Oldschool Hard

Buncha noisy kids with too much booze in ‘em…

Apologies for my absence. The lack of updates this week just gone is due to a delightful infection I seem to have picked up, although I am now on the mend, and have gone from ‘death warmed over’ to ‘just slightly achey.’ On the upside, being in bed feeling sorry for myself gave me some time to ponder. I thought, among many other thoughts, about the gaming magazines of the past: EGM, Gamepro, Nintendo Power. Sure, the latter two still exist and the first is going to be revived shortly, but they are wholly different entities to what they were in the 80s and early 90s, when I were a lad. Nintendo Power was basically a Nintendo catalogue that you paid for, but as a kid, too much Nintendo was never enough. EGM and Gamepro had a real sense of personality, and EGM in particular had a particular ‘vibe’ that you just can’t find in games magazines these days.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s some great games writing out there. I’m a huge fan of sites like Old Man Murray, Bitmob and Rock Paper Shotgun, and I read a bunch of magazines I like, as well as many blogs, which insert a bit of humour and/or personality into talking about games. It’s unfortunate that the same can’t be said for every gaming site or publication. I think the shift came when games journalism stopped being made by a bunch of rowdy kids and became ‘professional.’

The main problem I have with a lot of games ‘journalism’ is that it’s not journalism, but thinks it is. It’s a combination of an extension of marketing and PR (at a preview stage), and criticism (at a review stage), but it’s put through the filter of trying to be objective. And it’s boring. Telling me that it is ‘like X former game, the graphics are y, the gameplay is z, the sound is a’ is fucking boring. It’s formulaic, and it misses the forest for the trees. It tells me everything about a game, and yet nothing about a game, because it often misses the key criteria: tell me why I should or shouldn’t play this game, through the prism of is it fun? Don’t just describe the game to me.

For example, I’m not a huge fan of FarCry 2: the endlessly respawning enemies at every crossroads, the poorly explained reasoning behind your character’s motivation, the pointless malaria mechanic that serves only to artificially lengthen the game with some sidequests, the million diamond cases that are also pointless to chase after you get enough to buy a decent weapon or two, and the lazy PC porting.

However, it’s fucking beautiful and gives a real sense of place. It makes me want to go visit Africa. There are moments when one weapon jams, and another runs out of ammo, and you’re running through a hail of bullets trying to pick up another weapon that a dead enemy has dropped, where your heart is pumping, and it seems like a near-perfect game, if only for a moment. And the reason why I even bought and played through it in the first place was a hail of blog posts, from some of the blogs in the sidebar, telling me why they loved it, despite its flaws. They made me want to experience what they had, warts and all.

A game review would instead usually give me the mechanics: how the game works + how long it is + a rough plot outline + the negatives (ie. my complaints) + a note about the attractive graphics, with a cliched sign-off like ‘FarCry 2 is flawed but still playable. If you like FPSes, you’ll like this game.’ There’s rarely anything about how it made the reviewer feel, and what makes it worse is that although game writing often tries ever-so-earnestly to be objective, it tends to fucking fail at that, too.

Reviewers natually have favourite game genres and settings, or they’re working to a tight deadline, or whatever else. Tell me this. Music critics do. Film critics do. Treat yourself like the critic you are. Let me know ‘I didn’t like x FPS very much, but I don’t really like FPSes, I’m more of a RTS kind-of-guy,’ or ‘this mech game is way too short, but I fucking love mechs, so I loved it.’ Let me know where you’re coming from.

Also, the scoring system used by most is pretty much broken. 5-6 is a ‘crappy’ game, ’7′ is ‘average’. Below 5 is for truly shitty games, not for mediocre games on down like it should be. Scores below 3 seem to be reserved only for unfinished games, rushed out. The score often doesn’t even match the review: ‘This game sucks…6.5′ or ‘this game is nearly flawless…8.’

My previous example of “aggressively mediocre games” are a 5-6/10. These games are relatively complete and sound – there’s no guaranteed game-breaking bugs or obvious missing chunks of quests. They’re not terrible games where you don’t even know where to begin when criticising them. But they’re whitebread. There’s some flaws, and nothing makes them stand out. They stick to genre conventions. Their story is probably generic. Their graphics are attractive without being outstanding and their musical score is pleasant and/or forgettable… Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is, in my mind, a classic aggressively mediocre game – a 5/6 out of 10. Metacritic puts it at 72/100 – because, again, 7 is ‘average’ in game reviewing.

