Oldschool Hard

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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Just because this looked good once doesn’t mean we had to believe that was as good as it would ever get.

Oh, but of course I spoke too soon. I had less than a week of a functional WoW before a random error occurred, leading to a texture error and crash upon logging in. Also of course, a repair didn’t work and I had to do a full reinstall, running into the same install -> patch problems as before. I have no idea what I did right the one time it installed without a problem, and like an idiot, I didn’t make a copy of the folder when it was working. So I eventually had to install the game on my parents’ computer, a very slow process on their old machine, and then copy that folder to an external HDD. It seems to be working, at least for now.

I’m beginning to get some sort of battered-wife thing happening, where I feel like I must have brought it upon myself, somehow. Sigh.

Alright, I know you don’t care about that. What’s today’s post actually about? Graphics. It’s one thing to talk about graphics not ageing well – like my oft-mentioned belief in how poorly PS1 games graphics have aged – but this often comes down to a question about art design versus trying to push the technology at hand based on the knowledge you have of it. I have no problem with the cutting edge aging rapidly if I’m not being sold bullshit about how current graphics are never going to get better. I read items about how we don’t need to progress in graphics any time soon, and thus don’t need new consoles any time soon. While I agree that current-gen consoles are probably adequate for now with the current levels of HDTV and online gaming adoption, I think making a call that graphics don’t have anywhere much to go is bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

Every generation we’re treated to the same thing: a tech demo of ‘REAL GAME FOOTAGE!!1onebbq’ that always ends up being a frigging cutscene, and console-launch titles that don’t look anything like the initial tech demo. As developers learn to get more out a machine over time, we wonder what the hell we were thinking when we thought those first few games looked so amazing. Yes, current games mostly look pretty good, but resting on our laurels gets us nowhere, and some of the problems of (particularly) console games are fucking glaring.

As I’ve stated before, I play console games on a 50″ 1080p TV. The inability of current-gen consoles to combine high resolutions and anti-aliasing for anything moderately demanding, graphically, is markedly fucking obvious on a screen this big. “Jaggies” are everywhere, and all you generally have to do to confirm how bad they are is to compare a PC version to a console version of a multi-format game on any moderately powerful PC. Then there is the reasonable assumption that the game you’re playing on a 1080p TV should actually be output at a native 1080p. HA. Games like COD4 or Halo3 run upscaled at a native resolution closer to 600-700p most of the time, just to get an acceptable frame rate.

Even if a developer does get a game running relatively smoothly at a high native resolution, we run into more insidious problems like the “uncanny valley.” The closer you get to being ‘human’ without actually nailing it, the worse the problem usually is – this is why stylised and/or cartoonish graphics often age well, but “cutting-edge” graphics don’t. Plastic skin, incorrect lip-synching, movement that just doesn’t quite look human. I think this is partially a problem of hardware (in terms of skin and hair tone, hair movement, etc. being mathematically complex and thus heavily resource intensive, especially for something that doesn’t directly affect gameplay) and partially a problem of a lack of ingenuity or talent by artists and animators in being able to accurately represent human movement. And it amazes me how many games still can’t get the “camera” right – having it follow too close or far away, at the wrong angle, obscuring hazards, swinging wildly at corners…need I go on?

To expect the perfection of a Pixar film where each frame can spend hours being rendered on supercomputers is, of course, ridiculous. But to accept that near enough is good enough, ignore the problems, and not even try to push for any progression does a disservive to gaming and gamers, and harks towards an age of graphical mediocrity that would well suit an age of annualisation. I’ll be in the corner, playing Deus Ex again, thanks. It may look ugly now, but at least the developers tried to push forwards based on what they had available.

Picture originally from Kinox.

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Mmm, River City Ransom. “BARF!”

My last post probably gave you some idea of what sort of games I like.

So you can get even more idea of where I’m coming from, and can decide now if we’ll never agree and you can thus make a graceful exit (door opens outwards), here is a list of my top 25 favourite games. There’s a few that are stiff to miss out, but this is basically it. I originally drew up a huge list of my favourite games on each platform, it was long and boring, and I won’t subject you to it.

Bear in mind a few things: I keep both a literal stack of unplayed games that I get cheaply, and a figurative stack of digital files from steam weekend discounts, impulse sales, and so on, and the pile is currently up to about 80 games. Also, I could only own one console per generation before becoming an adult and being able to buy as many systems as I want, so I may have missed your particular favourite. My exposure in particular to non-RPG PS1 games, XBOX games, and Sega games post-Megadrive is limited, because I never owned the systems. Lastly, these are my personal favourites. I may have played -better- games, but sometimes something about a game just sticks with you.

River City Ransom
Crystalis
Mutant League Football
Shining Force 2
Snatcher
Shadowrun (SNES)
Super Mario Kart
Zelda: A Link to the Past
Planetfall
Wasteland
System Shock 2
Knights of the Old Republic
Vampire: Bloodlines
Planescape: Torment
Deus Ex
Fallout 3
Grim Fandango
Psychonauts
Baldur’s Gate/2
World of Warcraft
Super Mario 64
Shadow of the Colossus
ICO
Rez

Why yes, I do like cyberpunk, post-apoc, Tim Schafer, and Bioware. Why do you ask? I generally like moody FPS games, western RPGs, quirky adventure games, the unique, and anything with some form of experience and/or loot grind. Mmm, purplz.

This month, all going to plan, I will sit down with Brutal Legend, and Dragon Age: Origins, both of which have the potential to be in there, based on my usual preferences. Something like Diablo 2, Mass Effect, Majora’s Mask, Okami, Metal Gear Solid 3, Half-Life 2 or any of a host of other Infocom text adventures could be in there if I wrote this on a different day.

But I didn’t.

So they aren’t.

What about my least favourite games? Well, I don’t really have the patience to tackle JRPGs anymore, unless they review very, very highly. It’s not active hate, I just don’t love them the way I did as a kid, when the longer the game, the more the value.

Real Time Strategy is another genre I don’t have much love for – I enjoyed Company of Heroes and World in Conflict, but I tried to play through Warcraft 3 to get more of the World of Warcraft background story, and I just couldn’t do it. The style of play seems foreign to my gaming skill set and just not enjoyable to me.

I don’t like 1 on 1 fighting games, either. I don’t want to remember a million moves, I don’t enjoy the blocking techniques, and I don’t like getting my shit fucked up by a guy hitting an 80-hit combo that I can’t do anything about.

Perhaps my biggest pet hate crosses genre lines: aggressively mediocre games. I’m not talking about the truly crappy like Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust, E.T. or Altered Beast, but the games like Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, that have a framework of competency that leads you to believe they could have been something good, but have all the life sucked out of them.

My least favourite game? Halo. I’m not fond of FPS on a console at the best of times, so take this with a grain of salt, but I found this game massively uninspired. It had a colour palette like it was CGA all over again. Its way of ‘extending’ the game (and thus the value) was to make you run back through the levels, in reverse. And this was the company that made Marathon. They had a good track record. They knew better. Of course, it sold by the truckload and has a devoted team of fanboys. The series sells massively. It rated well. What do I know?

Picture shamelessly ripped off from IGN.com. If it makes you feel any better, I cropped it myself.

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