My first review went online today, of the independently developed Flotilla. From the review:

Flotilla is a game about capital ship battles in space, with the lighthearted mood and pacing of Shrapnel Games’ Weird Worlds series. Pirate chickens, space pigs, and other oddities spring up in your journey across the galaxy in search of things to fight and spaceship parts to salvage. Developed by the creators of Gravity Bone, Flotilla is a more traditional game in that it imitates the recognizable three-dimensional space combat of Homeworld. While exhibiting some appreciation for the details in maneuvers that would be performed in capital ship battles, the combat’s lack of depth and limited options for ship customization detract from what could be a significant addition to the strategy genre. Instead, Flotilla leaves one wondering when a developer brave enough to combine and tune every exciting, disparate concept in strategy game development will create a work to revitalize the genre.

Read the rest at Rules of the Game.

In the wait for Diablo III, Torchlight has been cause for celebration among those that wish for an effortless and predictable excursion into well-worn territory. But like Darkstone was to the deadspace between Diablo and Diablo II, Torchlight is being overvalued because of timing. I’ll certainly give Runic Games credit for creating a slick action role playing game that pays adequate homage to Blizzard’s seminal genre template, but Torchlight is in a genre holding pattern that is waiting for something else to take its place.

Indeed, Diablo is a name is guaranteed to be referenced when talking about any gear collecting, gold hoarding, point-click-kill marathon. And perhaps some developers think that this is something to aspire to, hoping to capture the players that don’t want to pay for an MMORPG by capitalizing on the success of a proven formula. But does the already diluted genre of role playing games need another Diablo clone?¹ What is this really offering the platform of PC gaming, in a time when the industry is rightfully criticized for creating sequels and clones and sequels of clones?

That’s a pretty heavy topic for such an innocent genre retread to lead to – after all, Torchlight is instant and fleeting gratification at its most elemental. One would also be remiss in failing to point out that Torchlight is a front to fund Runic’s upcoming Free-to-Play/micropayment MMORPG². There’s not much more you can say about Torchlight‘s intentions, even if like Neverwinter Nights the game and its toolset are being released to provide a product for the community with virtually endless replayability. Yet I was still compelled to spend many hours with Torchlight, because it closed the loop on something that was started almost five years ago.

I found the enthusiast press reaction to Torchlight a little disturbing. The critical reception seems to agree that there’s nothing to it; beyond the item hoarding and watching numbers go up, Torchlight offers no more than you would expect from an acolyte of Diablo, complete with a soundtrack that is essentially Matt Uelmen riffing on the themes from Diablo II. And for simply meeting these expectations, it has managed to receive generally positive reviews³, and has been included on many best of 2009 lists. Does Torchlight represent the triumph of the “indie” or “underdog” spirit? Are fans of the genre so desperate for a true successor to its figurehead that they are satisfied with design by association? This is another symptom indicative of the game industry’s ability to succeed by creating graphical updates of very old, overused game concepts. I don’t even buy refinement as an excuse, because it adds only a few minor flourishes to the design of Fate⁴, a game by WildTangent released in 2005. Travis Baldree, was the lead designer for Fate. He is also the lead designer for Torchlight.

The praise for Torchlight becomes highly suspect when there are no heavy references to Fate, because the similarities are obvious throughout the game’s proceedings. Runic’s development roster consists of a mixture of WildTangent, Blizzard North and Flagship Studios expatriates. Aside from some offhanded references to the pedigree of Torchlight‘s team in some reviews, it’s apparent no one bothered to make the connection. In 2005, Fate was named on many year-end lists, too⁵. It wasn’t a good year for role playing games.

The result is that Torchlight is presented by the enthusiast press as a minor revelation, and one can only conclude that these are the opinions of people who never played Fate. Indeed, the pet that brought unwanted gear back to town for gold was a fantastic idea, and seems to be one that many advocates of the game latch on to. The same goes for the shared Item Stash that can be accessed by all of the characters saved on the same computer. However, like many other concepts in Torchlight, these features were directly transplanted from Fate. And it’s a good thing; in many ways, Torchlight is the game I wished Fate had been. It unquestionably exhibits a more cohesive presentation, so I didn’t feel like my character was some paper doll wandering around in randomly drawn levels fighting randomly spawned creatures dropping randomly generated items. Torchlight has a common thread, and as tenuous as it may be, there is at least some goal to achieve in this game beyond nursing a sore index finger.

What arises from this scenario is a question of the acceptable level of ignorance for reviewing a game of a particular genre. The same could be said of a publication that gives a fighting game to someone who dislikes them, and expects a fair review to be produced. But if a reviewer knew or cared to point out it was simply a visual upgrade to something that had been done previously – by some of the same people, no less – would it have elicited the same response? I can’t help but get the sense that Torchlight is receiving the treatment of the typical independent or low-key release that does something noteworthy, so that critics can give it the requisite pat on the head and move on to the next high-profile release. Like my feelings towards Borderlands, I refuse to accept that Torchlight‘s greatness is supported by its ability to be a faithful recreation of the mechanics of Diablo.

The three character classes offered by Torchlight are a welcome change to Fate‘s non-template, where there were no classes and the system was so open you could create whatever you wanted⁶. But what initially appeared as flexible is actually a poorly implemented system that makes you wonder what is in front of you after experimenting with all the skill point options and delving through fifty levels of random dungeon. Torchlight only allows the increase of the same basic attributes of any action RPG: Strength, Dexterity, Magic and Defense, and they all start off at the more or less the same value and provide the same benefits to each class (More strength means better armour and melee damage, more Magic means more Magic Damage, etc.). Playing an Alchemist felt very close to a fighter-mage, provided I was equipped with suitable armor and a staff with large damage output. In fact, there are very little trade-offs for system optimizers that want to create melee hybrid classes, making the starting class choice meaningless except for the Skills that accompany them.

The Skill selection for each class is uninteresting, but serviceable. The skills are entirely dependent on character level; there is no “tree” of prerequisites. Thus, there is no commitment from the player to a particular branch of special abilities; most can simply be ignored until more powerful ones become available and cherry-picked out of the set. In fact, the mid-level skills (such as Ember Lance and Ember Lighting, the case of the Alchemist) feel so overpowered that there isn’t much use in spending points on anything else. Saving up Skill points becomes a common strategy. It is also odd that spell scrolls were included as an alternate source of magic. This is more of a carryover from Diablo, where a Warrior class could actually learn a Fireball spell if the scroll was picked up as an item drop. There are only four slots to store these spells, and un-learning them destroys the scroll. This isn’t as much of a sacrifice as it seems – the amount of spell scrolls that are dropped by monsters or purchased through vendors provides an ample supply to draw from. This seems like an element of design that was kept in by mistake; once again, the line for a character’s class is blurred when a Destroyer is able to wield a Level III fireball spell if they are willing to spend the Magic attribute points or have equipment that grants them. A more complicated skill tree with dependencies to make character builds more of an investment for the player would have synchronized Torchlight with its contemporaries.

In Fate, everything was randomly generated. Quests, items, the floors of the endless dungeon – even the “boss” monster to be faced at the end of the game was generated when a new character was started. By having a thread of quests based on an over-arching storyline, Torchlight avoids the same pitfalls of being inconsequential by providing a reason to keep going down into the dungeons. It’s the typical fledgling hero versus evil mage story, and the main characters in it don’t change every time you play the game. There is consistency in that, at least.

The dungeon levels in Torchlight are still randomly generated, but their layouts appear deliberate. And every seven levels, the surroundings change. It’s strange to see such a variation in environments going down through one set of catacombs, but Diablo did this too. There are new monsters to fight and they all seem to fit together with each level’s theme. It’s a welcome change from the obvious tileset and monster randomization of Fate. But once again Torchlight did not adopt what has become a genre convention: a surface world with more than one town, instead of stacking the differently themed levels.

Nevertheless, the structure and appearance of each dungeon level map are well-crafted and evoke an individual personality for Torchlight. There is a feeling of depth to each dungeon level, whether it’s through the layering of stairs or putting some inaccessible areas as background filler. This is one of the things I liked about the Barbarian Highlands in Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, and was further illustrated by the outdoor regions in Titan Quest. It gives the impression of scale and that there is some substance to these areas.

Indeed, Torchlight‘s strongest attribute is its appearance. It looks light-hearted and fun, which is yet another element borrowed from Fate. But in Fate, the game suffered from overly cute character and monster design; there was nothing threatening about its adoption of a casual game’s aesthetic. Torchlight corrects this, so that the game bears enough of a resemblance to what’s expected of a fantasy setting in action role-playing games without drifting into the bland side of the spectrum like Darkstone or Dungeon Siege II. Clearly someone at Runic was paying attention to Blizzard’s philosophy behind the art direction of World of Warcraft.

Because Torchlight‘s scope is limited to one town, it is considerably scaled down from its contemporaries. There are only four people in the town that give out quests, and they all have a type of quest repeated for the whole game with the exception of quests related to the main story thread. The monsters that must be slain are random, the items that must be retrieved are random, and the rewards are random and usually junk when they should have been level and class-based. You will always find better equipment through item drops or even at the vendors, as the game does a terrific job of randomizing their supply. The various non-player characters offer up these quests as if you want to do them, but it hardly seems worth it aside from the experience grind. Runic obviously spent more time on the game’s appearance. Because like Fate, if you play Torchlight for more than five hours you come to realize there is no end to the randomization of the entire affair. There is no incentive to do any of the quests other than there is nothing else to do.

What becomes immediately obvious to veterans of this genre is the lack of difficulty. The most lively parts of the game are the boss or special monster encounters, which often result in drawn out battles of health potion attrition. While the experience and looting grind may be enough incentive to spend hours in the catacombs below the town, even on Hard Torchlight quickly becomes an exercise in tedium when it poses minimal resistance. Money is easy to obtain through selling most of the items that get dropped. There is no money sink through something like equipment degradation, so there is nothing preventing players from stocking up on potions to guarantee survival though most of the tougher mob and level boss encounters. When you die, you “choose your Fate”: respawn at the exact point of death for a loss of experience and renown, at the beginning of the level for a loss of money, or in town for no penalty. And since town portals are persistent between sessions, getting sent back to town is always the best option.

