They should have called it imMORAL

Morality systems in games almost always come off as feeling superficial and silly. The choices always given to you end up requiring you to be Gandhi or Hitler with very little gray area in between. The only game I’ve ever played that didn’t come off this way was Mass Effect. Mass Effect certainly had those two possibilities, but it had the gray too. Besides, nothing aside from story was affected by the players’ choices. There weren’t any special abilities to be obtained by being especially evil or anything like that. This lead me to make choices largely based on my mood at the time and more importantly the context of the situations presented me. I ended up playing a character that was quick to anger, but was generally a good guy when it came down to it. This article isn’t about Mass Effect though, it’s about inFAMOUS, which features the most ridiculous moral choices I’ve ever seen in a game.

Before I ever started playing inFAMOUS I knew no matter what choices were thrown at me I would always pick the evil ones. There was absolutely no middle ground when the game gave you choices, I either got to choose to do the obviously good deed or the horribly evil one. Since the powers acquired for being evil were better in my opinion I opted to be the biggest bastard in Empire City. The problem with this is what is the point? Isn’t the reason to have any morality choices at all to allow the player to explore these behaviors? Maybe I want to see what it’s like to be a total selfish prick because it goes against my upbringing, or maybe I want to play the middle ground and just see how things pan out without making any big decisions. Perhaps I want to play it like I would if all this crazy stuff was actually happening to me in real life. None of this ever crossed my mind when I played inFAMOUS, I went evil simply because I wanted those powers. I was almost immediately turned off by the story, which only further made the moral choices irrelevant since I was almost solely playing the game for its playground appeal.

inFAMOUS follows in the footsteps of Crackdown, there is an open world and the player is given crazy super powers. It’s a wonderful setup that allows for a great deal of fun to be had doing almost anything. Since I thought the story was ridiculous, I was primarily playing just because I found the game fun. This is the only reason I chose evil, simply because I thought those powers would be more fun. My explosions certainly were a lot bigger than Gandhi’s ever could be.

The other glaring problem about inFAMOUS’s morality system is how poorly it melded with the story. Despite making good or evil choices, several of the missions require you to be good. There are missions that require you to escort a bus of injured people to a hospital. You can’t not do it and still continue the story. This of course causes quite the disconnect between story and player actions should you choose to go evil, but discussing that would be opening a whole new can of worms. There’s more ludonarrative dissonance in this game than… well a game with a lot of ludonarrative dissonance problems I suppose.

The game is still a great time. The controls are intuitive and the new abilities are introduced slowly enough to not be overwhelming. The world is fairly well designed, and the parkour controls are incredibly forgiving. Almost too forgiving at times, requiring multiple presses of the cancel button to reach the bottom level of somewhere. Also there are a few annoying sections, but given the sheer amount of your characters powers and the diversity of the city, I’d be willing to make the argument that the players lack of creativity is what’s really causing the problem. Simply put, the controls are solid and play off the environments nicely, which leads to a solid gameplay experience.

I still find it amusing that I can absolutely disregard a games story and still have such a great time with it. The whole point of this blog, whether or not I’m actually achieving it, is to discuss games in a more analytical light. For whatever reason, I’m more drawn to the narrative side of these discussions. I find games to be a very unique form of storytelling whose potential is just barely starting to be tapped, yet I’ll still play a game like inFAMOUS for no other reason than to shock the shit out of a bunch of weird looking bad guys in style. Whatever, I guess you can’t argue with fun.

Why Movie Games Suck Less Now

Just a quick note, I wrote this about a month ago for something else. It wasn't used so I figured I'd post it here. I only mention this in case any of you are paying close enough attention to notice the games I mention in my GameFly queue have already cycled through my currently played list.

I pulled up my GameFly queue the other day and noticed something rather strange. The game I currently had out was the movie tie-in game Wanted: Weapons of Fate. The next two games on my queue were the new Riddick game, Assault on Dark Athena, and the Wolverine tie-in I heard good things about. Anyone who has played video games for any length of time knows that games based on movies are horrid and movies based on games might even be worse. So why are my next three rentals movie tie-ins? When did they start becoming worth our time?

Fundamentally it makes sense that neither movie nor game can make the transition to the other well. Games generally have pretty bare bones stories, if you take out all the gameplay, you aren’t left with a lot to work with. Action scenes can only make up so much before a movie gets ridiculous. Games based on movies suffer from the opposite problem in that they can’t find enough material to create a complete game. The developers resort to making up anything they can in order to give their protagonist another reason to run through yet another soulless warehouse killing hundreds of goons. There biggest problem however is they are rarely given sufficient time to be made. Release dates are generally tied to the movie, but development starts later and can be affected by unplanned changes in the movie. This has been a problem for ages with one of the most famous cases dating as far back as 1982 when Atari pumped out E.T. in six weeks and expected to cash in on name recognition alone.

