Oldschool Hard

OMG BEST GAME EVAR IF U DUN LIKE IT YOU MUST LIKE GAYSTATION (nb. I am aware that it is also available on PS3)

If you look at the theme of most of my posts, it probably seems like a game developer must’ve kicked my dog and that a game publisher ran over my kid. Admittedly, I do place a lot of blame for the problems in gaming on developers and publishers. As I’ve already talked about, they are the group guilty of releasing shovelware, contributing to (causing?) the massive hype around certain games while other just as worthy games get released without any fanfare, and trying to suck money out of you while they hold onto control over how you use their games (that you supposedly own). And don’t think I don’t have more complaints for future posts, either.

I have to admit two things, however. One, that there are plenty of good games that come out, still, in spite of the stupid development and marketing decisions that are sometimes made, and two, not all problems with gaming are the domain of game makers.

The gaming ‘community’ is pretty good at being stupid, too, like in the ‘robust discourse’ of a typical XBox Live session, in proposing boycotts that they don’t follow, or having ridiculous attachments to particular games and/or systems that go beyond a healthy interest and devolve into pointless arguments and flame wars (‘ZOMG, DA GAYSTATION SUX XBOX 4EVA!!!’). Parts of the gaming press are also often pretty good at helping contribute to the hype train, and the scoring system that some magazines and websites use is broken (and something I will discuss in yet another post).

A problem both fanboys and these segments of the gaming press share is a habit of overrating games. It usually goes one of two ways:

- A game is released, reviews solidly, and then somehow rises in the collective imagination over the years until it’s held as a pinnacle of achievement for (insert genre, developer, system or publisher here).

OR

- A game is released, reviews spectacularly, and is held up the ‘THE BEST GAME EVAR!’ or similar, completely ignoring the obvious flaws. The game may be a great game, but hardly the perfect game that it gets reviewed as, and this eventually gets sheepishly acknowledged – but only in hindsight.

I can use two of my perennial whipping boys as examples to illustrate each.

In the first case, Final Fantasy VII is a great example. As a lot of people’s entrance to RPGs and a step forward as far as cutscenes on consoles go, it has plenty of reason to be well regarded, and it is a good game. But best RPG of all time, or even worse, best game of all time? Puh-leeze. You can argue the relative merits of atmosphere and mechanics, but Final Fantasy VI was pretty much a better game, as was V, arguably (and although I acknowledge it’s not a better game, I personally prefer IX to VII). Ergo, it is not only not the best RPG of all time, it’s not even the best RPG in its series.

As for the second case, step forward, yet again, GTA IV. You were ambitious, set out a remarkable stylised version of New York, and I played you for nearly 40 hours. You also had terrible draw-in and jaggies and looked very fuzzy on the XBox (and I assume the PS3, too), chugged along horribly without a quad-core processor on the PC, had cars that controlled like barges, hollow characters, and both your mission and game structure followed a model that was basically inherited, with only small changes, from a near 10-years-old predecessor. We had a good time together, GTA IV, but you weren’t the perfect game your other suitors said you were. I think they realised that, too, once they had stopped drinking the kool-aid and sobered up.

Image from Xboxer, resized.

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Are you experienced?

Some games have all the luck – high critical praise, strong fan appreciation, and good sales. Most game companies would be more than happy with two out of three, as long as it’s the latter two. Unfortunately for a few of the games on my Top 25 list, due to a quirky and/or unique nature, they seemed to have the first two covered, but not the last one, and similar games are unlikely to ever be released. Games like Psychonauts and Grim Fandango reviewed well, have a rabid fan base, but just never seemed to be able to sell to a more casual audience.

Another one of these sales-deficient games on my top 25 list was Rez. Ostensibly a cross between an on-rails shooter and, to a lesser extent, a rhythm game, Rez is one of those games where the mechanics are fairly pedestrian, but the strongly Tron-like (but brighter and more colourful) ‘vibe’ and what it does with its simple mechanics is what sets it apart. Rez is set inside a mainframe computer run by a (now) rogue artificial intelligence having an existential crisis, which you must liberate it from by giving it back its ‘soul’. You do this by destroying viruses and breaking through a firewall in each level to get to the AI’s central core.