There are also waypoints located at each of the transition areas between the main sections of dungeon, but using these just results in a longer walk. There are no monster respawns on the cleared dungeon levels – even between sessions – so there is no way to earn experience simply by travelling through previously cleared areas, or added risk in retrieving your corpse. If the levelling treadmill provides no opposition, is the purpose of this game to just get to the end? You can’t even show off your character’s gear to anyone. Is it the infinite randomness? Last time I checked, you could go down 2,000,000-plus levels in Fate. While I’m reluctant to label Torchlight as more genre pollution⁷, Torchlight commits a similar mistake to Borderlands in assuming that providing a new skin for the same well-worn formula is enough. Though at least Torchlight isn’t coy about it.

Everyone likes to compliment Runic on their work in creating Torchlight‘s OGRE engine, and how the game had such a quick development cycle. I have no problems acknowledging this feat when presented with such a polished product. It’s evident that Runic wanted to create something familiar for fans of the genre, and for some people this is good enough. But I see Torchlight as a necessary step to something better. I think Runic did too.

Torchlight doesn’t have any multiplayer. That seems to be the biggest complaint I’ve seen in reviews of this game. And it’s a valid one, when multiplayer is typical among this game’s peers in the year 2009. I took the same exception to Fate, and now that the dungeon design resembles something with purpose, Torchlight would be the perfect pick-up game for a few friends. Given the pedigree of the design team, one would think that multiplayer would be a foregone conclusion. But I suspect it was omitted on purpose.

Torchlight was released mainly to test the OGRE engine and to gauge player response to the game and its setting. In general, the critical reception seems satisfied without multiplayer, so there’s no need to include it even as an add-on. Runic has already confirmed as much on the official forums. Instead, Runic continues to work towards their MMORPG based in the Torchlight universe. Torchlight was an experiment, and the players of the game are all willing test subjects. I’m willing to concede that Runic has my money because they are creating something bigger and better. And they might actually do it this time.

Torchlight is praised as a noteworthy re-imagining of Diablo‘s well-worn formula. And in the wait for Diablo III, I suppose anything will do for obsessive fans of the genre. One only needs to remember the reaction to Darkstone – a painfully mediocre action RPG released during the wait for Diablo II that even I fell victim to. But this adoration is untempered by greater expectations. Torchlight is a competent entry into the action RPG genre, but fails to compete with the games that have already succeeded its greatest influence. Instead, Torchlight limits itself to improving Fate‘s groundwork to make a game based on randomly generated content feel like a game, instead of the transient experience it actually is. Torchlight is not a revelation, but a game that provides enough genre touchstones under a slick appearance to disguise its reservation. Torchlight is the game Fate should have been: an endearing impersonator, but an impersonator nonetheless.

Within the first fifteen minutes of playing a video game, I can tell if it will be good. I have yet to decide whether this is a useful skill in the context of adult life.

Services like Steam and the XBox Live Marketplace have effectively streamlined the process of consuming game demos, often before a game is available for purchase. This strategy is part of any publisher’s winning marketing plan. Let the masses jump on the game to provide free word-of-mouth advertising, and then watch them argue ad infinitum in every corner of the internet, since no one can be proven wrong. This is the ideal way to arrive at launch day. The review scores hit the usual aggregate sites based on the media’s preview copies, and people rush to the stores not just to get their hands on the game, but to prove everyone else wrong.

I am not usually such a person.

I have played and reviewed many demos since the inception of this website. In fact, I find myself relying on them more for the 360 than when I was solely a PC gamer. New PC games don’t stay expensive due to the high shelfspace turnover at electronics and even specialty retailers, whereas console games seem to retain their price a lot better¹. When I’m thinking about a new game purchase, reading exaggerated reviews and watching video samples of the game in action aren’t enough.

This makes the demo extremely important to someone like me. And once I start making notes on my first impressions of a game, it’s hard to stop. Most demos I’ve bothered to play provided me enough information to settle on an opinion. I knew the games weren’t going to get any better. And in the case of Ghostbusters: The Video Game, I was ensnared by nostalgia in the hopes that I would be playing Ghostbusters III. I wish I could say that was true.

Then there was Batman, a license that wields even more brand power, arriving in the form of Arkham Asylum last month to an unsuspecting audience. There was suprisingly no hype to speak of; no previews out of the usual. The demo was made available two weeks prior to the full version’s release. It caught a lot of people off guard, myself included. Everyone was excited over the possibility that a video game starring Batman was actually good. Naturally, the initial impressions were positive – and they spread.

I played the demo the week it was available for download and was prepared to post a negative review based on my impressions. There is no way the game should be receiving overwhelming praise. Except something held me back. My experiences with the game felt unfinished.

Surrounding myself with the opinions of people I know and who had played the full version, my suspicions were confirmed: the Arkham Asylum demo was terrible.

In the anticipation of a game that is sometimes years away, arguments will erupt about its quality, often hinging on such damning empirical evidence like screenshots and whether they were faked or not. Massive armies of the overstimulated who have nothing better to do will swarm websites like Gamestop² and NeoGAF and Amazon leaving comments about a game that they haven’t played, and likely isn’t even finished yet. Meanwhile, our favorite video game news outlets will be given their monthly ration of screenshots to post, and the whole process begins again. This is how the machine works. And video game culture at large not only accepts it, they love it.

Back in the early days of PC Gaming, demos were essential for getting the word out about a game. This is how the Shareware scene started. Publishers would release the first mission or chapter of a game for free, and you would have to pay to play the rest of it. These chapters were often made up of sub-missions, and provided enough content to be classified as a game in itself. For a while, this was enough to support a fledgling game development community and allowed it to compete with the big studios and their boxed games available on store shelves.

Shareware was a sign of good faith on the Publisher or development house. They’ll give you a full-featured part of their game, with the intent that you will become a paying customer. Sometimes it worked.

The best part? By the end of that first mission you knew exactly what the game was about, because no features were left to be unlocked – there were just more missions ahead and you could easily extrapolate what the rest of them would be like. Does anyone remember that Quake was distributed as a demo? The full version was available on the $5 CD-ROM, waiting to be unlocked. Of course, that worked out really well for id when software pirates had cracked the key generator and people were playing the full game a day later. I saw this as the the start of the demo’s decline as an actual slice of the game. Sure, PC Gamer and other magazines included demos on disc, and as consoles started distributing games on CD and DVD their enthusiast magazines did the same. But a publisher’s approach to the demo was forever changed. It was more of a preview – not a sample of a game in its finished form. In fact, some demos go so far as to say that it isn’t even representative of the final game. So why release it at all, if things are bound to change?

Of course, the opposing argument is that games are just too big and complicated now, and there’s no way that you could convey its essence in something that is designed to be played in twenty or thirty minutes. Some publishers feel that a demo isn’t even necessary for their game, as it’s just not conducive to the typical mission-based shortening that occurs. Instead, they’d rather let their audience pick up the full version and try it for themselves. And then the game becomes another statistic in the “unfinished” pile.

A good demo should be long enough to allow you to gather some intelligence about the story (if any), get comfortable with the control scheme and mechanics, and show every feature of the game (within some reasonable constraints of the story revealed) to get a feel for what the full version has to offer. Usually that happens in the first mission of a game, because the beginning of any game should be the incentive to continue. I should not be spending the next eight hours trying to find some hidden brilliance to appreciate a video game. I do not have that kind of time. I don’t think anyone does. Unless they are masochists.

The demo for Arkham Asylum is horrible. It is poorly assembled and a woefully inadequate representation of the final game. If I had let the demo make my decision, I would not have been playing it the last two weeks. The demo is two gigabytes of nothing. It goes through the motions of an opening movie, some combat, and a stealth section that is actually a small part of a “stalking” concept used to great effect throughout the full game. It ends with the setup to a boss fight that never happens³. The demo is made up of sections that were actually much farther apart in the full version. Worst of all it was too short, which left me doubting whether the game was even worth my time. If a demo ever does that, it is doing something wrong.

If the creation of Rocksteady’s demo was so arbitrary, they could have picked better locations and scenarios to present the game’s features. There was combat, sure, but it was so rudimentary that it made their system seem so generic. There was no wall-breaking or climbing. There was no hunting for secrets or alternative paths of entry. The way the demo was constructed fails to incorporate Arkham Asylum‘s greatest asset: its focus on exploration. Instead, it feels like it was created to make the game seem safe – predictable, even. My biggest complaint was the inability to use shadows for hiding, but the game makes up for it once you learn to use Batman’s tools to surprise instead of stalk. You’d never know it from the demo, though.

Is the new driver behind creating a demo to keep as much as possible from the player, to ensure that curiosity wins out? Batman could have started with all of the gadgets so that they could be experimented with. There aren’t that many. Allow the player to set up explosive charges to stun enemies, instead of being limited to the Batarang or Inverse Takedown⁴. The demo for Ninja Gaiden II gave the player all the weapons⁵ and provided the first half of the first chapter in the game. By the end of it I knew I had to buy it. Not to learn more about the game, but to play more.

I finished Arkham Asylum last week. My experience with it was positive; I’m glad I bought it. But I almost didn’t. If it weren’t for recommendations from friends and seeing some impressions in the raw on Twitter, I would have stubbornly passed it by and missed out on a solid video game while the machine kept going.

Demos have evolved into barely interactive commericals. They are the music videos to a video game’s LP. They give you all the flash with no context, leaving you hanging to the point where you often have no choice but to rent or buy the game to make an informed decision. But the average game purchaser doesn’t always have that kind of money lying around, or time to spend making this determination on their own. So they turn to reviews and the often completely unrelated scores that accompany them in the misguided hopes they’ll provide that missing insight. The Hype Machine claims another victim, and keeps on going.

In the view of the massive, lumbering machine that is The Video Game Industry, demos are no longer a necessity to make a sale. In fact, they don’t have to exist at all. Some publishers don’t release demos until a game has been out for a month. But this is just a bonus. Those early adopters that have to play right now? The publishers already have their money, and these games are now stitting on a shelf in the “Used” section of your local video game shop. And that salesperson behind the counter? He’s telling the guy that just got $15 for a pile of recent titles about some screenshots for this new video game. Better put that money down now to reserve a copy. It’s this year’s must-buy.

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 have¹.

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 time². I published most of them. It was a start.

Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (2002)

When Medal of Honor: Allied Assault was released, it recieved endless praise from the entire video game industry. The word that reviewers liked to throw around was “cinematic.” The movie reviewers liked to reference was Saving Private Ryan. Which was completely natural, seeing as how Spielberg himself had something to do with the game. But this was the start of a recurring problem with video games.