Clearly, good or bad, these games are selling otherwise every movie under the sun wouldn’t have a licensed game attached to it, but why do they have to suck? No one wants to work on a game that they know is crap and a good game that sells to the hardcore could generate a whole lot more revenue.

Well it seems like some people are finally starting to take the hint. Last generation there were at least a few tie-ins I can remember that were worth playing. One was Spiderman 2, which used the popularity of GTA’s sandbox style, while nailing the web swing mechanics as an incredibly fun mode of transportation and combat.

Another two dealt with several of the traditional movie-game problems head on and fully benefitted from the effort. First, Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay was developed in correlation with Vin Diesel and the movies writers. From the beginning it was clear they cared about the direction the game went, maybe even more so than the movie. ;) The game was made as a prequel to the entire series, so the developers were not bound by the movies plot. Most important of all however was the game had over 18 months in development. It astonished its audience upon release who were rightfully jaded, but pleasantly surprised and was just recently updated and re-released as a bonus with Assault on Dark Athena that I mentioned in my queue up there.

The other game, Enter the Matrix was written as a side story to Matrix Reloaded by the creators of the series. The Wachowski brothers had the story laid out ahead of time and even had all the cut scenes filmed in live action on the set of Matrix Reloaded. Sadly Enter the Matrix was still plagued with the problems of being rushed to coincide with the movie release, but it was a step in the right direction.

Fast forward to this gen, more specifically this year, and there seems to be a slew of half decent tie-ins. Games like the ones in my queue, among others, are all getting fairly positive reviews. Most of them seem to be fixing their content inspiration problems by making their games shorter. This isn’t exactly the most elegant solution, but like I’ve said before, I’d rather have quality over quantity. Hell, too much quality even starts to get tedious after the 30 hour mark. (I’m looking at you GTA4.) Another thing tie-ins seem to be successfully employing more and more is capturing the feel of the movies they represent. That has always been the goal and now it’s becoming a reality. Afro Samurai for instance, while taking some liberties with the story, still feature several parts of the movie shot for shot. Bosses have several the same moves, set pieces are the same, and it really feels like playing the movie.

Probably the most significant change to happen recently however is just an increased interest in games. With the advent of the Wii, gaming is reaching millions of new people and new exploitations of the powerful HD consoles are allowing games to tell stories in ways like never before. People are taking notice including several big movie producers and directors like Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg. Many have expressed interest in or have already made games. With such support backing the narrative potential of games coming from Hollywood, wouldn’t the first logical step be to improve the games already closely associated with movies? With the interest there, developers are now being given the proper time and resources to make quality tie-ins. They’ve always had the talent, it’s nice to see them finally able to put it to good use.

Hostile Takeover

I was recently talking to my roommate about Fallout 3. He had been playing the game pretty religiously for the last week or so and then completely stopped. This was strange because earlier in the week he was telling me he really wanted to finish the main story because he realized he was getting close to that point he always seems to hit with many games where he stops playing entirely. What we realized after he stopped Fallout 3 was that the point where he quits playing isn’t based on how long he’s been playing the game, but how far into the story he is. After looking over my library of games that my roommate has really enjoyed we noticed that he quit almost every single one right near the end of the game, let’s say around the 85% point. He described it as the point where the story “completely takes over the game.” According to another friend of ours this is a common occurrence among gamers, but it is the first I’ve heard of it. Maybe after talking to him more I’ll have more to say on the topic, but for now I just want to explore possibilities for why my roommate quits games right near the end.

First off, my roommate whom I’ll now just refer to as Conor, said he quits playing after the story completely takes over the game. This most likely because games generally don’t have the most compelling stories. If you are primarily playing games for the fun game mechanics then stopping at the end credits is as arbitrary of a line as stopping anywhere else. Unless you are continuously getting new power ups that vastly change how the game is played there is no difference between quitting halfway through versus quitting at the end. Sure, different things happen farther into the game, but with most games the core mechanics are laid down and mastered early on. Therefore if you do not care about story at all then quitting once you grow tired of the gameplay makes perfect sense. The reason Conor would always make it to close to the end, but not quite, is because once it is clear the game is coming to a conclusion it is essentially the same thing to him as the game actually coming to that conclusion. There is no point in finishing the last hour or two when all he thinks the game has left to offer him is the finale of a story he never really cared about.