You can go through different stages of ‘evolution’, which transform the look and function your avatar, and serve as powerups and increased health. The game builds through 5 levels to the last boss rush, which deals with the crisis of the AI by (literally) throwing all sorts of existential questions at you. Possibly my favourite level outlines the entire evolution of life from the primordial soup onwards – not the sort of thing you see in most games.

Made with a sort of stylised wireframe graphic look, Rez‘s tagline is ‘experience synesthesia’. Synesthesia, if you’re not familiar with the term, is a condition in which senses can blend together, leading to things like the association of certain sounds with different tastes, or assigning colours to letters based on their look or sound, among other symptoms. The game tries to do this in a few ways: by using bright colours throughout most of the game, matching your shooting to coincide with beats and sound effects in the pumping electronic soundtrack, allowing you to have some control over the music in the game, and with the Japanese release of the game, there was also an option to buy it with an accessory called the ‘trance vibrator’ which, as you can probably imagine, was rapidly pressed into service by female gamers.

Rez takes some elements of Tempest 2000, Tron, and even (the also underrated and undersold) Frequency, and combines them with a sort-of more cyberpunk version of the Tron plot. Originally available on the Dreamcast, the version with which I’m most familiar is the PS2 version, although there is now a HD version available on XBox Live. Although it’s not really a long game, it is highly re-playable, with multiple game modes, and at around 10 bucks, I can’t recommend it more highly.

Image from bit-tech.net, cropped to size.

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Blocky, isometric corporate evil happens here.

When doing some googling for something completely unrelated to gaming, I came across a game called Skyscraper, which apparently came out on PS2 in 2008, is out on PC, and is being adapted to the Wii. Metacritic doesn’t seem to think it exists, and I can’t find a review for it, which probably tells me all I need to know about its quality. Nevertheless, it got me thinking.

I’m an early Generation-Y. While most of my childhood memories are of the 90s, I’m a child of the 80s, the decade famous for, among other things, greed. Corporations were evil and about to take over the world, especially Japanese corporations. Shiny black skyscrapers were the most visible symptom of the malady of these world-conquering companies, evidenced in books and movies like Die Hard, Robocop, and Rising Sun. The whole cyberpunk movement was a response to the seemingly inevitable corporate takeover of the world, leading to books like Snow Crash and my favourite book of all time, Neuromancer. Nefarious things were planned and executed in skyscrapers – what exactly was going on behind that black facade? You can certainly still put forward a case for corporations trying to rule the world (not that they didn’t try before the 80s), but the idea of the Japanese taking over the world fell by the wayside in a fairly spectacular fashion, and near-future fiction has largely moved on to other concerns.

I still love cyberpunk, and I still think skyscrapers are cool, especially black skyscrapers, even if all the people inside are doing is selling paper products. One of my abiding childish dreams in life is own the world’s only full-skyscraper laser tag centre. As a result, I love to see games with skyscrapers featured in them, and I don’t think there’s enough games that use the skyscraper as the centrepiece that it should be. Arguably, games set inside skyscrapers are often just dungeon crawls taken outside of a fantasy setting, but while the mechanics may be similar, the vibe is usually completely different.

Off the top of my head, I can think of a number of games involving skyscrapers. There’s games with skyscrapers in the background, or forming an incidental part of play, like Arkham Asylum, just about any cyberpunk game (Deus Ex, Syndicate, etc.), the GTA series – well, really any game set in or near a city. There’s games where you’re on skyscrapers, like AaaaAAaaaaaaAAAAaaaaaa (with however many ‘a’s it has) – A Reckless Disregard For Gravity, Crackdown, or Spiderman 2. But what I really love are games set exclusively in skyscrapers.

Getting the rocket to blast open the doors, racing to beat the terrorists as they break the multiple locks, trying to get a radio, walking slower as your ‘feet’ meter goes down after walking on glass, the tension of the sparse music – Die Hard on the NES may have only been half an hour long when done right, but it took many goes to work out exactly what you needed to do. Hard but fair. D/Generation and Corporation/Cyber-Cop both had a dark, creepy atmosphere, with riffs on the same ‘illegal genetic experimentation inside a skyscraper’, although one was isometric and more of a survival-horror type of game, the other first-person and more stealth/action.

