Remowned

When Mass Effect was released, I noted that I would love to see a game like this (or, really, this very game) with much of the combat stripped away, putting the gameplay emphasis on the already-excellent dialogue system that provides a framework for hugely enjoyable social interactions. You can help characters, confound them, double-cross them–it was, and it remains, the best part of the game for me.

But I will say this: while I would still be enormously interested in a game–many games!–such as the one I describe, I picked up Demiurge Studios’ PC version of Mass Effect this week and it almost feels like a whole new game. (more…)

In the opening staff roll to Metal Gear Solid 4, there is a standalone credit for a “Rumble Director.” That is awesome.

Just about all my free non-music time at home over the past two weeks has been dedicated to Rockstar North’s Grand Theft Auto IV, whose story I completed just seconds ago. As some of you know, I rarely finish games these days–in most cases, I really don’t feel most games actually have enough fresh, compelling gameplay to last the number of hours it takes to complete them. This makes my completion of GTA4 all the more impressive–it’s not just that I finished a game, but that it is such a massive game.

Everyone has said a billion great things about GTA4 so I’m not going to list them all off. Rockstar North indeed managed to create a bafflingly well-realized world with an impressive level of fidelity and life. It’s been said, and I agree.

For my part, the thing that impressed me most–and led to me completing the game at all–was how brilliantly Rockstar balanced on the midpoint between overexaggerated absurdity, believable mundanity, and genuine gravitas.

The first of those was established in the original Grand Theft Auto and Grand Theft Auto 2, laying the seeds for the crucial third entry; the second trait was most significantly introduced (perhaps moreso than necessary) in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas; and the third has been generally on an upward curve from III to Vice City to San Andreas; but it has not been until GTA4 that all three were so expertly set against one another.

Most appealing to me, perhaps unexpectedly, has been the mundanity. (more…)

As some of you may know, I currently serve as Editor-at-Large at industry trade publication Gamasutra.  Today, we ran a piece of mine looking at the idea of subtext in games, with an examination of titles such as Half-Life, Grand Theft Auto, Ico, No More Heroes, Full Throttle, and BioShock.  Here’s an excerpt:

On the surface, Full Throttle is a badass neo-noir biker murder thriller with hard rock music (on that level alone it is already more novel than most game premises), but underneath it is a melancholy reflection on the American frontier and the inevitability of invasive industrialization.

If you have any interest in a dialogue- and puzzle-driven game, Full Throttle isn’t overbearing or preachy in the least, but there’s a lot to chew on. Its subtext is essentially literary, hinging on classic themes of American fiction.

If you like, go check out the whole thing.

I’ve never really had any familiarity with that tradition of specialty board games like Settlers of Catan and its ilk, those games that always seem to have German designers and feature strong economic elements–like a lot of niche hobbies, it’s absolutely huge once you become aware of it, but if somebody involved doesn’t induct you into it, you are extremely unlikely to ever become aware of it.

I took my first (and, so far, only) steps into that world when a friend of mine showed me Alhambra, positing that we, The Guys, who had never played these sorts of games, would enjoy it. He was right. I spent about a month in San Diego earlier this year hanging out with my old high school buddies, and we played that Goddamned game about twice a day every day for weeks straight. It was then that the corruption seen in this post’s headline was spawned. (more…)

One of the guys in the band in which I play is sort of a casual hardcore gamer–that is, he plays “hardcore” games, but it is not a dominant form of entertainment for him, he does not follow video game news, and he probably doesn’t fight to the proverbial death on the internet in passionate support of a particular console. He’s up on the big console games, but probably not as much on those that don’t hit the top 10; he’s played StarCraft, but doesn’t generally play a lot of PC games.

In other words, he’s pretty similar in his gaming habits to what I imagine the vast majority of the game-buying public is like. As he does not eat, sleep, and breathe this wacky form of entertainment, he is not quite as indoctrinated with all of the fairly ridiculous conventions that most of us take for granted every time we pick up a controller.

He’s played God of War, for example, and he really enjoyed it, like most who played it have. His one negative comment, though, I felt bore repeating. In God of War, you pick up all sorts of mystical objects that help you with various stats and abilities–orbs, eyes, feathers, and probably some other crap. This is of course par for the course in video games, doubly so in third-person action/adventure games.

My bandmate’s reaction? “God of War, it’s good, but man, that Kratos–he collects the most weird-ass stupid shit.” (more…)

I watched the Coen brothers’ Prohibition-era gangster flick Miller’s Crossing at the Castro the other evening. I’ve seen it enough at this point that I’ve internalized the interpersonal connections and intricate subplots, and can focus entirely on appreciation when I watch it.