Another possibility is once the story takes over then the freedom of an open world game is lost. This of course only applies to genres where you don’t necessarily need to complete everything in the main storyline immediately. Several of the last handful of games Conor played were sandbox games, including Assassin’s Creed, GTA4, and Fallout 3. In all three of these games there is a main quest, but at any point in the game you can find something else to do. Assassin’s Creed is the exception because the story literally does completely take over and forces you down a linear path for the last hour or so of gameplay. The other two however only do this artificially. There is a bit of ludonarrative dissonance going on when you are mere moments from reaching a games epic conclusion, but decide you want to go to the strip club with Jacob or wander around post apocalyptic D.C. looking for a U.F.O. instead. Even though you can do these things instead of finishing the main quest, the story in sandbox games eventually become so much of the focus that it feels wrong to ignore them. So instead of actually finishing them or ignoring them, Conor ends up quitting because he cares little for the story, but still feels a sense of ludonarrative dissonance if he chooses to ignore it.

I wonder how Conor would feel about playing a game with a more compelling narrative. I have a feeling he would have stopped playing Bioshock almost immediately after the major twist around the 3/4s mark. Same with a game like Far Cry 2, where the ending was absolutely fantastic, but the pacing started to lull a bit after completing a few missions in the southern half of the country. I am fairly certain he never would have made it through this lull before the ending. Both of these points mark a change in the story that don’t necessarily fit into the category of “taking over the game”, but are where the story starts to feel almost irrelevant. Far Cry 2 recovers wonderfully from its pacing problem, but for a gamer like Conor it would be too late. As for Bioshock, it never really recovered, that game would have been better off ending shortly after the twist or perhaps adopting another ending entirely.

After talking to Conor last night, I found he still defends a few games for their storylines, specifically Final Fantasy 7 and 9. We both tend to agree that JRPG’s storylines are far too long, but something about those two were interesting enough for him to finish through to the end. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just because he played them when he was a lot younger, but it would fit nicely into my theories above if it is just because they are interesting and well presented stories. He certainly seems to think this is the case. I haven’t played FF9, but I can vouch for 7 being a unique and well presented story, especially considering where video games were from a narrative standpoint when it was released in the late ‘90s. Also, it might be interesting to consider that Conor is a film major that has focused a very large amount of his effort into writing screenplays and the art of storytelling. Would he have a different reaction to games if he didn’t know all the technicalities of how stories tend to unfold and the narrative devices employed? I have no idea.

Anyway, it’s something to think about. I might have more on this later, but don’t hold your breath. :)

The Epitome of Mediocrity

We all remember the Killzone 2 hype train that lasted far longer than any train should. You know the kind, where you have to sit there in that sort of shady part of town for ten minutes as the damn thing passes. To recap, it started with a video whose graphics looked too good to be true during E3 2005, a full year before the PS3’s release. Well it turned out it was too good to be true because that video was pre-rendered. The train ended this February when the game was finally released to critical acclaim. MetaCritic right now lists the game at a 91 and I want to know why? I finally played it this week and while I can say it’s not bad, it sure as hell isn’t good. The game is incredibly average in all aspects aside from graphics. Average isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but when you make a game in as saturated a genre as shooters are than you had better have something more than graphics to set it apart.

I will say that Guerrilla outdid themselves on the graphics. The Killzone 2 that finally did make it out four years after that infamous pre-rendered video looks damn near as good. Everything is incredibly detailed and the character models really pop when you see them up close. The only problem is everything is brown and gunmetal gray. Like every other war shooter out there this gen, Killzone has you fighting your way through boring dirty colored cities. There’s no luscious green foliage or vast deep blue bodies of water to look at, just dirt and metal.

Other than that faint praise, everything about Killzone 2 just screams mediocrity. Every gun I found throughout the campaign was simply uninspired. There was the assault rifle with the green dot scope, the enemy assault rifle with an iron sight, the enemy SMG with the same iron sight. Oh and I can't forget the heavy machine gun that resembled an M60 and the utterly useless grenade launcher that launched the slowest detonating and tiniest exploding grenades ever. The only gun I encountered that was remotely unique was the lightning gun and I can’t even say that it was well designed. To use it you simply had to aim in the general direction of your target, lightning would then proceed to shock the shit out of him and arc towards anything else nearby. Within about three seconds everyone in front of you would be dead and twitching. This thing had infinite ammo too, so I think I can safely say it was the most overpowered gun in any shooter ever. I think Guerrilla knew that though because it is only available for the last half of one mission. Also, wouldn't a lightning gun not arc towards people when being used in an almost entirely metal factory?