With the success of the Medal of Honor franchise, everyone wanted to tap into this new sub-genre. We started to see a lot more games use World War II as a setting. And the people that loved every single one of them would soon turn on them as fickle audiences often do. And not because the setting had nothing new to offer (Brothers in Arms proved that³), but because it was simply a skin designers would stretch over the same tired FPS formula. Will World War II games ever be fashionable again? Will they ever explore anything deeper than gun-toting heroics? Maybe we’ll see a bunch of games about Iraq in 40 years that leave out all the bad parts, too.

I didn’t actually get to play Allied Assault until later in the year, when I upgraded my desktop. In hindsight, this was fortunate, as everyone was over the initial hype and playing Battlefield 1942. I played the Omaha Beach landing and took part in what everyone called “the most intense experience you will ever encounter in video games.” At the time, I agreed with these hyperbolic reviews. And I still do, mostly. It is intense. It is absorbing.

But is it accurate? And, even though we already know the answer to that, is it right to give these games praise for offering a sterilized simulation rather than realism?

The World War II genre is simply a manifestation of the gaming industry’s obsession with “cinematic presentation.” Big budgets and bigger expectations encourage developers to create the equivalent of Hollywood’s summer blockbusters, in the hopes that this will somehow contribute to the validation of the medium.

However, by doing this you have now have reviewers who base their opinions on how games reference the “source material”, which are movies, and are themselves not entirely genuine. No one who reviews one of these games understands what happened out there on the battlefield. You can’t expect a veteran to play this and give their solemn nod of approval⁴. They fought so we wouldn’t have to. Why do we insist on reliving these horrible events? Why do we call it a game?

Allied Assault got me interested in the history behind the events of these games. I started reading about World War II, and the famous battles and operations summarized and retold by its various missions. I wanted to know what it was really like. I read the first hand accounts of Allied soldiers who were just kids thrust into the front lines and expected to carry the weight of the free world on their shoulders.

In Allied Assault I had autosaves and quick reloads when I died. After reading some of these books, I found the whole concept disturbing. At this point, I wanted to study these games. I wanted to record and categorize the effect of this genre on people’s impressions of World War II, and war in general. I wanted to prove how out of touch our generation was, and how these events are being perverted by an industry.

And yet with all that introspection, I was ensnared just like everyone else the following year by Call of Duty⁵, designed by key members of the 2015 team who left EA to create Infinity Ward. This was a game I could get behind. You weren’t Rambo, you had buddies standing around with you joining the fight for freedom. See how much personality they had? See how everyone reacted when they died?

I wouldn’t articulate these feelings for another few years, in an article I wrote for The Cultural Gutter⁶. I detached myself from the spectacle of it all. I thought about those 20 minutes spent in 2002 trying to beat the Omaha Beach mission in Allied Assault, and how I was annoyed at the number of attempts it took me to complete. Indirectly, these games still had a lot to teach me.

Rise of Nations (2003)

I played Civilization II along with everyone else in University. I stayed up way too late for “one more turn”. I tried out Alpha Centauri after Sid Meier left Microprose to form Firaxis in 1996. I felt that Civilization III was a richer game than its predecessor and probably the best in the series, even though the critical reception for Civilization IV has long since overshadowed it. When I heard that Brian Reynolds was leaving Firaxis to form Big Huge Games and was planning to make a real-time Civilization, I was a little shocked. Would this be a travesty or the breakthrough crossover that everyone had been waiting for?

I got Rise of Nations the week it was released. I played it for at least three months straight. I introduced it to friends and acquaintances that had never played Civilization, and whose experience with Real Time Strategy was the brute force reactive tactics of StarCraft and Command & Conquer. I watched as they succumbed to the spellbinding combination of civilization building and front-line battles. Tales of a Scorched Earth was almost ready and this would be the first review I would write.

My review for Rise of Nations became an obsession. I was struggling with the review style I would use on my website, as I wanted to avoid the type of product summaries that everyone else slavishly followed. I had to pick apart this game and figure out what made it work so well. I wanted to trace its influences back through video game history, and put words to Reynolds’ brilliance in how he selected the best aspects of these influences and combined them into a satisfying whole. As I struggled to find my voice, I also tried to develop my own rubric for reviewing video games with words and not numbers. While I was familiar with the criticisms surrounding either approach, I just wanted to write.

I never did publish that review; instead, smitten with the recent purchase of a Game Boy Advance I finished and published my review of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. A more simplified effort, and what I thought was the safer bet. I didn’t know what audience I would acquire, and I didn’t have confidence enough in my detailed analysis of Rise of Nations to think anyone would find it worth reading. Going back to read the Castlevania review is disappointing. I could have set the tone for this website a lot earlier.

Rise of Nations is stilll one of my favorite games. But it also remains one of the most important in the development of this website.

Metroid Prime (2002, played in 2003)

One of my friends got an XBox and Halo: Combat Evolved the day they were released. I was still in University. Naturally, I had to see for myself what everyone was getting excited about. Microsoft entering the console market? Preposterous!

Halo was a first person shooter, designed to be played with a gamepad. As an overzealous PC gamer⁷, I looked upon this game as an abomination. How could anyone get used to this? Nudging an analog stick provided nowhere near the same responsiveness or precision as a mouse. There had been numerous attempts prior to the XBox to bring FPS to game consoles, and this effort would be no different. I’d give it a try, just to say that I played it. I made it a third of the way through the co-op campaign in two sittings. You know, to humor him.

A few years later, Halo would be identified as not only the XBox’s “killer app”, but the game that made consoles a viable destination for FPS. With the introduction of XBox Live, people were playing Halo 2 online like I was playing Unreal Tournment a few years prior. This was it. The end was coming.

I refused to legitimize this shift in attitudes towards console gaming, even in light of what I called “PC Defectors”: developers and gamers who were growing tired of the PC as a platform, and moved over to the XBox for a more streamlined and hassle-free experience.

Back in late 2003, the Gamecube was subjected to a massive drop in price by Nintendo. It clearly couldn’t compete with the PlayStation 2′s stranglehold on the market, or the unexpected rise in popularity of the XBox. The Gamecube had a limited selection of 1st party titles, but no “killer app” that would sell consoles the way the Grand Theft Auto and Halo series did for the PS2 and XBox. At this cheaper price, Nintendo would settle for being someone’s second or third game console. This is how I got in.

I had heard about The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker, Metroid Prime and Super Mario Sunshine. I knew they were good games, and reason enough to own a Gamecube. However I found myself connecting the most to F-Zero GX at the time, because I had so many great memories surrounding the SNES version. For $150, how could I go wrong?

Well, I was wrong. About the title I bought the console for, anyway.

Metroid Prime caused an uproar among fans of the series. Like everyone else I was astonished at how such an iconic side-scrolling action game could be transformed into a first-person shooter.

Metroid Prime was the game that proved me wrong about FPS on a console⁸. Retro Studios made a PC gamer feel right at home with the Gamecube controller, creating an accessible blend of action and adventure in a vibrant new environment, while still retaining everything I enjoyed about the old Metroid games (even the backtracking!). The combat may have been made easier with the lock-on feature, but the controls were forgiving enough to allow me to get comfortable with the idea of using a gamepad to move and jump and shoot instead of the trial-by-fire approach to Halo‘s brand of action. Metroid Prime may not have been a true run-and-gun FPS, but it allowed me to get comfortable with the concept. There was nothing to fear about FPS on a console.

While those sentiments were sincere, I still remained faithful to the PC. My aversion to console gaming wouldn’t be dispelled until much later.

Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines (2004)

Like everyone else, I bought Half Life 2 on the day of release. I can’t say my excitement was of Diablo II-proportions, but it was a day that would cement Half Life into the video game collective conciousness, after attracting a cult following since the original’s release. It would also mark the launch of Steam, which would bring Valve’s authentication servers to their knees. Half Life 2 redefined acceptable linearity in FPS by creating a compelling narrative driven by the player⁹. I fully acknowledge it as one of the greatest games ever made.

Unfortunately, Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines had to compete with the blockbuster release of Half Life 2. Being the first game to use the Source engine, it was rushed to coincide with Half Life 2‘s launch, and it showed. The textures were plain and uninspiring, the facial animations stiff and inhuman, and there were numerous game-crippling bugs. Players and reviewers thought this was reason enough to overlook the game. There was Counter Strike: Source to be played, after all.

This would be devastating to the sales and critical reception of the game. It was Troika’s last effort before shutting down in February 2005. It was also their greatest achievement.

As soon as I finished Bloodlines, I wanted to play it again. This was a game that captured everything I loved about the tabletop RPG, and about computer RPGs in general. It was an example of what these games should be striving for. The voice acting was superb, and the dialog felt completely natural and engaging – something I wouldn’t encounter again until I played Mass Effect. I loved Bloodlines unconditionally, and as a result it changed the way I thought about video games. If a game is deeply flawed, yet so perfectly displays an aspect that defines the genre, it should still be recognized. Maybe I had too much of a personal investment in this game, but I made a point of advocating it to whoever I talked to. I even called it the best game of 2004 when everyone else was handing those accolades to Half-Life 2¹⁰

In early 2005, I got an email from someone who read my review of Bloodlines. Up until then I had received a few emails since starting the website from random visitors with mostly disposable praise or criticism. The useful feedback usually came from the comments section after each post. I appreciated every single one.

This email, though. It was from someone who had been turned off of Bloodlines by all of the negative press surrounding it upon release. He saw no reason to pursue it.

That is, until he read my review.

At that point this person, whoever they were, completely validated my existence. I wielded the power to influence people to play good games; I wasn’t just screaming into the void with opinions no one cared about. This is the most valuable piece of feedback I have ever received in the entire life of Tales of a Scorched Earth, and I will never forget it.

After that I knew my purpose. I would not be content to simply play video games and write up a review. I wanted to critique them. I wanted to contextualize them in our culture, and provide more than just references to other games. I wanted to cut through the hype and evaluate a game on its own merits, not popular opinion. I wanted people to recognize the flawed ones that deserved better.

Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines is the reason this website still exists.