What’s the solution? Well, there’s no one solution. Reviews need an overall. Scoring needs an overhaul. But I can think of something that will at least enliven reviews: show me your personality. Be subjective, games writers. You’re not journalists in any traditional sense, and nor should you be. You’re not reporting the news. Don’t give me the games writing equivalent of a lede and a nut graf then tick off boxes on your review formula. Tell me about what the game made you feel, why it’s fun or not, and what else you like so I can compare our tastes, please.

Image from Video Games Blogger.

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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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“So I ask you, from this podium, where is film’s Planescape: Torment?”

For one more semester, I’m a full-time grad student. Being currently unemployed, largely by choice, less due to the workload than the belief that I will end up strangling a customer if I ever work another day of customer service in my life, I have a fair bit of spare time on my hands.

I channel that spare time into gaming, scratching my head while staring into space with a slack-jawed expression to come up with ideas for this blog, and I also read a lot of magazines, websites and books, including a few gaming magazines (Retro Gamer, Atomic, PC Powerplay, (US) PC Gamer) and a lot of gaming websites, which are pretty much encompassed by the links on the sidebar. When I did my undergrad studies, including writing a few essays on gaming-related topics (it was a Media Studies/Journalism degree), there wasn’t a great deal of available academic and ‘serious’ discussion about games to study, but in the last few years, a lot of serious-minded blogs, books, and websites have emerged, putting discussion of gaming into a different context.

Among practical consideration of how to make games, and how games are played and ‘used’, there’s often more theoretical and abstract discussion about what games mean and how they ‘work’. Common themes that tend to come up include: narrative in games, ‘are games art?’, and my personal favourite flavour-of-the-month discussion, ‘where is gaming’s Citizen Kane?’

Where is it? It’s nowhere. It doesn’t need to be anywhere. To digress slightly: living in Australia, I’m sorely aware of the ‘cultural cringe’, where ‘we’ as nation are ever-so-concerned with what visiting celebrities and dignitaries think about our country, and get enraptured when they talk about going to a wildlife sanctuary and petting a Koala or Kangaroo, or following the breathless coverage of what they bought when going out shopping. Celebrity worship pervades (western?) culture, but we have a special form of it where our validation as a country and culture seems to depend on what other people think.

In the same way, ‘gamers’, if they/we can even be referred to as one group, seem to feel a similar cultural cringe, a need for validation from people outside of gaming, and seem to think this can be achieved if there’s a ‘Citizen Kane‘ to hold up and proclaim ‘see, gaming is important! It does matter! It can be art!’ And to that I say, why can’t you enjoy it for what it is?

I’m all for drawing influences from other media to make games better, but only if they make games better under the standards of games themselves. Games don’t need to stand up to some arbitrary standard to please people who don’t like and/or understand games. If we’re so concerned about making gaming ‘matter’, then why don’t we look to some books and ‘arthouse’ movies: Gravity’s Rainbow (try to untangle this narrative using motion control!), Portnoy’s Complaint (with realistic liver-fucking action!), Requiem for a Dream (using the e-motion despair meter!), maybe Irreversible (yeah, I’m not even gonna touch that one).

Forget WW2 games, all about the glory of war and sacrifice and rah rah rah, how about really showing the despair of war, with some WW1 games based on well-known ‘franchises’, like some All Quiet on the Western Front? Spend hours in a fetid trench until you have to deal with some trenchfoot! MEDIC! Suck in some mustard gas and die painfully, not being able to draw breath properly, because you didn’t piss on a rag in time! Or better yet, charge over the top of a trench at the order of a hopeless commanding officer and be mown down en masse by a machine gunner for trying to move 10 ft further in! Or don’t charge from the trench and get artillery shelled! Fun for the whole family! No, no, don’t thank me. Just making the games would be enough. You think I’m being silly? They managed to mash the ideas from The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged into a game, didn’t they?

Of course, I’m being facetious. Only a small percentage of media ‘matters’, and its legitmacy is usually self-evident. Like any other medium, if the ‘reason’ for games has to be explained to someone, that person’s never gonna get it. Enjoy games for what they are, and stop looking for legitimacy from people who have no right to give it.

Image pulled from Alt Film Guide.

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