In particular, I want to point out the introductory scene, which sets up the relationships and general convictions behind local boss Leo O’Bannon and up-and-coming rival Johnny Caspar. Even if you aren’t entirely sure what all they’re discussing, the scene completely frames these two men in a way that informs your perception of them for the remainder of the film.

This is reminiscent to me of the opening scene from Tim Schafer’s brilliant 1995 biker adventure, Full Throttle. (more…)

For the last week or two, the main game I’ve been playing has been Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, recently released on Nintendo DS.  Especially with GDC all last week, it’s been easier to slot in a War here or there than to dive full-steam into a big PC or console game.

The thing I love about Advance Wars is how simple and elegant it is, and how those elements along with its excellent balance create a deceptively deep overall experience.  Still, many of the objective-driven single-player campaign battles do feel like “puzzles”–often it is less an issue of dealing with evolving tactics, and more about figuring out the one overriding tactic necessary to beat that particular battle.

There are also a number of optional battles that are evenly matched on either side, allowing for more of a straight-up tactical battle than the puzzle-esque flavor of the main campaign missions.  It was in one of these battles that, for the first time, I experienced gameplay that could actually be remotely compared to “war” in an Advance Wars game. (more…)

A couple of years ago, I was alerted to this gorgeous concept artwork taken from the development process of Fumito Ueda’s wonderful PS2 game Ico. It reminded me of the “sketchy” renderer from the well-known NPRQuake project, and I wished somebody would make a full game from the ground up optimized with this kind of art direction. Imagine how amazing that inset scene would look if it suddenly burst into motion, with a cel-shaded approach taken to the hard-edged shadows and maybe subtle animation on the hatching lines for objects that are moving.

Though it’s not quite the same thing, it looks like at least one team is doing something along those lines. SEGA Game Studios Japan is working on Valkyria Chronicles for PS3, an alternate history 1930s tactical RPG with some real-time elements. One screenshot is inset right, and I have a second and third as well.

Even though the overwhelming majority of games shoot for photorealism, or something approaching it, however unsuccessfully in most cases, I’m glad to see that even on today’s powerful systems not everybody is automatically going in that direction.

Still, I’d like to see this sketch concept taken further, to the more high-contrast, hard-shadowed look of that Ico concept art. It seems like it would be a perfect match for the downloadable services, where a low-cost title benefits more from the hype of interested hardcore gamers than it would amid the vast retail sea. With titles like Echochrome, flOw, and Everyday Shooter, Sony in particular seems interested in funding experimental projects such as that.

Yesterday was the last day of 2008’s Game Developers Conference, which for the first time in several years I was able to attend without any preexisting press commitments. I didn’t go to any press conferences, announcement-oriented sessions, or spend much time in the press room (where I have overheard such classic video game journalist statements as, “That talk sucked; it was, like, targeted at developers or something”)–I just went to lectures and presentations, learned a lot, and met a bunch of interesting people, which is what’s best about GDC.

One of the more interesting lectures I attended was by Patrick Redding, narrative designer on Ubisoft Montreal’s upcoming Far Cry 2, whose creative director is Clint Hocking (Splinter Cell, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory). Hocking also gave a fascinating earlier talk on how to qualify (and, by extension, better define) the rather vague term “immersion.”

Redding gave a great deal of insight into the remarkably ambitious dynamic African setting of Far Cry 2. Interestingly, at least as I see it, while Far Cry 2 and Crysis are both essentially followups to Far Cry, they have gone in drastically different directions–Crysis took Far Cry’s player choice in gameplay style and amplified it through the nanosuit, while Far Cry 2 takes Far Cry’s focus on open-ended environments and blows it up into a systems-driven, semi-autonomous ecology. Hence Redding’s rather unusual title, “narrative designer.” As distinct from a writer, Redding conceives not the dialogue itself but rather the underlying systems that allow Far Cry 2 players to (supposedly) participate in a dynamically-driven narrative, one that is largely shaped by gameplay choices.

In the narrative of the plot, Far Cry 2 takes after Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness or Coppola’s film adaptation Apocalypse Now–”a journey into the depths of Africa and into the mind of a madman,” as Redding put it. Meanwhile, the narrative of the gameplay is more based on the Dashiell Hammett novel Red Harvest or Kurasawa’s classic film Yojimbo (arguably inspired by Red Harvest), in which the protagonist (here, the player) pits brutally pits warlord-led factions against one another. (more…)