Gears of War (2006, played in 2008)

When the ad campaign started for Gears of War, I was filled with seething rage. My allegiance to PC gaming was as strong as it had ever been, and seeing Epic use their Unreal Engine to create what appeared to be a third person shooter in some darkened and grunge-layered science fiction setting felt like a betrayal of the highest order. These were the same guys that brought us the brightly colored and meticulously balanced Unreal Tournament 2004. What started with Halo would soon completely reshape the landscape of first person shooters and multiplayer gaming on the console. It was a sobering revelation, and I despised Gears for perpetuating this trend.

Time passes, people have children, and they tend to unclench a little. Maybe that’s all I needed.

In the summer of 2008, I bought a laptop to replace my desktop. In hindsight this may have forced my hand in the decision to purchase an XBox 360. But I’ll get to that.

I got Gears of War for my PC, because I wanted to try it out for myself. I already had a XBox 360 controller from my time with Assassin’s Creed, and I used the HDMI-out to plug my laptop into the TV. It was an instant XBox 360!

I played through most of the campaign. Visually, the game was a lot more detailed than what I originally gave it credit for. The duck and cover, shoot and run mechanics flowed naturally, and I was able to get a grip on the control scheme for the most part. But something didn’t sit right. I tried with the mouse and keyboard, but it felt sluggish and unresponsive. I didn’t like the story, or the neverending stream of gender stereotypes and macho overcompensation coming from my television. I gave up on Gears of War. I moved on to something else.

In November 2008, I played Horde mode in Gears of War 2¹¹. It taught me to use the 360′s controller for shooters, and revealed an “endless mode” with an intensity of play that stripped the game down to its basic elements. I loved what I was experiencing.

I went back to Gears of War on my PC and finished it. I then started to write one of the longest, most positive reviews I have ever written at Tales of a Scorched Earth¹². Playing the game long after it was released I could ignore the press, and write what I truly felt about the game. Writing the Gears of War review was the most fun I’ve had since starting Tales of a Scorched Earth.

So I bought an XBox 360. I had to be able to play Gears of War 2, you see.

I was wrong about Gears of War. It is a prime example of the exploration of video games’ basic tenet: kill or be killed. It is Space Invaders with a Lancer, and yet it refines a mechanic for FPS and third person shooters that would be shamelessly copied by the video games that followed it.

Gears of War taught me to slough off platform evangelism. If there is a good game somewhere, I should play it. I dispensed with any rhetoric I had written in the past¹³. I would focus on the games themselves, not get caught up in the fanboy politics that accompany them. I revisited a pact I made with myself shortly after starting this website: I will write here until I have nothing more to say about video games.

And since expanding my horizons with the XBox 360, I have a lot to say about video games.

The “Gaming Made Me” series of video game retrospectives started by Rock, Paper, Shotgun came from games industry writers, journalists and the designers that make them. It’s become a kind of collective autobiography sourcing the video games that shaped who they are.

Of course, the cynical part of me expected this community-driven effort to consist of mostly name-dropping key titles from the history of video games. But I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the response of webloggers that have taken up the mantle where Rock, Paper, Shotgun left off¹.

So now I feel the need to contribute, because I think it is absolutely necessary for anyone who loves to play or write about video games to recognize the ones that got them into the hobby. Or in the case of game designers and professional writers, what made them get into the industry itself.

I have been into computers since very early on in my life, and playing computer games was a natural extension of that interest. However, I had no idea that this hobby would result in me creating a website to talk about them. I’m no industry figure, weblogging personality or budding game designer – I’m just a guy that loves to play video games, and write about them. For the people that truly love video games, they are as important as the books they read or the movies they watched when growing up.

For any game weblog, I’d say that writing something like “Gaming Made Me” is more essential than an “About” page. It’s important to let readers know where the author is coming from, and what games influenced their lives and opinions of what makes a great video game. It provides context for the reviews and criticism they produce.

At this point in my life, video games are no longer just a hobby. They have made me a writer, and they have taught me to be critical of things beyond video games. Both video games and this website have become such immutable aspects of my life, that I can’t imagine it without them.

It was hard to come up with this list. So hard, that I had to split it into two. I wanted it be a list of games that shaped me as a player of video games, as well as my viewpoints on what makes a great video game, instead of simply rewording a “favorite games of all time” list. So I’m not going to list off the Zeldas, the Half-Lifes, the Thiefs, or the Rainbow Sixes. That would be too easy for me. No name dropping of the classics and pretending as if they meant something to me in my early development as a gamer. The following list of games got me started in the hobby, tempered my opinion of the medium, and introduced me to the genres I love. Most importantly these are the games that eventually led me to write about them². They are the ones that left an indelible mark. And for that, they must be recognized.

Alley Cat (1984)

Bill Williams’ Alley Cat was one of the first games I got for my IBM clone desktop PC when I was nine years old (it had been out for a few years). The PC had no hard disk, and I had the game in PC Booter format – it booted right into the game without the need for an OS. The computer and game arrived in my house at the same time a lot of my friends were getting NES consoles for their TVs. I thought the whole home arcade thing was stupid. I could do more with a computer.

Except that all I had for my computer was a monochrome monitor. So I could play Alley Cat in black and green, or black and orange, or black and pink, or black and white. That’s some variety! Who needed the NES and its 8-bit graphics and low-fi chiptunes. I had a PC speaker.

Obviously, these experiences established my allegiance to PC gaming at an early age.

I played the living shit out of Alley Cat, mostly fueled by a white-hot jealousy of the friends that had an NES and Super Mario Brothers. So I got good at it. And for what appeared on the surface as a game for kids, it’s actually pretty hard. Jump into a window in an apartment compex, play a mini-game: a maze in a giant piece of cheese, a fishbowl with electric eels…it was pretty surreal and often frustrating. One of the mini-games involves seducing a female cat to increase the difficulty level, after which the other mini-games could be replayed. Alley Cat helped me define “keyboard bashing.”

Alley Cat was the first computer game I remember committing myself to, even if was for the wrong reasons. I consider it the start of both a rewarding and extremely damaging relationship with video games.

SimAnt (1991)

After the success of Will Wright’s SimCity, there were a series of games developed to leverage the “Sim” brand, which included SimEarth, SimLife, SimAnt, SimTower, SimTown and SimTunes. Little did we know this was just the beginning of a publisher’s business model built on the sales of expansion packs!

SimAnt is generally considered to be a critical and commercial failure for Will Wright, as it seemed to be too eccentric a riff on the SimCity formula. Instead of focusing on large scale empire building or ecosystem shaping, SimAnt was about digging tunnels in the ground, collecting food, managing population happiness, defending the colony, and avoiding lawnmowers. Most gamers weren’t ready for that.

A friend gave this game to me to try, because he thought it was cool. I was 12. I was so past the age of thinking bugs were interesting, so why would I want to create an electronic ant farm? The whole concept seemed ridiculous. Nevertheless, the game gripped me for months. It was better than SimCity: this game taught me about sustaining life³. I was so captivated by my ant colony, striving every day to keep my Queen alive so that it may prosper, that I began to assign my own narrative to it. I would later use these ideas to write a short story for my school’s creative writing contest, where I described a lowly ant’s adventures in saving his colony. I won fisrst prize for it, too. People thought it was such a creative and original concept. If they only knew it was inspired by a video game.

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1992)

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is my favorite game of all time⁴. It made me love computer games, and electronic games in general. It made me appreciate good scripting, dialogue and voice acting. It made me believe that an original story based on a well-known property could actually result in a good game. It also made me wish it had been made into a movie.

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis was the first game that helped me break down the barrier between “toy” and “medium” for video games. It is a game I go out of my way to play once a year, like watching a favorite film or reading a favorite book. The endgame brings sadness because I know it will be over soon. I have yet to encounter a video game that instills these feelings. Fate of Atlantis made me realize video games would be part of my life forever.

Diablo II (2000)

After finishing Ultima VIII: Pagan, I needed something similar. The game had captivated me with its isometric viewpoint, simple combat, epic quests and inventory management (really! I would have to leave excess stuff in people’s desk drawers and then come back to get it later). In response came Blizzard’s Diablo. While I would have to wait a year to play it (didn’t have the horsepower in my PC), I knew it was The Answer. See, Ultima VIII still had elements of adventure in it, as the world of PC RPGs hadn’t yet made the transition to the action-ready clickfests most of them have become. And you can thank Diablo for that.

Though Diablo was just the beginning of an obsession for me. The claustrophobic setting of a church with stairs that go down, down through relentless packs of monsters, down straight into hell, would occupy most of the time I spent with my computer. With Battle.net, Blizzard gave us multiplayer and co-op and (theoretically) endless replayability with their randomly generated dungeon levels, but it started to get tiresome. And with the release of Starcraft, the teaser trailer for Diablo II included on the disc confirmed its existence. It also gave me my reason for being as a PC gamer.

The wait for Diablo II was torture. It was the self-inflicted hell that the hero at the end of Diablo endured. My appetite for news on its development would not be appeased. I looked at screens, learned rumors of the new class types and the expansive maps that we would be treated to. The scheduled release was Spring/Summer 2000. I waited.

Closer to this time , I went to a local electronics superstore and asked for a specific street date. The woman who worked there looked at me funny and said, “You’re the 14th person to ask me about this game today. What’s so special about this Diablo II?” I had to bite my tongue at that point. Clearly society would never understand the cultural impact of video games.

I was away at University the week the game came out. I had to wait until the weekend to pick up my reserved copy, which was back home. After waiting over two years, you’d think that a few extra days wouldn’t matter. But knowing that it was there, waiting for me, just made it worse. Incidentally, I vowed to never pre-order a game after that. It hadn’t yet become as widespread a trend, but I could see that pre-ordering at a specific location tethers you to it. It provides no advantage over picking it up at any other store. Instead, you are made a prisoner with your own money and the con artists laughing at you from behind the counter.

But we are talking about Diablo II, the computer game.

The night I picked it up, I installed it on my parents’ computer. Over that weekend I must have logged close to 20 hours and stayed up way too late. I put the savegames on a diskette and packed up the CDs to go back to school. That week, I finished the game. In all it took me about four days, completing every quest and visting every random dungeon. I had beaten Diablo again. But where was Baal? The solid prospect of an expansion pack after I had finished the game helped sustain the euphoria of victory. These would be the best games ever made.