There are also borderline cases of skyscraper crawl – the tower crawl during the Midgar section of Final Fantasy VII, and the tower in Thief 2, that while not technically a skyscraper, served largely the same purpose in the steampunk style of the game. It’s debatable whether the skyscraper plays more of a role in these games than in, say, GTA IV or Crackdown, but it comes back to that nebulous darker cyberpunk-ish ‘vibe’. Mirror’s Edge is another borderline case, of which some happens in a skyscraper, some on a skyscraper, but doesn’t have quite the same sense of dark art-design that skyscraper crawls seem to have. Again, the ‘vibe’ isn’t quite right. I can’t complain too much, though – any scraper is better than no scraper.

Image from Abandonware Paradise, cropped to size.

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The ‘it was all a dream!’ ending – possibly the laziest narrative device ever.

A game is generally its own reward – the enjoyment is in the experience. Having an expectation that at the end of a game that I’ve enjoyed I’ll be treated to a song-and-dance show that neatly wraps up every loose end in the game, shows where all the characters end up, like in Animal House, and leaves me all giddy is really expecting too much. And yet I can’t help feel a little bit cheated when a game is wrapped up in a rote manner, or a manner that insults the efforts of the player, or one that just isn’t fitting.

I enjoyed Borderlands. As I’ve previously said, I like loot grind games. If nothing else, my love for WoW should make that obvious. But the ending brought back memories of some of the shittest game endings I’ve ever seen. The point of the game was in the mechanics, not the story, which was thin the whole way through, but wow, talk about an anti-climax. It was reminiscent of the generic mangled-engrish end screen of some early 8 and 16-bit games, usually with text something like ‘Congraturations! Now try harder difficulty level!’

At least that implies that if you complete the game on its hardest difficulty setting, you might be thrown a bone. Crappy endings that don’t fall into the ‘end screen with text’ category tend not to give any ‘outs’ – this is the ending, deal with it. Hope you enjoyed the game, if not, tough shit.

(WARNING: I am vaguely spoiling the endings of 5+ year old games. If you’re that behind, read no further. And go play some games, dammit.)

In examples of the insult ending, there’s the cliche of the ‘just a dream’ ending of Super Mario Bros. 2, or the ‘kill boss -> straight to credits + cringeworthy rapping’ of Gears of War and the anticlimactic boss battle of its sequel. Or how about, speaking of sequels (now that‘s a segue; where’s my pulitzer?), the Halo 2 ‘buy the sequel to find out more!’ blatant cash grab (which I didn’t play, but did watch happen), KOTOR 2, which left so many threads hanging it was ridiculous (but then, so did the whole game – the Blizzard ‘when it’s done’ would be very useful applied to all games). The Half-Life no-choice ‘choice’. Or perhaps the ultimate crappy ending, the ending of Metal Gear Solid 2, which has obviously had a lot of time put into it but made fuck-all sense. I felt like I was going to involuntarily re-enact a scene from Scanners by the time the bloody thing finished.

I’ve also had my favourites through the years, endings that finished games on a satisfying note and added a little cherry on top of a delicious game sundae. In direct contrast to the perplexing ending of its prequel, Metal Gear Solid 3‘s ending, while also convoluted, was much easier to fathom, tragic, and totally in keeping with the events of the game. The STALKER ‘ironic wish fulfillment’ endings were very appropriate to the dark tone of the game. SHODAN’s little sting in the tail at the end of System Shock 2 suited her goading and wheedling of you throughout. The Conker’s Bad Fur Day ‘negotiation’ was as irreverent as the rest of the game (‘NO WAI EDDIE, YOU CAN’T BREAK THE FOURTH WALLLLLLLLLL’). Deus Ex‘s three choices that fit well with the various paths you can take through the game. The ultimate sacrifice in Diablo, and the bittersweet endings of Shadow of the Colossus and Planescape: Torment, all downbeat, all so in keeping with the game’s theme.

Perhaps that’s the key to it all. The best endings don’t need to be elaborate, even though some are. They don’t need to be positive. They just need to fit what came before. I can’t believe that could be hard, but there are enough crappy endings around to show otherwise.

Picture from TerrisUS.

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