to argue that it's bad for the medium as a whole to want to tell mature or provocative stories? I'm not sure I can wrap my head around that.
But then, I'm sure some people can't understand why I think Halo has been bad for the industry overall. Mere dislike is easy enough to deal with - I don't like real time strategy games, so I don't play them. Simple. I actually quite enjoy Halo, as far as braindead repetitive corridor shooters go; my problem with it is that it pushed the focus of game design in a direction I consider to be ultimately harmful to the cause of gaming being considered a valid medium. Perhaps the people who enjoy said direction are the same people who are actively opposed to games led by artistic concerns.
Are they wrong? I dunno. Not necessarily. But I can't accept that artistic games, seeking to tell intelligent or emotionally resonant stories, are bad for the business. Where would that mindset have gotten theatre or cinema?
I was one of the first wave of users, and the lag, bugs and lack of support were so bad that I ws driven from it and therefore, sadly, Valve products in general. After completing Half-Life 2 the first time around, I barely touched Steam. I mustn't have so much as clicked the icon in stretches of, lordy, two years at a time.
When convinced by friends to take up Steam's chat service a couple of months ago, for the purposes of voice comms during Minecraft sessions, I found myself pleasantly, if mildly, surprised. Everything is well laid out, it's fairly smooth and fairly fast, and there's a brilliant selection of games. There are still faults - the damn thing seems to spend its entire existence updating, for a start - but it's a world away from the poorly-implemented service I knew and just about tolerated (for a brief time, anyway) back in 2004.
And whatever faults Steam has I can overlook for one simple, joyous thing: it's made demos cool again. As recently as four or five years ago, most devs had seemingly given up on playable demos. Some blame the nature of sandbox games or the further rise of cross-console releases, but those things didn't stop people in previous generations; I'm pretty sure it's just a case of greedy publishers not wanting to give away even the slightest bit of content for free. And that's one of the many reasons why I fell out of love with gaming. Being unable to try before I might buy meant that... well... I didn't buy, more often than not.
But Steam, as well as championing indie games, has made the distribution of demos not only feasible but commercially viable once again. No more having to scour shady download repositories or wait for magazine coverdisks, which was how things worked a decade ago; now, if a game intrigues me, I can give it a try on my own terms, and if I like what I see I can buy the full version then and there. This is a truly marvellous thing.
To younger gamers this must all sound like the confused rantings of a hopelessly out of touch old man. Well, I am what I am, but over the last few days I've been young again, playing demo after demo in a state of rapt enthrallment. Especially indie games; I here and now stake my claim for the right to, whenever anybody starts complaining that nobody is doing anything new in the gaming medium, punch that person in the face. And then make them play Eufloria or VVVVVV.
The latter is especially brilliant. It's a platformer with no jump key - your commands are left, right, and switch direction of gravity. Yes, switch direction of gravity. Instead of jumping over a pit of spikes, you pull yourself onto the ceiling, walk past it, and then drop down again. Genius. Like Portal, the game is very clever about how it uses this, making it essential to the gameplay and not just a gimmick. And like Portal, while Prey technically did it first, VVVVVV does it much better. It's also extremely cute and - helped out by the retro-styled graphics - even a little emotive.
Designer Terry Cavanagh (of Distractionware) is also responsible for the haunting Don't Look Back, an 80s-ish platform retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Of all the games out there which require you to shoot Cerberus up the arse with a handgun, it's quite possibly the best (did any of the Devil May Cry games ask that of you? I can't rightly remember off the top of my head).
A couple of other intriguing little art-piece puzzle-platformers found on Don't Look Back host Kongregate, referenced a few times in the comments field for that game, are Loved and The Company of Myself. The former succeeds more as artistic statement than game; it's short but quite beautiful, visually, and contains some interesting musings on a range of subjects connected to dominance, servitude and - in terms of both ownership and overbearing creepiness - possession. Sadly the game side of things is twitchy and unresponsive at times; perhaps that's why creator Alexander Ocias identifies it primarily as a short story. The Company of Myself is built around an absolutely remarkable concept - using the main character's past lives as tools to get through the game. Think Super Meat Boy's end of level replays, redone as the core mechanic. Maybe I'm envious because I had a similar idea myself recently, and Company does it better justice than I ever could.
But Company also stands out for the weaving of the story into the mechanics. That many-lives gimmick is richly explored by the narrative and not in the way you might think. Rare is the game which truly moves us; rarer still is the game which moves us when we're not even doing anything tactile yet, while we're advance-mapping out a level and suddenly we realise the impact of what we must do to progress. But exactly that happened to me this morning. It's a sensitive, intelligent story which also happens to include one of the, and I am not kidding here, most overwhelmingly excellent mechanical gameplay devices I have encountered in literally years.
I was heartened to see that all three of these games have received reams of positive feedback and favourable community ratings. But the negative feedback is just as telling.
Naturally, some of the negative comments come from those complaining that they Don't Get It, or that these games don't contain enough gore and explosions, or that the graphics are stupid and the music is gay (they're not, and it isn't). Not to stereotype or anything, but these definitely tend towards the less literate of posts. But there's also another layer to the poor responses. There is, it seems, a small but fervent minority who actively oppose the use of games as an artistic platform, who find the very concept of narrative-led gaming pretentious and argue that Having Something To Say is best left to other, less visceral media. This reaction, I must confess, was a bit of a shock.
I know there are plenty of gamers who simply don't care about games as art, or games as story. I don't mind that at all. But the idea that games as art is actively detrimental to gaming is one I hadn't really considered before. Maybe it's spinning out of the old narratology vs ludology debate from way back when, when games were only just breaking into the academic consciousness? The idea that individual games have been hampered by their story, or by artistic pretensions... yes, certainly. But to argue that it's bad for the medium as a whole to want to tell mature or provocative stories? I'm not sure I can wrap my head around that.
But then, I'm sure some people can't understand why I think Halo has been bad for the industry overall. Mere dislike is easy enough to deal with - I don't like real time strategy games, so I don't play them. Simple. I actually quite enjoy Halo, as far as braindead repetitive corridor shooters go; my problem with it is that it pushed the focus of game design in a direction I consider to be ultimately harmful to the cause of gaming being considered a valid medium. Perhaps the people who enjoy said direction are the same people who are actively opposed to games led by artistic concerns.
Are they wrong? I dunno. Not necessarily. But I can't accept that artistic games, seeking to tell intelligent or emotionally resonant stories, are bad for the business. Where would that mindset have gotten theatre or cinema?
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