Of course, I was able to look past the hideous low resolution graphics (releasing a game in 640 x 480 game in 2000? Really, Blizzard?), the repetitive nature of the quests, and the game’s nefarious ability to make you want to collect things while in the perpetual loop of clicking a mouse button. Diablo II would provide the model for Blizzard’s own MMORPG, and an entire genre would be dominated by this game in the years after its release.

There’s no arguing Diablo II‘s impact on computer games, and video games in general. The simple “Click-Kill-Reward” concept had never been used to such devastating effect. This was a game I could install and play like some would play Solitaire, to pass the time. Everything became mindless, reflexive. I don’t think I’ve finished a game so many times as I did Diablo II. Hardcore mode provided an outlet for the experienced Diablo II player, where the character dies permanently. Losing my level 43 Sorceress stacked with a selection of rares and uniques to some pack of Fetish Shamans casting Inferno forced me to new depths of humility.

Diablo II was also responsible for something else. Back in that summer of 2000, another game was released. It was called Icewind Dale. Creating a mostly storyless dungeon crawler with the familiar rules and deep game mechanics of Baldur’s Gate had me equally gripped after I had finished Diablo II. So I decided to write an essay comparing the two. I thought Icewind Dale was the better game. I used pathetic excuses like “deeper”, “better soundtrack”⁵ and “nicer looking graphics”. I published the article on a website dedicated to games that didn’t last long. In time I realized I had betrayed a game that provided so many hours of enjoyment, and created stories I could share with the friends that also obsessively played it. Diablo II galvanized my love of PC gaming, and video games in general. Video games were more than a distraction to me at this point. I thought about them all the time, about their multiple layers of presentation, and how they were quickly establishing themselves in our cultural consciousness.

I began thinking about a proper website. I would have to write more about these things.

This is the first part of a two-part series. Read “Part 2: Critical Mass”

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.

I can also respect Ken Levine’s position on the finished product: he acknowledged the shortfalls of the original game [2, 3], and knew there were things that could have been better, or fully realized. He had a particular endpoint in mind – the character that results from the adventure should reflect the choices made in the game, however insignificant or arbitrary they may have been. The end of BioShock was about coming face to face with what you, as the character, had wrought upon this underwater dystopia. And you should be made to reconcile the results of these decisions.

BioShock 2 is set in Rapture again years into the future, even though in the original game we were eventually tasked with its sabotage and ultimate destruction. And while I can accept that some plot contrivance will surface explaining how some parts of the colony were able to survive during the time between games, I can’t help but wonder why. A game like BioShock – one that attempted to retain a deeper meaning throughout its duration – demands that the story come first if they are to retain interest in the microcosm they have established. Is the story beneath the sea, or up on the surface where a clash of civilizations at odds with one another could be further developed? BioShock ended on a bad note, whether ADAM hungry players want to admit it or not. The “Good” ending is basically a non-event. Why would I want to continue the life of an old man surrounded by orphans? So a bunch of splicers took over a nuclear sub. What happened after that? It’s a mutant apocalypse waiting to happen, and I was the cause! Why can’t I be responsible for fixing it?

At first glance, BioShock 2 is going back to Rapture to do all the things that should have been done in the first game. Why am I supposed to care about walking around outside of Rapture now? The threat of flooding was always at the back of our minds while wandering through those tunnels, but it never happened. Is 2K Marin trying to make up for this oversight?

The Player wakes up as a Big Daddy, and as if to silence the people that will harbor the “been there, done that” attitude, this particular Big Daddy can use plasmids. And, like the original game, he can either harvest ADAM directly from Little Sisters or taken them on as partners to do the harvesting. While it may seem exciting to fend off a bunch of splicers while your partner harvests ADAM, I don’t see how this choice holds the same initial gravity as the original game. A Big Daddy has already been shown to be all but indestructable, and could easily plow through the game killing Little Sisters and Splicers with impunity. You are (presumably) a human that was turned into a Big Daddy, but there is no history there. At least in the original you were a man that through convoluted plot turns and exposition was able to appreciate some of the human elements sprinkled throughout the storyline that would make it seem those token morality plays actually meant something. Instead, the approach used for BioShock 2 dresses it up as an action game that renders its own existence pointless.

But I know 2K Marin thought about this. “We’ve already established that Big Daddies are basically invincible. How can we make this different?” Everyone sat around the board room table looking down at their hands. And then I’m sure somone piped up: “We’ll Make a Big Sister!” in what must have seemed like veritable flash of genius.

Aside from the obvious lack of creative vision, the fast moving, always observing Big Sister will play a prominent role in this game. This new character positions itself in the game world like the SA-X in Metroid Fusion – a character that is your shadowy reflection, appearing every now and again to let you know who you’re eventually going to be fighting. This is really what the first game should have been like; by making Big Daddies recurring characters that could be defeated with a little persistence it lessened their overall impact in the game world. Of course, this all depends on whether Players are willing to convince themselves that this new technology was invented in the nine years since the original BioShock, by people who were only partially jacked up on Plasmids. Or was it there all along?

BioShock 2 also hopes to recapture the suspenseful environment that made the original game so unique in its delivery. But it’s already been done! By staying in Rapture, Players already know what to expect from Splicer subculture, unless 2K Marin are going to reveal some Ultra Mutant Splicer or other scientific mastermind that was strangely absent from the first game. This decision is basically admitting that the original game had nothing to say at all; it just provided a pretty new environment to shoot things in. That’s really what’s happening here, as I am told that I “finally get to drill people” and “shoot the rivet gun” as a Big Daddy. I find it extremely hard to accept that the peak of creativity ended at the halfway point of BioShock. But with these video previews of the game in action, that’s essentially the extent of 2K Marin’s sales pitch.

BioShock 2 ignores the groundwork that was laid, and instead focuses on a Player’s insatiable need to shoot at things. Big Daddies weren’t that interesting – they were part of BioShock‘s environment and became only obstacles at the end of the game. Apart from the fact that Rapture is already destroyed, BioShock 2 doesn’t appear to explore the mythos of Rapture as much as it wants to rewrite it. Instead of carrrying the story forward, it wants to go back and “do all those other things you wanted to do in Rapture.” But it’s too late, guys. We want to see what’s next.

According to 2K Games, the plan is to eventually have six BioShock games in a story arc to rival Star Wars[4]:

Look at Star Wars. It’s a fight between good and evil, just like BioShock [and every other game in existence, it would seem - ed]. If we spin it the right way and get the right twist of innovation, we can make six parts of it, as Star Wars did…we have to be careful not to cash in.

At least they’re being up front about their aspirations for the franchise.

Notes:
1. Refer to my review of BioShock, a year late to the party.
2. In an interview from September 2007, Ken Levine reveals that the “black and white” endings weren’t his idea; he would have rather seen a better representation of the Player’s choices in the game. But those choices had to actually have an impact in the game first, Ken.
3. At GDC 2008, Levine gave a talk about how he “screwed up BioShock’s story”, by making the climax too soon. As I said in my review, it’s basically a revenge mission after the halfway point.
4. Christoph Hartmann, Global President of 2K Games confirms more sequels of BioShock are in the works.

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.

For its use of the ubiquitous duck and cover dynamic in third-person shooters, Guerrilla still plays more like Lost Planet than Gears of War. The controls feel a little too loose and imprecise. The “steady aim” is simply a zoom-in on the aiming reticule’s current position, instead of the solid over-the-shoulder view you get when aiming in Gears. The weapon switching mechanic was implemented contrarty to convention, too – the obvious choice of the D-pad was passed over in favor of the right shoulder button to bring up a selectable menu mapped to the four thumb buttons. It takes some effort to get used to, and often caused accidental weapon switching due to the additional step in selection and the buttons in close proximity to each other (unlike, say, the radial menu used in F.E.A.R. 2). It’s almost as if Volition wasn’t paying attention. However.

Despite being a bit clumsy in the way it integrates taking cover and gunplay, I felt like I had more freedom to pursue the objective in the demo for Guerrilla. Gears of War always made a point of herding the player through each level, to ensure the action was strung together seamlessly so the player could get back to using those incredibly refined controls and firing that lovely Lancer. Guerrilla, on the other hand, has a broader scope in mind. It presents an “open world” for missions to be completed. Another one of those review-ready, game design marketing phrases.

I can’t really blame Volition for trying to do this with Guerrilla because of their success with the Saints Row series. It’s a design decision that could effectively ruin the franchise for fans of the original FPS Red Faction games. However, it’s clear that Volition thought about how best to implement this to maintain the existing subject matter in the way Guerrilla is presented, and I think they got it mostly right. At the beginning of the demo’s mission, I never felt that I was being forced in any particular direction except to reach an objective. I could sneak around until I was spotted and the colony’s soldiers were alerted, or run in guns blazing. There is no health pool; rather, the game uses the popular method of regenerating health when taking no damage. Aside from the flexible approach to the mission, Guerrilla still follows many of the other current conventions of the third-person shooter genre, and I had to wonder where it was going. It didn’t apply any one aspect of the game’s dynamics especially well, and in the first few minutes of play was in danger of losing my interest. So I started breaking things with my hammer.

One of the features that made Red Faction such a landmark in PC gaming was its showcase for the Geo-Mod engine, which was released shortly after “ragdoll physics” (a.k.a. Havok) entered the game reviewer’s vocabulary. With the introduction of Geo-Mod, we had to read “destructible” as well. Guerrilla provides the latest version of this engine, with results that have actual impact on the game’s core mechanics.

Volition was wise enough to include the best examples for the use of this engine’s capabilities at the start of the level. Because every single environmental object can be destroyed in this game, there is always the risk of losing cover, which is now an essential part of combat. Charges can be thrown to blow up the side of a building and expose your position, or that fenceline you were using to corral troops into a choke point could be cut down by heavy machine gun fire from an enemy support team. Since there are vehicles available in this game to cover longer distances, these can be driven into a bank of explosive containers to cause a distraction or take out larger structures. It also follows that cover can, in effect, be created from debris resulting from explosions or collapsed structures. This is in stark contrast to a game like Fracture (2008), that only permits this kind of activity in areas where the designers wanted you to do it. Combat in Guerrilla often becomes a spectacle with this ridiculous display of physics, but there are environmental implications that directly affect the way it progresses.

Guerrilla also provides a suitable challenge. On Normal difficulty, there was always a risk of instant dealth if you weren’t under some form of cover – even if it was simply peeking around a corner or aiming through the window of a building. That alone made me think about my actions, and resulted in multiple attempts because of my sloppily executed plans. I actually played through the beginning of the demo about 15 times, but most attempts were used to test the responsiveness of the AI and gauge the damage I recieved with the “run and gun” method. I was even convinced that it was reasonable that the entire colony’s garrison was out to kill me – I was the lone rebel that would upset the balance bewteen them and the subservient colonists. And this is where the game gets really fascinating.

The mistake that many action games make is dropping the player into the middle of a situation and expecting them to take care of it on their own. The “One Man Army” phenomenon has been around as long as video games – probably cemented by Wolfenstein 3D, and simply reinforced by every shooter that has come out after it. Call of Duty, one of my favorite games of all time, made a point to move away from this general design. Especially in the face of the Medal of Honor series, which always seemed to revolve around one guy turning the tides of war in favor of the Allies. While the AI in Call of Duty was occasionally suspect (and likely the reason that Brothers in Arms introduced active direction of squad AI in WW2 shooters), the game always made sure there was someone by your side, fighting the good fight with you. You could protect your squad mates, but if they died they were almost immediately replaced with someone else and no emotional response from anyone. Guerrilla tries its best to avoid these conventions.

Morale is used as an environmental influence on the NPC colonists that are distributed about the map. There are colonists everywhere who see you, a member of the Red Faction, as the one that will unshackle them from the oppressive regime of the EDF. Blowing up EDF outposts, destroying EDF propaganda posters, killing EDF soldiers and causing general havoc within the work camps will increase morale in the area, which decreases the hold of EDF over the colonists. Similarly, if you kill one of the colonists during a firefight – even if you’re in the process of protecting them – the morale of the colony decreases, and they will be more inclined to run and hide than stick around to see the outcome. The missions in Guerrilla are all to further the cause of the Red Faction, and by extension increase morale. When morale in an area is high enough and the bullets start flying, a colonist might stoop over an EDF soldier’s corpse and pick up a gun to join in the fight. You might be the catalyst for the Revolution, but it’s clear Volition wants Players to know they don’t have to see it through alone. This is a much needed dimension in a game that on first glance (including my own) could easily be labelled as another copycat.

Red Faction: Guerrilla initially appeared as a game I should be reserving the typical scorn for in the way it mechanically repeats the trends in third person shooters. But I found reasons to keep playing, and I’m glad I persisted. From start to finish, the mission had a genuine flow to it: sneaking around turns to calculated street fighting turns to lumbering around in bulky mechanical armor, which ends with jumping on the back of a truck and firing a gun in a rail sequence. While it may have been contrived by today’s standards, it didn’t feel forced. Where previous installments were typically FPS-oriented and designed for a PC audience, this is a game that seems to want to take advantage of these recent trends in game design and provide its own flourish to the formula. Sure there are missteps, but it was abundantly clear at the end of the mission I played that Volition is trying to evolve this series. And I want to see where it goes.

My first exposure to Gears of War was a commercial that aired in late 2006 featuring Gary Jules’ cover of “Mad World”. It was an awkward insertion of a popular song for what appeared to be a grungy, blood spattered action game for emotionally stunted adult males. If I heard that song in, say, a Final Fantasy commercial, that would have been entirely justifiable – predictable even – for the series’ melodramatic tendencies. But watching these juiced-up football players bedecked in pock-marked bulky armor fight off what appeared to be zombies, or insects, or insect-zombies to such a mopey tune was a jarring spectacle. What message was the advertisement sending me? Was I supposed to feel sorry for these battle-weary soldiers pressing on in some city decimated by war to defend the human race? Were these men actually sensitive to the death and destruction around them? My first response was that it was merely a ruse to get me to think this game would be something different. It wouldn’t be about killing endless waves of the faceless alien invader; rather, it would explore the human condition and man’s response to being thrown into a war he didn’t want to fight, but was damn well expected to end.

After about two solid hours of playing the game, I stopped thinking so hard about this. Gears of War is not a statement about the atrocities of war in modern times. The arrangement between Gears of War and its player is much simpler. The game inscribes upon the player the desire to fire a gun – repeatedly and with extreme prejudice. It encourages hooting and hollering and much chest-thumping after each challenging firefight. It revels in the act of shooting a weapon so much that it becomes the only reason you come back to the game. And the game leaves you no other choice but to love it in return.

Gears of War has become a kind of figurehead for the “hardcasual” movement – genres traditionally for the hardcore adapted to be accessible – to the point where anyone who likes it must obviously be a brickheaded cretin and have no taste in video games. It’s always the fate of any successful title, and feels a little more petty every time it happens. But to dwell on that point is to miss the game’s biggest strength: it allows itself to be picked up by almost anyone and have its essence immediately tapped by the Player. That this experience can be enjoyed by the hardcore and casual alike is a feat worth recognizing.

Halo ushered in a new age of shooters that were adapted for the console; Gears of War is the only shooter I have played since that managed to create controls that I feel perfectly comfortable with. Cliff Bleszinski has mentioned that he was inspired by the shooting controls of Resident Evil 4, but Epic has not just improved them as they have perfected them, creating a template that all console shooters should adhere to from this day forward. Playing the PC version allowed the use of Mouse/Keyboard, and I did try it for a short while, but I found myself switching back to my Xbox 360 control pad. They felt jittery and their cold precision took me outside of the game. I felt like I was cheating myself of the experience of playing the original game as it was intended.

Gears of War isn’t just about running into an area and shooting everything in sight. Well, not totally. Yes, the game is on rails as you are coralled through corridors into each new area. But Gears breaks up this motion by employing a duck-and-cover system that slows down the action into bite sized exchanges of gunfire. Working with this mechanic is the Crimson Omen, which is just a fancy name for a damage indicator at the centre of the screen. Take enough damage in a short period of time, the screen turns red and you’re dead. This seems to be a pretty ubiquitous concept in the design of modern shooters, but in the case of Gears of War it’s entirely appropriate. It allows the focus to remain on shooting, because instead of constantly referencing a health bar the primary objective is to survive – instant death could be at any moment. It’s another example of how the game forces you to live in the moment. You’re getting shot at – take cover. Find a good position to return fire. Move on to the next objective. It implies an urgency in the game’s pacing. You don’t want to stop the forward momentum.

Much criticism has been directed at Gears for being unoriginal, and not much of a challenge since taking cover isn’t always required on the lowest difficulty setting. That may be true, but where Gears excels is the delivery. The repetition in the dive-for-cover, crouch, peek, aim, fire, crouch, fire pattern in each encounter makes it second nature, to the point where the game takes on a natural rhythm. I have yet to see a more meticulously crafted refinement of the genre. Every one of the game’s features revolves around shooting a gun, or facilitating the act of shooting a gun. Take cover and aim, or take cover and blind fire to suppress an enemy. It makes reloading an active distraction. Instead of reflexive button pushing, Gears introduces the “Active Reload” where you can reload faster or gain damage bonuses for a perfectly timed reload button press. Mess up the timing, and it’s precious seconds before your gun is usable again. It makes you want to focus on reloading to get it right.

Of course, there’s the Lancer. The Lancer represents a landmark in weapon design. It is a gun that I used for the entire game. Even when it was out of ammo, I used the pistol. I didn’t want to drop it for fear of losing this essential appendage. Never before has a weapon’s melee attack been so incredibly satisfying. In first person shooters, melee is often just using the butt of the gun to push enemies back, to buy some time and get a good shot. It might even work. With the Lancer, there is a genuine feeling of comfort knowing that the chainsaw bayonet is always available for an instant kill. Successfully biting the Lancer’s chainsaw into the flesh of the Locust, their black blood spraying across the screen with Marcus providing the guttural growl and the chainsaw buzzing, always buzzing, until the Locust finally falls. These types of theatrics are simply externalizing something that was felt by every PC gamer since using the chainsaw in Doom, and as such are completely necessary.

The setting of Gears of War might as well be in the Warhammer 40,000 universe; the trivial reasons behind the conflict on the fictional world of Sera and the character design for the Gears are clearly influenced by it. By the end of the game you get the impression that maybe the Locust weren’t invaders, but were always there, awakened by bloodlust to exterminate the encroaching humans. The Gears are just dirtied-up Space Marines sent out to do the heavy lifting – and clearly enjoy it. Having the player portray the anti-hero Marcus Fenix, who makes it clear from the start he has no respect for authority, simply reinforces who this game is aimed at. For co-op, the game introduces Dom: a long time friend of Marcus and his wingman for the entire game. While two more members of Delta Squad are added later – the sarcastic Baird and showboat Cole Train – you spend most of your time in game with Marcus and Dom.

Both the appearance and behaviour of these characters are parody of actual humans, and yet they work because of the game’s subject matter. As a result there’s a certain charm to the way the characters are exposed in the game. Marcus is always grumbling about being the Army’s errand boy. Dom grounds the game with humanity in his quest to search for his missing wife. Baird always has a wisecrack and often saves the day with his mechanical know-how, and Cole Train is either talking smack or cutting loose with a “Whoo!” that would make most pro wrestlers blush. These attributes are instant gratification, and do not require any further investment in the characters. Because Gears of War fully subscribes to the less talk, more action approach. And it does that so very, very well.

Gears of War presents a bleak landscape that has been decimated by war. There are only a few colors on its palette that are all too familiar to those experienced with the id software school of level design. There are plenty of destroyed buildings and burned out cars to create a vast supply of cover, choke points and sniper nests. When the game goes underground into the realm of the Locust, the same drab tones are punctuated by lakes and rivers of bright green imulsion, an apparently valuable substance that was never fully explained. The way Gears of War weaves in and out of these locales is as seamless as the way you duck in and out of cover.

The flow of this game is almost perfect: there is barely time to breathe, but you never feel overwhelmed. The action is brilliantly paced in between the spartan in-game cutscenes that deliver only the bare essentials, so the game gets you back into the action where focus belongs. You get the feeling that it is only you and your squad fighting this war, and this ridiculous situation is made worse by the nature of the missions you are forced to go on. Retrieve this item, repair this structure – as if Delta Squad was really just a gang of intergalactic repairmen. But these are reasons that were thrown into the mix because the player needs an objective in this type of game. Simply taking territory and killing everything on the map isn’t incentive enough for players, according to Epic’s designers. Because they studied video games, and they want to show the player that they understand the needs of the action gamer. They want the player to feel like they have accomplished something, represented by a boss battle or blowing up some random piece of machinery. This dangling carrot – or even the prospect of a payoff – helps drive the action forward.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t always result in the most satisfying encounters. Much has been said about the inclusion of a driving mission that features another appearance of the darkness-loving Kryll, where you are tasked with driving a vehicle that cannot move and use its weapon at the same time. I can see what Epic was trying to do here: create a driving mission that actually has some tension in it, so the need to keep driving is always there to disguise a set of shitty, unresponsive controls. I could shoot a Lancer all day long, performing Active Reloads to the tune of The Presets’ “Let’s Go”. Seriously. The natural flow of the game was broken by a very clumsy sequence that serves only as an irritating obstacle that must be surmounted before the shooting and chainsawing can resume.

The squad in this game is essentially Marcus and Dominic. Cole and Baird show up from time to time for the larger setpiece battles, but you will always be depending on Dom to watch your back. For the most part, Dom’s AI is serviceable. He will defend objectives, take cover when necessary and try not to get himself killed – too much. So when depending on Dom becomes hazardous (or pointless), the use of cover and less brazen tactics will assure survival in the single player campaign. When incapacitated, squad mates resuscitate themselves when all Locust are cleared from the area anyway.

What’s more impressive is the adversarial AI. In fact, it is often shockingly methodical. Just when you think you have the perfect position and start taking pot shots at the Locust, they suddenly see what’s happening to their comrades and come after you. They will suppress and flank – just like your own squad is doing – to get to your position. They will pick up weapons from their fallen brothers, and will often be equipped with the same things your own team is.

This was a brilliant design decision by Epic, because with it they have effectively dispelled all preconceptions about First Person/Third Person shooters as merely exercises in target practice. The Locust are equals on the battlefield and behave as realistically as you would expect in the context of the overall game’s mechanics. They will all at once seem organized and efficient, while brandishing the kind of fearlessness that is frightening in any enemy. With that said, what really bothered me was the Locust’s uncanny ability to sense when I was aiming the Longshot sniper rifle. In well hidden positions, I very rarely could get more than one shot off before they all started ducking or running right towards me, even if members of my squad were the more immediate threats.

This frenetic exchange of tactics results in a new kind of firefight; conflicts that broach new realms of intensity. I could probably stop writing at this point, and simply say that Gears of War is about firing a gun in a series of well-orchestrated firefights that make you feel like thumping your chest or barking like a wild animal after each battle is won. It brings out both the best and the worst in people that play video games. But this game deserves more than that. So I must continue.

Gears of War establishes its formula early on, because it wants to give casual players the most complete representation of the game so they won’t be intimidated by the introduction of new features or a change in pace. All of the tools available in the war against the Locust have been used by the end of the first Act. The player then hands themselves over to the game’s story, where they are exposed to various setpieces, more challenging areas to fight in, bigger monsters to kill and the frat boy banter between the members of Delta Squad.

The extra levels in Act 5 for the PC version of the game lead in to a battle with a Brumak – a creature previously only revealed through the game’s cutscenes. It feels gratuitous in the context of the overall game, but the buildup to this encounter is almost palpable, to the point where there is no other choice but to include the Brumak in a money shot that almost overshadows the endgame sequence (almost). Defeating the Corpser was only pushing it into imulsion; fighting the Brumak was a legitimate contest. It’s a shame that because of the callousness of Microsoft and Epic owners of the Xbox 360 version of the game will never get to experience this. Though the game’s AI is once again the reason for the encounter’s difficulty – Dom would often get himself stomped by the Brumak after running right up to it.

After the fight with the Brumak, the resolution of Gears of War starts with a battle to get onto a freight train carrying the Lightmass bomb that has managed to elude the grasp of the Gears. It’s not a very subtle metaphor for the climax: Marcus and Dom must fight their way through the cars of this speeding frieght train on a collision course with their final objective.

RAAM, a General in the Locust army, is waiting with the bomb. It’s actually a bit of surprise, because the last time this character appeared was in the game’s first Act when he killed off Kim, which made Marcus the leader of Delta Squad. It’s strange plot device, as if Epic was trying to tie the beginning and end of the game together. I never felt I was out to get RAAM in the game; I was always in pursuit of the next objective. But the fight with RAAM is necessary for closure. It is also incredibly hard. Not just because I was constantly worrying about whether Dom was going to get his ass curb stomped again, or trying the avoid the Kryll immediately drawn to any position I took up. This final confrontation is made difficult because you can’t just pull out The Best Weapon (there is none), take cover and chip away at RAAM from a distance. This fight forces you to use every single tactic you learned while playing the game up until this point. Killing RAAM is a fitting end to the game, because it makes you feel you like you have defeated the game itself, and all it has to offer. It is a perfect culmination.

At the very least, Gears of War positioned itself comfortably next to Halo as an original, exclusive and highly bankable IP for Microsoft’s console. But it also brought accessibility to a genre with an unassuming execution of controls, refined game mechanics and deliciously simple objectives. I didn’t realize how much I loved Gears of War until I started explaining the game to others. These wide-eyed, passionate and often one-sided conversations would basically be reduced to the following statement: Gears of War will make you feel like a man.

I have a list of my favorite games of all time always in my mind when I play. It is constantly referenced and compared as I gain new experiences through video games, though it is rarely updated. Gears of War helped me get past my contempt for the trends of video game culture and its influence on modern video game design, and accept the game for the achievement that it is. The shameless machismo and gun pornography may capture a different audience, but the polished production and unwavering focus on its goal assures Gears of War a position in the halls of video game legend.

When I saw the name of this mission in Left 4 Dead, my thoughts turned to a last stand at an abandoned small town radio station, where the four Survivors must send out a distress call to anyone who would answer, while static rang through the building in defiance. With the onslaught of Infected raging outside the building, the Survivors slowly start to make peace with the fact that they might not get rescued this time after all. As the ammunition is consumed and the walls start to crumble behind the massive weight of encroaching Tanks, the Survivors take stock of the situation. They are about to die.

Except that’s not what happened. Apparently Valve was thinking about an airline staffed entirely by Infected. So we get an airport. A big, sprawling airport with an incredible scene involving a plane crash just in time for the final standoff. Which, as it turns out, is nowhere near as exciting as my little scenario. But that doesn’t mean that the rest of the mission wasn’t as exhilarating as those that preceded it.

This past weekend’s session of “Dead Air” was was with a full foursome. Having the AI at your side may be like having the ideal teammates, but they need to be watched. They will pull off unnecessary heroics and choose to heal you over themselves. Martyrs, all. Four humans on a team exposes the true dynamics of this game as they were intended. The balancing of health packs, managing friendly fire and sticking together while under attack are the essential tenets of the game’s mechanics that must be learned. While the difficulty seemed to ony marginally increase, when there are four free-thinking individuals on a team it’s harder to manage a group that starts to unravel during an Infected invasion. Choose yourself over the group and you will die.

In “Dead Air” there are once again plenty of rooftop battles through a city overrun by Infected. Eventually we arrived at the airport, where we were treated to a very interesting setpiece that takes place in the main foyer and departures waiting area inside. The set-up of this scene was a little disturbing: we were surrounded by piles of luggage placed by people who likely never made it out of the city. Pressing on, we had to drive a van into a pile of luggage and debris to clear the path forward. Naturally that alerted the horde. All four of us were waiting in the foyer as the Infected swarm enclosed us on all sides. At first things seemed to go pretty well: two of us on shotgun duty and two with assault rifles. But those reload times on the shotguns began to take their toll as the Infected steadily increased in number. One of us fell, then two. The group wiped in short order.

The second attempt was a little more organized. After moving the van, we all went to the mezzanine that overlooked the foyer, hoping to take pot shots at the Horde before moving on. But we underestimated the AI Director. This time, the Horde was both upstairs and downstairs, coming from shadowy corridors behind us and rushing up the escalators in front of us. And suddenly we were in the same predicament as before.

I wouldn’t call the response to events like these in Left 4 Dead “problem solving”, but it requires a great deal of thinking on your feet and cooperation without second guessing. Planning a raid in MMORPGs is a lot easier than figuring out how to simply survive an enemy that fears nothing and completely surrounds you. Voice chat makes these snap decisions easy to communicate, and eventually we made it through into the final stretch.

Left 4 Dead isn’t satisfied to simply set up a small staging area to make the last stand in. It needs to inject a feeling of desperation and urgency, of fear that you won’t make it. Nothing could have prepared us for the shocking display of a passenger plane crash right in front of the group. It was symbolic; it made us think for a second that maybe that was the last ride out of here. Maybe we were simply going out onto the tarmac to die, like that theoretical scene in the abandoned radio station.

The finale’s centerpiece is a gas truck used to refuel a cargo plane. As the hapless survivors stumbling onto the scene, the anonymous pilot of the plane asks us to refuel it. Of course, the noise will alert the Horde and it’s a matter of waiting out that fill cycle before we can leave.

Since the landing strip was an open area, the firefight seemed a lot more manageable than the one from “Death Toll” by allowing us to see the entire battlefield. Though the number of Horde was about the same, and the AI Director made itself known by dealing out Specials with frustrating frequency. The last thing on our minds was worrying about the gas truck behind us blowing up in a storm of flying bullets. Instead, I couldn’t help wondering why that lazy fucker in the plane didn’t get out to help us.

Some of us were incapacitated, or dragged off by Smokers, but someone always managed to be there. Then the health packs suddenly ran out. Two of us jumped on to the top of the truck, which proved to be a strategic advantage in the final moments of the battle as the AI Director decided to deliver one last swarm for good measure. This is when the game makes you want to shoot a gun until there is no ammo left, until you are down to a pistol and keep shooting long after the last Infected has fallen. It is a feeling that is simultanously disheartening and exhilarating.

Once we were given the go-ahead to jump onto the plane, only three of us did: one of us stayed outside for a few more seconds to fend off the horde with his automatic shotgun for a safe boarding. At this point I think we all held our breath, wondering if he’d make it out of his last-stand heroics alive. He quickly realized that bothering to reload at this point was a stupid idea, so he hopped onto the plane and joined the rest of us. The plane took off, and we let out a cheer. Another happy ending.