The actual gameplay pretty much played out like every other run of the mill shooter I’ve played. It had a cover mechanic, but it wasn’t nearly as good as Gears or Rainbow Six’s. There was a knife, but there was never a reason to use it or a fast way to get it out. There were a few vehicle sections, but they controlled clumsily and didn’t really add anything special to the experience. I guess I can’t really fault them for that though; I haven’t played a shooter in ages that had a fun vehicle sequence. Actually I can fault them for that, them and everyone else. Anyway, point is there was nothing really original or refreshing about the campaign and that is kind of a problem when games like Bioshock, Call of Duty 4 and Far Cry 2 have been proving over and over again just how powerful this genre can be. The only vaguely interesting part about the game was how enemies kept respawning, you pretty much had to force your way forward. It was more like advancing the frontline rather than killing everyone and moving on. Still this proved frustrating because the game never really made that concept clear and it only applied to certain parts of the campaign. The only way to be sure this is what you were supposed to do was to kill people for a long enough time that you were satisfied they weren’t going to stop coming.

Lastly, and this is kind of a personal complaint but I might as well mention it while I’m completely hating on this game, is the PS3 controller. Something about the way it feels just doesn’t work well for FPS’s. The analog sticks don’t resist enough so aiming always feels kind of floaty and loose. There aren’t triggers, which doesn’t seem like it should matter, but pressing R1 to fire just feels wrong. R2 is even worse because firing in bursts usually results in my finger just slipping right off the button. Every time I play a shooter on the PS3 I just find myself wishing I could use my 360 controller. I know if I had readers I’d get a lot of flak for that, but luckily I don’t and if I did I’d tell them to shut up!

I didn’t intend for this “review” to be so harsh (though the sarcasm was pretty intentional), but I was fairly appalled by how much hype and high scores this game received. Like I said above, it wasn’t bad, but it didn’t do anything even remotely new or unique. In all fairness I never tried the multiplayer, but from what I heard during release it took it’s RPG elements a little too far. Besides, I gleaned enough of the games controls and gameplay from the single player to know I didn’t want to play the multi. I think the reason this game resonated so negatively with me is because it is a perfect example of hype affecting review scores. I can’t think of any other explanation for why it reviewed so well. Based on the current state of grade inflation, I would have expected 8’s all around. If we were using all the numbers in the 1 to 10 scale then 5's would be pretty accurate. Instead we are left with an average of 9.1, which comparatively speaking should result in a fantastic game. Yet we didn’t get a fantastic game, we got a shooter that everyone forgot about a month later because everyone was getting hyped for the next big thing.

Paradise in Other Games

As the more perceptive of my seven or so readers can see, I recently started playing Burnout Paradise again. I went and bought a copy the day the new Big Surf Island DLC came out. Interestingly enough, it had been damn near exactly a year since I last played Burnout Paradise when I popped it back into my 360. As I’m sure most gamers are aware, Burnout Paradise has seen an unprecedented level of support since release from its developer, Criterion Games. Since I stopped playing last summer they have added day and night cycles, weather effects, motorcycles, a cops and robbers mode, an entire new island, and some other stuff I’m sure I forgot about. Even better, most of it has been for free! Gamers everywhere have rallied behind this new model of support, but I wonder just how viable it really is? It works great for this style of game, but how will it fair if applied to a linear narrative or even any game with a narrative?

The reason Burnout Paradise can be modified so easily is there is absolutely no story. You drive cars around what is essentially a giant playground and have a blast doing it. The game gives you a plethora of things to do, and whenever Criterion comes up with something new, they throw it up on the marketplace. Most games however, aren’t like that. Prince of Persia, for example, stirred up all sorts of drama by deciding to add content to an already finished product. That game had an ending with a sort of hazy choice to be made. If you were among the minority that opted to end the game prematurely then the addition of DLC to add onto the story was essentially a slap in the face. Seeing as how most games single player campaigns fit into a narrative like this, with or without choices, adding content ends up feeling tacked on or just more of the same. New content for Burnout on the other hand not only adds new areas, but alters the old areas injecting a fresh twist on an old game. The only way to do that with a game like Prince of Persia would be to add new gameplay elements that require you to replay the storyline.

