Oldschool Hard

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.

Share this post:

This is the sort of achievement that actually counts for something.

I think Microsoft hit upon the purest form of sweet, sweet digital crack when they came up with XBox Live achievements. How many hours have been spent by poor gamers trying to get the most obsession-required, difficult or obscure achievements? All for a maximum of 1000 nerd points a game, that are worth exactly zero. You can’t trade them for anything. Having more doesn’t get an in-game advantage beyond whatever you unlocked in the process of actually getting them. It doesn’t get you free games, or discounts on your Live subscription, or anything other than bragging rights. And yet I find myself drawn to certain achievements, chasing little orbs or riddle symbols well after I’ve completed a game’s main storyline, for what, I don’t even know. All they are are a modern, complicated version of the high-score table on the arcade machines down at the local fish and chip shop, only with your gamertag attached, instead of cool three letter word like G O D or S E X. Heh, sex. That’s a good one.

The effort required to get the same amount of achievement points can vary widely. My one (and only) playthrough of the original Gears of War netted me a mere 100 points, as most of the game’s points are tied up in multiplayer achievements that I’m not at all interested in. Balancing that out are the easy ones. I’ve received achievement points, just for not skipping a cutscene, in The Darkness. In a game like Avatar (not the movie game), you can get all 1000 points the game has to offer merely by button-mashing, within the first 5 minutes of playing. Perhaps it’s a canny sales strategy – appeal to all the gamer score whores, although I’d say it’s more likely to be the most rented game than a big blockbuster.

I don’t really mind achievements that flow naturally from gameplay (complete this level, kill a realistically-achieveable number of smellies, do x jumps), and even better if they require some skill, but still flow naturally (complete this level quickly, kill a realistic number of smellies barehanded). I’ll even give kudos to the most out-there achievements, like the Six Degrees of Schafer achievement in Brutal Legend, where you have to play with or against someone who already has the achievement to get it (and the first people to get it had to play against the developer, Tim Schafer). It’s the ‘rack up 700 hours online with a 10:1 kill:death ratio’-type of achievement that really annoys me, and while I expect the idea is to try and keep you playing their game, that sort of ridiculous way of doing it makes me want to drop a game like a bad habit as soon as another game comes along.

Now, Microsoft was only the first. In the way of all gaming innovations, others would later come along to latch on. Later to come were PlayStation trophies, steam achievements, WoW achievements…that last one is like sprinkling the finest columbian powder over concentrated crack. It’s so addictive it should be illegal. I’m not even going to begin to tell you the stupid shit I’ve done to get achievements in WoW (nor how annoying it is to not have achievements for things you’ve actually done, because you did them before achievements were introduced). All I will say is that there was a lot of time wasted, a lot of boredom, and yet I did them anyway, like an idiot.

Please, eliminate these wretched things. Not because they inevitably influence game design, not because they serve no real purpose, but because I CAN’T HELP MYSELF AND I NEED YOU TO TAKE THEM AWAY. I won’t do the stupid ones, but if I think something is do-able, I will keep trying to run back and forth across a lake in Shadow Complex for a measly 5 achievement points. Unless, for the love of god, you stop me.

Image from Polygamer.

Share this post:

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.

Share this post:

Happy New Year. I hope Santa brought you what you wanted and your New Year’s resolutions are achievable, or better yet, that you didn’t make any at all.

HAY WHAT’D YOU GET FOR CHRISTMAS, EDDIE? HUH? WHAT’D YOU GET?

I got clothes, and books. Clothes bought by other people are great because I have terrible taste in clothing (eg. boxer shorts with cartoon characters, and t-shirts with obscure video games) and whatever other people buy me is almost always better than what I choose myself. Books are also great. I like books. Books are a place where I would love to make a career. Like with games, I keep a big pile (in fact, multiple piles) of books. I try to read at least one a week. I fail, but I try.

Oh, and a camera. It’s tiny, a little Canon to replace my big-ass old Canon that has a sensor problem and makes every photo it takes look like the cover of a Peter Gabriel album. We had a good run, but I like photos to actually document what I’m looking at. Demanding, I know.

BUT WHAT ABOUT GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMES?

I bought myself a fuckload more games in the Steam holiday sale. I don’t ask other people to buy games for me, because I can buy my own damn games, and I know my own tastes, which don’t always stretch to the latest AAA game.

WHAT ELSE DID YOU DO?

After my initial plan fell through, I went up the highway a little to the country for New Year’s Eve and watched as Mother Nature rolled in a rather spectacular thunder and lightning display, a kiss-off to a shitty decade from her perspective (and a passable one from mine). Then I came home and attempted to reinstall WoW again.

I used both a disc and the direct download to install, multiple versions of the various patches, tried defragging and all the other steps suggested on the WoW tech support forums (even though their suggested cause of the symptoms I was experiencing was essentially impossible), and even updated to Windows 7, but I still had patching errors.

After coming home from New Year’s, WoW finally installed, patched and played without issue, after previously failing to install and/or patch properly about 20 times. I have no idea what I did differently, or what had changed, but I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. Of course, it had to be the day after Winter Veil that it finally decided to work, depriving me of those achievements for another year, but hey, it’s only nerd points.

While the reinstall process drove me mad, I generally don’t have too many problems with patching, and I vastly prefer this gaming generation’s computer-gaming foibles to those I’ve had to deal with in the past. Having patches and drivers available over broadband internet, rather than waiting for magazine cover discs or having to contact the company to have them send out floppies (at my expense) is a massive improvement.

Sure, in PC gaming there are still patching problems (crucial in a MMORPG, not so much a problem in a single-player game where I don’t necessarily have to have the patch to play) and game breaking bugs – issues which I feel can be solved by better quality control and testing, and driver issues, which probably relate more to the almost unlimited combinations of hardware that a PC can have than anything else, but I no longer have to write custom autoexec batch files, just to make things load in the right order to have enough extended memory to play a game (“640k, more than anyone could need!”). I don’t have to know the commands to make a system ready to receive a game to be loaded off of a cassette tape, then have to wait for the tape to play through while the computer reads the data off it, only to find out I’ve been duped by another shitty Ocean licenced game.

Things could be better, sure, but things could also be worse, and at least these sort of problems seem to be getting better, rather than worse.

Share this post: