Filed under: Games, Movies, Reviews | Tags: 1up, dead space, eurogamer, movie, videogames, videovista
The build-up to Dead Space has been a bit of a rollercoaster (albeit a very gentle one) for me. Despite my better judgement, the teaser trailer (all very generic Event Horizon-y) really interested me. A survival horror set in deep space? Yeah, sign me up!
Then the other trailers and previews made it look more like a standard Doom-style FPS, which is really not something I’m too enamoured of at the best of times, so my interest duly waned. And then I learned about the tie-ins: a comic and Dead Space: Downfall, a feature-length animated movie which ties in with the game, and I was interested again.
Then I read Eurogamer’s less than glowing review of the game, and once again my level of interest dropped. In a nutshell, Eurogamer’s stance seems to be “It looks good, and shooting things is satisfying, but the gameplay’s only just up to standard and it’s artificially lengthened and really it’s just a shooter rather than a survival horror.” And as all of those are Bad Things in my book, when I read the review, you could colour me ‘meh’.
But then I watched the 1Up Show (which features some remarkably impassioned defence of Dead Space, along with some pretty-looking footage) and read the 1Up review of the game, which mentions the same points as Eurogamer, but sees them defferently. After the show and the review, I was upbeat again.
But then…. Then I watched Dead Space: Downfall (I’m reviewing it for Videovista this month) and it’s turned me off the whole enterprise again. The film is designed to be ‘mature’ in the way that appeals to 14-year-old boys. There’s blood and bad language, and plenty of both, used gratuitously and often unnecessarily. But the interesting parts of the Dead Space world are barely touched on (and I’m almost certain they’ll be ignored completely in the game): the planet-destroying mining industry, the religious movement that opposes it and the way these fit into the wider context of humanity expanding through the cosmos.
Only time will tell though. Dead Space is out on Friday (October 24th) and I’ll be grabbing a rental copy as soon as I can, so that I can write a properly-researched review of the film. Expect an update then.
I was extremely sceptical about this when I downloaded the demo. It’s a console RTS where the primary control method is your voice. As we all know, voice control is useless. Have you ever tried one of those talk-type word processing programs? Say a sentence into a microphone, get a string of gibberish on your page. Or mobile phones: I’ve got a fairly snazzy one, but if I tell it ‘phone mum’, more often than not it tries to call Rob or delete Sam’s contact info or something. How the hell is a game going to work with voice commands?
Pretty damn well, it turns out.
Attach your headset to your controller, hold down the right trigger, give what is described as “a who, what, where command” (for example, ‘unit one, attack hostile unit three’), then release the right trigger and the clever game knows just what to do. Most of the time. Sometimes it gets it wrong, but by and large it’s spot on.
The demo’s a bit rubbish though. You get a single-player level, which is too easy for words: two columns of lightly-armored enemies are approaching Kennedy space centre, where a rocket’s about to be launched. You’ve got three units, and you’ve got to defend the rocket. It’s simplicity itself. Two of your units attack the larger column, the other attacks the smaller one. Then, when the smaller one’s dead, unit three goes and supports units one and two. Another wave of enemies approaches. Simply repeat the original strategy.
The level’s over in under five minutes, and I got an A ranking for it. Without really trying.
You can play a skirmish level on the same map against either a human over Live, or the AI, which is more difficult and diverting (took me 12 minutes. I still got an A though), but I’d have liked another single player level or two. Especially when the demo’s 1.6 gigabytes.
Definitely a game to look out for when it’s released, although I’ll want to rent it first to check out the single-player campaign. From the demo, it seems to revolve around a fairly cliched ‘unknown terrorists are launching multiple attacks against several countries!’ storyline.
And I still say it’s brilliant. The secret stars are bastards though: frustrating, sadistic and in a couple of cases, pointlessly long-winded. If you do collect them all, you can access an alternate ending, although I’m not sure how much it adds to the game. Certainly not enough to warrant collecting the stars just to see it. You’ve got to enjoy the game enough to find fun in the challenge. The alternate ending in itself isn’t a big enough payoff.
I claimed I was going to write a big long post about Braid being art (or not, whichever the case may be), about the story and about what Braid’s done for gaming. Actually, though, there’s no point. It’d be pretentious of me and it’d really only serve as a self-congratulatory “see, I can write pseudo-academic waffle with the best of them” post.
I do still want to say a few things about the game, but I’ll keep them short.
If you haven’t played it, you really should. It’s expensive, as Live Arcade games go, but it’s definitely worth it.
It’s very clever. It merges platforming with puzzling well (though it’s not the first to do that by any stretch of the imagination) and the time-reversal gimmick is very effective, as is the evolving way in which it’s used.
It looks and sounds fantastic.
The story is very interesting, with multiple layers and several equally-valid interpretations. And although it’s actually quite predictable in its structure (start at level 2, play through 3,4,5 and 6 before moving back to 1 for the big reveal) and its surface interpretation, there’s so much under the surface that I didn’t mind. The story is also well-integrated into the game, no small feat considering it’s told through text boxes.
Overall, I’d recommend this to anyone who’s interested in gaming beyond just shooting things or playing on plastic guitars. I’d much much rather buy four or five games like Braid than one like Gears of War 2 (though I’ll no doubt end up picking that up too, at some point).
Embarrassingly, I completely missed this. Only learned about it today. Introversion Software have a new game out! Multiwinia: Survival of the Flattest was released on September 19th, so I’m rather late to the party here. Admittedly, I was on honeymoon when it came out, but I had no idea it even existed! And since I’m a fan of Introversion’s games, that’s a poor show on my part.
Multiwina is the sort-of sequel to 2005’s utterly brilliant Darwinia: a stripped-down RTS in which a virtual world populated by little flat stick-men has been infested with nasty viruses and it’s up to you to get rid of them all and return Darwinia to its utopian state.
Multiwinia takes place after Darwinia was saved from the viruses. Now the Darwinians have split into different tribes and are waging war on each other. It’s up to you to take control of one of the factions and beat all the others!
Except…
The story only exists on Multiwinia’s website. The actual game is story-less. It’s a collection of multiplayer game modes (King of the Hill, Domination and so on), with up to 4 players. You can play all of the maps in singleplayer mode, with the computer AI filling in for human opponents, but there’s no ‘Campaign’ mode. That’s a shame, in my opinion, since I’m not much of a multiplayer gamer. I really only play singleplayer games, and a ‘beat one map to unlock the next’ progression model, with a story attached to the maps would have been a dream come true. Of course, it would really have been an expansion pack for Darwinia if that was the case, but that would have been no bad thing.
Also slightly disappointing is Multiwinia’s interface. It’s very easy to navigate, which is excellent, but Darwinia had geeky in-jokes (such as fake pirate intros of the sort that I remember from my C64 and Amiga-playing days), and a nice sweeping cinematic camera intro, and the front-end was just a map of the Darwinia world, with available locations highlighted. It had charm. Multiwinia feels a bit soulless. Flat, if you’ll pardon the pun.
Of course, that’s all window-dressing, so to speak. The only real important thing is how Multiwinia plays. Luckily, it plays brilliantly. I’ve been glued to it all morning. It’s a really stripped-down RTS (hardly any unit types, no resource management, no possibility of tank-rushing or turtling) in which you just fight the other factions. You’re in battle within seconds, and the fighting just continues until either time runs out or the other players are wiped out. It’s frenetic and brilliant for it. It’s got definite just-one-more-go addictiveness, and for £15 you’d be a fool not to buy it. It’s also pretty forgiving in terms of system requirements:
- 2.0 GHz CPU
- 512 MB RAM
- Windows XP or Vista
- GeForce 6200 or Radeon 9600 series
- Internet Connection for multiplayer games
And it only takes up 62 megabytes of hard drive space!
The honeymoon is over. And it was brilliant. If you’ve never been to the Highlands and Islands of western Scotland, you’re definitely missing out. You should go. Go now!
So, lots to do, now that I’m back. Braid to finish, for one. Stories to redraft, and write, and submit, for two, three and four.
Also coming up soon: finishing the site’s redesign, and restarting the exercise bit of it, as I’ve put on a not-inconsiderable 3kg since the wedding. All that lovely seafood and cosy tea-rooms with delicious home baking! Mmmm, cake.
Stay tuned!
Despite all the naysayers claiming I’d made a mistake by mentioning my plans for a website redesign on this blog because: “people will expect in now and it’ll take you six months to get around to it” (you know who you are!), the website has had a front-page facelift. It’s still not finished: the colourscheme hasn’t changed, I’m not happy with the way the section titles look and there’s no automation (meaning I have to manually update everything every time I write a new blog post, for example); but at least there are tidbits from all the different site pages as soon as you arrive. Hopefully it’ll cut down on my bounce rate a little.
As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m not going to be around much if at all for the next month, so it’s extremely likely that there’ll be no more site updates until October.
Onto news!
Since writing about rllmuk’s Braid Story thread, my traffic’s gone up from one or two people a day to thirty or forty. Yowza! I guess I shouldn’t be surprised: that place has nearly 12,000 members, but it was still a bit of a shock to find out where all that extra traffic was coming from.
And just yesterday, I got a mention from Usefully Employed. He’s rather respectable and counts some pretty decent bloggers among his readers, so God knows what they’ll make of this here.
Finally, it’s my stag do this weekend, so between all the hair-shaving and strippers and general debauchery* it’s highly unlikely I’ll get to finishing my thoughts on Braid before next week. Come Monday, though, I’ll be making a concerted effort to 100% finish the story.
EDIT: 06/09/2008:
11:08am
I’ve only gone and put one of the .css files for the website into a password protected directory, haven’t I? Fear not though, it’ll be fixed soon.
11:18am
Tis fixed!
*There won’t be any of that stuff. I hope.
I’m getting married in two weeks and then I’m going on my honeymoon for a fortnight, so things are pretty busy hereabouts, and I’ve not had the time to concentrate on the website that I’d normally hope to have. To be honest I’m not even thinking about it at the moment: I’m concentrating on stuff like whether the band will have a bar tab at the wedding reception (answer: probably) and whether there’ll be enough taxis to take everyone back to the hotel afterwards (answer: probably, again). I’ve written a couple of news items there announcing what’s essentially a month’s hiatus.
Imagine my surprise then when a concept for a site redesign popped fully formed into my head!
So now it’s all down on paper: visual structure, navigation design flowcharts, some thoughts on graphics (don’t worry Joe, I’m keeping the typewriter)…
I sincerely doubt I’ll be able to get it done before the wedding, as it’s quite a bit more complicated than the current design. Complicated in terms of making it work, anyway. For the end user it should be just as straightforward as the current design, but it will look lots better and hopefully cut down on my frankly appalling bounce rate.
It’s likely that the new look would mean a redesign here, too. Certainly in terms of colourscheme, but also possibly in terms of how the blog actually works. Although having said that, I’m constrained by the blogging software I use, so unless I’m willing to shell out lots more money I might have to leave the guts of the blog the way they are.
Exciting times ahead!
Filed under: Games, Work | Tags: Braid, Games, Jonathan Blow, narrative, rllmuk, story
After my last post, on the criticism of Braid at rllmuk (criticism as in literary criticism or film criticism, not as in people being disparaging of the game), I’ve been thinking about what I like about the game.
The gameplay is interesting, but to me it’s nothing all that amazing. You’ve got different worlds, all of which have similar (though subtly different) rules, and you use the different rules to solve puzzles. It’s pretty straightforward in that regard (at least until you get to the last level, where that mechanic is subverted very well). I’m not all that bowled over by the level structure either: you start in World 2 and it’s pretty clear from the beginning that the final world will be World 1.
Mainly what I like is the way in which the narrative is handled. It’s pretty crude in parts - backstory is done through reading books rather than through using the time-reversal mechanic to take the player back to Tim’s childhood, for example - but this works well because of the ephemeral nature of the backstory: the player’s never sure whether Tim is really rescuing a princess he knows and who is held captive (though the last level’s pretty clear on that point), whether he’s searching for a princess he’s never met or whether he’s searching for a lost love; whether the princess is real, an abstract concept or a metaphor for something. Or whether it’s all of the above. I think the abstraction certainly adds something to the narrative (in the way the terminal text did with Marathon), but what I’m most impressed with is the way that many of the finer ‘emotional’ points of the narrative are hinted at by the art style (World 2 has a sunny, cottage-garden feel of optimism, but as the game progresses the worlds get progressively darker and more unusual), by the paintings that the player assembles which again hint at key narrative points (which I haven’t figured out yet but have read some very enjoyable - and possibly ‘correct’ - interpretations of); the music, which works as an emotional touchstone when playing both forwards and backwards; and the way that these aspects aren’t forced on the player: the player experiences the story without recourse to MGS4-style exposition cutscenes which wreck immersion.
Most of all, I’m impressed with the way Jonathan Blow has told a story which is very interesting, but without forcing it on the player: he’s managed to tell this story in an unintrusive way, using platform game mechanics. If only people designing shooters and RPGs could figure out how to do the same!
I haven’t fully finished Braid yet. I’ve gone through all the levels and collected all of the puzzle pieces, and read all of the books, but I’m still collecting stars. I’ll post again, with a more complete response to the game (and to that rllmuk topic I keep banging on about), once I’ve got all of the stars and seen the ’secret’ ending.
I’m pretty damn late to the party on this one, but it’s worth mentioning anyway.
Greg Costikyan got on a bit of a condescending soap box back on February 24th, and posted a piece about games criticism.
Read it yourself - it’s worth it - but in brief, he’s saying that criticism and reviewing aren’t even remotely the same thing, but they’re often taken to be synonymous by games journalists (and gamers). He says that reviews are all well and good, but they’re not going to help move games forward as an art-form (or even an entertainment medium), whereas criticism might. Then he bemoans the fact that while we’ve got plenty of games reviews, we’ve got no games criticism.
He’s not wrong, of course, but then I came across a topic (containing massive, massive spoilers) on the rllmuk forum talking about Braid, Jonathon Blow’s interesting rewinding-time platform puzzler. It seems to me that what’s happening in that topic is exactly what Costikyan wants to see from games criticism.
Greg says a definition of criticism could be:
“Criticism is an informed discussion, by an intelligent and knowledgeable observer of a medium, of the merits and importance (or lack thereof) of a particular work. Criticism isn’t intended to help the reader decide whether or not to plunk down money on something; some readers’ purchase decisions may be influenced, but guiding their decisions is not the purpose of the critical work. Criticism is, in a sense merely “writing about” — about art, about dance, about theater, about writing, about a game–about any particular work of art. How a critical piece addresses a work, and what approach it takes, may vary widely from critic to critic, and from work to work. There are, in fact, many valid critical approaches to a work, and at any given time, a critique may adopt only one, or several of them.
Some valid critical approaches? Where does this work fall, in terms of the historical evolution of its medium. How does this work fit into the creator’s previous ouevres, and what does it say about his or her continuing evolution as an artist. What novel techniques does this work introduce, or how does it use previously known techniques to create a novel and impactful effect. How does it compare to other works with similar ambitions or themes. What was the creator attempting to do, and how well or poorly did he achieve his ambitions. What emotions or thoughts does it induce in those exposed to the work, and is the net effect enlightening or incoherent. What is the political subtext of the work, and what does it say about gender relationships/current political issues/the nature-nurture debate, or about any other particular intellectual question (whether that question is a particular hobby-horse of the reviewer, or inherently raised by the work in question).”
Now, I can’t say how intelligent the people at rllmuk are, I’ve never met them. But they seem pretty informed about games and about Braid’s themes, and they’re not trying to persuade anyone to buy the game (in fact, it’s a massive spoiler of a topic: if you haven’t completed the game, you shouldn’t be reading the topic in the first place). They’re discussing interpretations of Braid’s story, interpretations which take into account Braid’s predecessors and its gameplay mechanics, as well as the ‘pure’ story contained in the books dotted about the game. I’d say it counts as criticism.
And that’s all very interesting, of course, but it raises even more interesting questions if you look at the wider games community. The topic on rllmuk isn’t the only place this sort of discussion’s happening - there are lots of boards engaging in Braid-criticism. But aside from a brief section in an episode of the 1up Show and some discussion in the GFW podcast, I haven’t seen any ‘professional’ criticism. It’s got me wondering whether that’s because criticism doesn’t work very well in a purely didactic medium such as a magazine (EDGE is probably the closest thing to games criticism I’ve seen in print, and I find the magazine almost uniformly pretentious and boring. Much as with Sight and Sound, to be honest) or whether it’s because Braid is the first game with fairly mainstream appeal that has enough going on to be worth criticising.
For the record, I don’t think it’s the second option. Mind you, I don’t really think it’s the first either. Perhaps it’s just that Braid is where a more vibrant criticism is going to come from and in a year or two’s time we’ll be able to find decent game criticism. I hope so.
Well, perhaps not a-plenty, but certainly a-few.
I thought it might be nice to mention some of the blogs I read, just to show that I don’t exist in a vacuum (and as a bit of a shortcut to the updating and fleshing out of the blog’s appearance which was maligned in an earlier post). I’ll do this with game blogs first, then I’ll do it again later on for other types of blogs.
Okay. In no particular order then:
Roboto-Chan isn’t actually a blog: it’s a column on GameSetWatch which I’m a big fan of, and which I’m mentioning here because it’s so interesting and because it warrants a special mention (separate from GSW, which is going into a ‘games sites I read’ post if I ever get round to doing one). Roboto-Chan deals with mecha in games and always has masses of information (and hints at so much more that I’m reminded of just how ignorant I am when it comes to big robots and games).
David Jaffe’s blog is worth a scan, as the man doesn’t shy away from saying what he really thinks, and that’s pretty rare in the games industry. I tend not to particularly agree with a lot of what he say, but the fact that he speaks his mind in the first place is definitely worth applauding, and when he says something I agree with, he tends to say it in a way that I really agree with.
Jeff Gerstmann’s blog is very sparsely updated (even more so than this one), so when he’s not saying anything there it’s worth checking out Giant Bomb: the site he set up after he didn’t* get fired for giving Kane and Lynch the review it deserved.
*(officially, at any rate)
That Videogame Blog is a bit Kotaku-ish: they’re both news sites rather than diary-type blogs, and they both have a whole bunch of contributors. They’re both worth reading though, to keep up on what’s happening in the games world.
Davis LLP’s Video Game Law Blog is an interesting read: it does exactly what it says on the tin - blogs about videogame law issues - but as with Usefully Employed (a fantastic employment law blog), I read it religiously. I don’t understand half of it, mind you, but it gives a perspective that’s divorced from the usual lights-and-whistles publicity machine industry coverage.
And finally, we get to Greg Costikyan’s blog. Costikyan helped set up Manifesto Games, and he consistently rails against what he doesn’t like in the games industry. As with Jaffe, I don’t always agree with him, but I love the fact that he believes in something and he’s vociferous in his pursuit of it.
So, those are the blogs I read. Later on today, I’ll be adding permanent links to the sidebar. If I’m missing blogs I really should be reading, or you think I’m reading something worthless, attack the comments with gusto and tell me about it.