Still, there are a ton of games that could easily adopt Criterion's support system. GTA4 has in a way, with its DLC bringing storylines unrelated to the main game. A game that could have did a lot of really cool things with extra content, but I feel only scratched the surface was Crackdown. Crackdown is very similar to Burnout Paradise if you can overlook the very glaring fact that in one you are a super soldier and in the other you are a… car. The philosophy behind each game is essentially the same. You are given a huge world, tools to do cool things in those worlds and various objectives to complete. Once you were finished with Crackdown, co-op and all, you could have easily been left wanting more. I certainly was and I put a pretty ridiculous amount of time into that game. Realtime Worlds did release a small DLC pack with new weapons and cars, and a few other throwaways, but if they kept supporting Crackdown like Burnout, I could see myself still coming back to it two years later.

The reason I find Criterion’s continued support for Burnout Paradise so exciting is because up until now console DLC has felt more like a rip off than a justified addition. It’s only been getting worse as we get farther and farther into this cycles lifespan as well, map packs are getting smaller and more expensive and content is being released within weeks and sometimes days of a games release. There are some cons to this system such as developers having to dedicate resources to their older games that could potentially go to newer titles, but when so many new games feel like more of an expansion pack than an actual sequel it makes you wonder why they didn’t just keep patching the original. It won't work for all games, but when it does I think you could turn an awesome game into something really special.

Dark Athena > Butcher Bay

I never played the original Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. I remember everyone raving about it and friends offering to let me borrow it, but for whatever reason I never played it. This made Assault on Dark Athena a very intriguing title for me. Not only would I get a new Riddick game, but I’d finally get to play through what is considered to be one of the best movie games ever. I only read one or two reviews because I was planning on checking this out based on word of mouth alone, but of the ones I read it seemed like everyone though Butcher Bay was still the better game. Maybe it is because I never played the original, but I definitely think Dark Athena was actually superior.

First of all, I think both games dive bombed pretty hard in their last third. Both more or less abandon all stealth mechanics and let the shooter mechanics run rampant. This would be fine, but neither game is a terribly competent shooter. They aren’t bad, but the controls feel a little loose and towards the end of Butcher Bay specifically the encounter design becomes frustrating. Walking down a hallway that leads to a T, while a guy on either corner shoots at you from the cover of said corners is not a quality encounter. It leaves you with no real tactical options other than stand from far enough away and hope your aim is better than there’s. The worst however is the multiple encounters with robots that can only take damage from the back. Early on when I first met these robots, they were in rooms with lots of places to hide. Getting the drop on them was intuitive and fun. Later in the game however, I found myself fighting two at once with several basic guards providing backup. The arena was well lit with very little cover, getting behind these guys was damn near impossible. If I did manage to get behind one, the others would most likely blow me to hell before I could kill him and return to safety. Also the enemy A.I. is pretty retarded at times, which would often lead to the robots getting stuck in one spot that really was impossible to do anything about.

Dark Athena, on the other hand, failed less badly than Butcher Bay. Its ending was still the weakest, but it was better than the worst parts of Butcher Bay. In Dark Athena, the stealth mechanics are replaced with a manually triggered grenade launcher gun that was super accurate, which also means very easy to miss with. It was kind of a weird switch, but the gun was awesome and remained fun to use for the last third of the game or so, despite several fairly cheap encounters.

The atmosphere and story of Dark Athena also boded better with me. It felt a lot more fitting for Riddick as a character than Butcher Bay. In Butcher Bay, I was tasked with escaping, something you actually end up doing three times by games’ end. Escaping just to get thrown into a higher security level via cutscene got pretty old by the third time. The pacing was also ground to a dead halt multiple times by doing errand quests for other inmates and the clunky side quest system used in these parts detracted from the experience for me. In Dark Athena it is just you. The only help you receive is from people trapped in cells, it’s all about Riddick doing what he does best in a conveniently dark and well ventilated spaceship.

Also, as nominal of a part as this is, I absolutely loved the first time I was given control of the drones. Killing guards as shown through the red robot interface with very little regard for my own well being, while the very Half Life inspired techno played in the background resonated very powerfully within me. I think for a similar reason that the climax of Half Life 2 Episode 2 was more than enough to make that my favorite game of the series. Coincidentally, I’m listening to the music that played during that part of Episode 2 right now.

Anyway, both Riddick games shine brightest in their beginnings and middles more so than their ends. They both provide an interesting take on stealth, a genre that is very easy to totally screw up. I’d recommend checking them out if you haven’t played Butcher Bay before. The graphics aren’t totally up to snuff, but they are more than sufficient. Starbreeze does enough things you think you’ve seen before with a unique enough twist to warrant your time. I suppose if you are a fan of Butcher Bay already then you don’t need a recommendation, but if not check ‘em out. They may not be the best games out there, but they are a good time.