December 14th, 2009
Borderlands: Genre Pollution
With Borderlands, a game described as a “role-playing shooter”, developers Gearbox hope to capture the audience that spends many sleepless nights wandering through forgotten strongholds while pillaging corpses and undefended treasure chests. They want to make the grind of the modern Fantasy role-playing game appealing to those repulsed by the thought of more swords and sorcery and Siberian tiger mounts. Gearbox is going post-apocalyptic wasteland on this formula. They’re going to make this grind cool.
Borderlands is influenced by games that are second jobs thinly veiled as “entertainment.” There are enough trappings in most that the player does not immediately recognize it until they are separated from the system. Maybe the rewards are frequent enough; the increase in character abilities more steady and immediately gratifying. But Gearbox fails to dress up Borderlands to hide from the player the laborious byproduct of the genre. As a result, Borderlands merely resembles a mechanical facsimile of its influences.
August 7th, 2009
Gaming Made Me, Part 2: Critical Mass
This is the second part of a two-part series. Read “Part 1: Discovery”
I started thinking about writing full length reviews of video games in late 2001. I was still at University. I was going to make a website and came up with some generic name I thought was edgy and reflective of what I wanted to accomplish. It was going to cover more than video games. I had some things to say about popular culture.
After talking to some friends at school about my vision, there was some interest in this collaborative effort. There was already a zine floating around our faculty, but it was horrible. It was a soapbox for people frustrated with school and mostly contained their annoyingly priveleged views on an “oppressive” society. Instead of being provocative or insightful it was lampooning popular culture with pedestrian observations and half-baked philosophy. I could do better.
Of course, when you rely on friends to produce something for free, it doesn’t happen unless you get on their case about it. And I wanted to keep my friends. Plus, the whole “trying to graduate from University with a degree” thing. The project died on the vine, and I gave up the dream. For the time being, anyway.
I graduated from school the next spring, and started playing video games while I looked for work. My comptuer was getting old, and at this point the most it could muster was Unreal Tournament and Civilization III. I read the issues of PC Gamer that were mailed to me to keep up with the industry and the hobby I loved. I hung out on the internet a lot, and read too many terrible reviews that people actually got paid to write. My head started filling with ideas again. I could do better.
I started thinking about another website. Something that would capture my love of video games and provide an outlet for my brand of scathing commentary. I would call it “Tales of a Scorched Earth”, because I am an insufferable Smashing Pumpkins fan. I would adopt the handle of “Gatmog”, because it sounded cool and it provided the mystery any good internet handle should have[1].
During this time, I started playing and thinking about video games as if it were research. I built a new desktop PC after I got a job and some money. I had a new purpose: I would record my thoughts on video games, write some reviews and share them with others. The availability and ease of use of self-publishing tools made this easier than I expected. I thought I would be doing something different than the typical weblog, and I used that as inspiration.
I wrote a lot of reviews and embarrassing posts during that time[2]. I published most of them. It was a start.
May 15th, 2009
sinking creativity to new depths
Now that proper BioShock 2 video previews are circulating instead of scanned magazine covers and wild fan speculation, I can’t help but feel like the gaming public is being duped and they don’t even realize it. Or maybe they don’t want to realize it, because BioShock has already been granted its lofty position as a new standard for video games, and no one dares knock it off its pedestal for fear of losing that anchor for cultural legitimacy. Even though I don’t share this opinion, I was willing to see this game through because it at least made an attempt at a philosophical statement, whether I agreed with its implementation or not [1]. BioShock may have failed as the game that showed such promise in its first 10 minutes, but at least it prompted a discussion that was not mostly Games-Are-Art wankery. And I’m not talking about how the game made you go out and buy a copy of Atlas Shrugged; I’m referring to the way it makes the “choice” in video games we love to complain about a mostly empty gesture. Maybe this statement was intentional; or maybe it was just an honest, unfiltered reflection of game design as it stands today.
May 6th, 2009
your cover has just been destroyed. now what?
When Red Faction: Guerrilla’s friendly tooltip “Hit LB while near a wall or an obstacle to take cover” popped onto the screen, my eyes were rolling to the back of my head in pre-emptive disinterest. But I played through the demo anyway, and discovered there is something more to this game. Or at least, developers Volition deserve a lot of credit for making it seem that way.
February 18th, 2009
F.E.A.R. 2: in which you see ghosts and fire a gun and wear power armor
The demo for F.E.A.R. 2 has two themes running through it that are clearly at odds with one another, and they do a fine job of convoluting the game’s purpose. On the one hand, the introductory mission of F.E.A.R. 2 stresses gunplay and combat, showcasing the AI that made the first installment remarkable. On the other, the player is constantly bombarded with horrible imagery, to the point where it starts to lose its effect. There is no buildup or tension; instead, there is a flash of some disturbing scene that cuts through the action, and then the game introduces clone soldiers to fight. Detractors will easily point out that there wasn’t much beyond this formula in F.E.A.R., but going back to play it after experiencing the demo for F.E.A.R. 2 reveals a more conservative balance between the two themes and a more controlled buildup of the atmosphere and story. As I came to the end of the demo’s mission where I had to jump into some Mech power armor, I did not feel like I wanted to find out what happens next. There was no “Ladder Scene”, and the initial spectacle of the bullet time effects that were so impressive in F.E.A.R. is no longer there. So what is it, Monolith? Is it a first person shooter, or is it a horror game bound together by first person shooter conventions?