The biggest criticism against this game is that there are only four missions. And while the FPS obsessed might fly through these missions just to get to the end, this type of approach misses out on the game’s biggest strength. It’s not about the kill count or pointing out who startled the Witch or finishing the missions on the highest difficulty. Left 4 Dead encourages a co-operative effort to survive. “No One Left Behind” is not just an Achievement; it is the philosophy behind the entire game.

Beneath the waves of the Atlantic Ocean, there is a hidden metropolis established by a megalomaniac tired of dealing with the confines imposed on him by the modern world. In the wake of a civil war that tore this city apart are the hordes of Splicers – humans horribly disfigured and disturbed by excessive self-inflicted genetic mutation. Plazas and hallways scarred by war and bedecked with posters advertising the use of these mutagens wait silently for the player, who will upset the stalemate in the battle for supremacy in Rapture and restore some kind of order. But to face the Splicers and expect to stand a chance, the player must do their own share of gene alteration – upgrading the ability to absorb damage, increasing physical prowess and gaining elemental offensive abilities. BioShock does its best to blend aspects of the first-person shooter with projectile spells, stat-boosting, and the point-and-click adventure games of old, creating an environment teeming with ideas inspired by the best of dystopian science fiction literature. It also reveals an engrossing story, and yet another argument against a society governed by an individual’s opinion on what is right without the checks and balances of the status quo. But somewhere among those many blood spattered corridors and in between the creepy ramblings of the 326th splicer I had to fight, the game lost me. Not for lack of interest I had gathered following its complex plot, but in the way it leaves its promise of moral ambiguity untouched, and leaves the player nothing more than an extremely attractive and original first person shooter.

Even though this review is a year late to the party, I can’t assume everyone has played and finished this game. I mention some significant plot points during the course of my analysis that will potentially ruin the entire experience, so please do yourself a favor and stop reading if you plan on playing BioShock eventually.

Another warning: this review is long. It is now the longest review I have ever written for Tales of a Scorched Earth. But that’s never stopped me before.

BioShock was the highest rated PC game of 2007, and one of the highest rated video games to be released in 2007. It received a seemingly endless stream of praise for creating a computer gaming masterpiece. You know, since the last one was released in 2004. Naturally, I felt compelled to experience it for myself to see whether the game would really live up to its reputation. While the high praise for Resident Evil 4 was mostly annoying to me, I actually believed the hype surrounding BioShock to the point where I felt bad for not being able to play it upon release. A number of factors prevented this, but now that I have finished the game one year later I feel that I am able to detach myself from what the popular opinion was at the time and review the game on its merits alone.

First I want to get the whole “spiritual successor” thing out of the way, because it seems to be an unnecessary talking point in every review I’ve read. I know Ken Levine’s past as a designer, and the title may have the word “shock” in it, but let’s be totally clear here: BioShock stands – and should be judged – on its own. Like any other game, it borrows heavily from the merging of different genres, game mechanics and themes that predated it, but I have yet to experience a game that has ever had such tightly controlled art direction. BioShock took the art deco aesthetics of the 1930s and injected them into the completely original setting and subculture of the failed paradise of Rapture. During the game’s introductory level, the moment the television screen in the bathysphere reveals the underwater skyline I was transfixed by the possibilities that lay ahead. Who built this place? Why is it underwater? And what was I getting myself into?

The quotable dialogue, posters and genetic experimentation interspersed through the entire game clearly pull their inspiration from dystopian science fiction and classic Hollywood. The ethereal soundtrack culled from old 1930s recordings echoes off of the walls of the first few rooms you explore that have clearly been ravaged by fighting. The first Splicers you encounter are dressed in party masks that cover their hideous faces. This sensory dissonance implants a real urgency to find out what happened.

However, in response to this initial curiosity the best that BioShock can come up with is a vending machine. That spits out a very grubby looking syringe. That you have to stab into your arm. Suddenly granted with the ability to shoot lighting bolts from your hands, you feel empowered. But that feeling doesn’t last long, because the shotgun and its various ammo types can be just as gratifying.

The use of Plasmids (spells) and Tonics (passive abilities) to enhance your character is one of the game’s focal points, but I felt they were constantly conflicting with the game’s unique selection of weapons and the way they can use different types of ammunition. Plasmids and Tonics can be found in the game, or purchased from another type of vending machine. The Plasmids and Tonics must then be equipped via a Gene Bank, where you can see the inventory of other Plasmids and Tonics you have obtained to that point. Instead of the dramatic syringe-sticking scene at the beginning of the game, once you can purchase new abilities from vending machines, it’s simply a matter of shifting some icons on-screen at the Gene Bank.

If Old Man Murray had the Start to Crate review system, I offer up The Vending Machine Dependency Test. BioShock relies too heavily on vending machines to supply players with everything they need in the game. Another example that immediately comes to mind is the recent Dead Space, which similarly uses vending machines in an environment that’s most unlikely to support them. It overtly expresses the designer’s inability to come up with an interesting or original way to hand over power-ups and weapons. No wonder there was an uprising! Weapons, Plasmids and Gene Modification were readily accessible by any member of Rapture’s community. Finding weapons that have been cast onto the floor, or unused ammo is far more believable in the wake of a civil war than buying things from vending machines that are amazingly still operable after such a violent conflict.

If BioShock wanted to add depth to the game’s mechanics via some light character customization, it does a horrible job of integrating it into the interface. BioShock treats Plasmids like other weapons, in that you can only see active ones alongside your equipped weapons. You can’t see active Tonics, nor can you ever view your other Plasmids unless you go to a Gene Bank. I can understand that this is necessary to equip them (it is do-it-yourself genetic modification), but just to see your inventory? And where do you carry all those weapons and extra ammo? The fact that there is no inventory or other stat-building reiterates how thinly this RPG-lite skin has been stretched over the typical FPS.

Eventually, the RPG elements just seemed to get in the way. They felt only half-realized, and with a full complement of weapons and modest supply of ammo under my belt I didn’t feel as much of a need to upgrade my plasmids or tonics. Certainly Plasmids make dealing with groups of Slicers easier (like Electro Bolt and Frozen Bolt), but they aren’t essential. Most seem like showcases for the designers to show how they can create clever weapons or copy existing ones, like Telekinesis. With all the terrible side-effects from splicing that you see from exploring Rapture, your character remains curiously pure – tainted only by the choice of actions towards Little Sisters in pursuit of ADAM. If Plasmids and tonics can be ignored or consumed with impunity, what purpose do they serve in developing your character?

In this regard, BioShock tries too hard to be deep. As the main character, you slowly discover how your life is central to the history and future of Rapture, and the game desperately wants you to make a connection with the character. This is emphasized by the game’s focus on the RPG-lite elements of Plasmid and Tonic upgrades, and morality play that is constantly paraded in front of you through interactions with Big Daddies and Little Sisters. But like Gordon Freeman in Half Life 2, you say nothing for the entire game – even as you end the life of Rapture’s founder (and your father). This emotional detachment may be one of many statements regarding the game’s interpretation of Objectivism, but I cynically offer the more simple explanation: if Jack didn’t kill Ryan and go running after Fontaine, the game would be over.

While BioShock allows players to save anywhere, they also introduce the feature of Vita-Chambers. These are basically respawn points in each game area that are automatically activated when you are nearby. When you are killed, you are automatically resurrected at these points without having to reload your game. Any ammo you had spent is gone, but if you were fighting a Big Daddy his health bar is exactly where you left it. Through dying and respawning it allows you to wear down tougher enemies that take away most of the challenge. A later patch to the PC version allowed people to turn off the use of Vita-Chambers, but the damage of the original design decision had already been done. Why include them at all? The technology used to create Vita-Chambers is explained in the context of the game world making it somewhat plausible – but why so many installations if it was still in the experimentation stage? I can see if it was to prevent the quick-save-and-reload mentality that often breaks immersion in FPS, but then why not include automatic save points which seem to be accepted by PC gamers? It’s a seamless way to integrate saving in-game, while not allowing players to exploit the system.

I also wasn’t really satisfied with the Hacking mini-game, a real step backwards from the simplicity of System Shock 2. As the game progressed, hacking became an annoying distraction while under fire and I mostly resorted to destroying turrets and cameras, or used Auto-Hacks. Tonics that slow the flow of liquid were good, ones that reduce alarm and shorting tiles are better, but why not a Tonic that decreases the overall number of tiles to make the entire hacking process shorter? I really just wanted to be in the game more, instead of dealing with these tack-ons to the experience.

Linearity and simplicity is not always a bad thing when you’re trying to tell a story with a First Person Shooter; Half Life 2 is a perfect example of this. Sure you were able to carry an entire arsenal of weapons in the back pocket of the Hazard Suit, but the game didn’t focus on how these weapons were arranged on your person or grant you the ability to affix a sniper scope to it. Guns were a defensive necessity for you to be presented with the rest of the story. The meticulous set-up of BioShock‘s core mechanics amounts to little more than window dressing on a game that at its core is essentially an unusually beautiful first person shooter.

Lightning proves to be very useful in this game when you’re dealing with enemies that don’t figure out standing around in water results in instant death.

BioShock often collapses under the cumbersome weight of its mechanics, to the point where the narrative flow suffers. I made up my mind early on that BioShock was just a first-person shooter with a more complicated weapons upgrade system, so I decided to focus on the story elements that were being fed to me in between trips to the many vending machines and searching for potato chips and unused EVE in garbage cans. Finding out the rest of the story was really the only reason I kept playing the game.

However, BioShock could have made a more concerted effort in getting plot elements across. Tape recordings can be interesting when used sparingly, and help fill in the gaps between interactions with the main characters of the game, but they shouldn’t be the only method of delivering the plot. There was also too much time spent on how important plasmids were to develop my powers within the context of the game, instead of giving me more information to piece together what is probably a fascinating history for Rapture. Because Gordon Freeman doesn’t speak, Half Life 2 did a great job of integrating newspaper clippings, propaganda posters and random chatter between NPCs as a way of expositing the storyline without forcing you to sit through cutscenes or tape recordings. Although BioShock has its own share of posters that can be pieced together to form what likely happened in the last weeks of Rapture’s organized society, there just wasn’t enough neutral information being provided to make me feel like the game was allowing me to figure things out for myself.

Since tape recordings are so valuable in providing more story, it makes you want to explore the game world itself – the gardens of Arcadia, the twisted artist’s sanctuary of Fort Frolic, the dilapidated apartments of the lower class in Apollo Square. BioShock does its best to make that possible by providing a number of additional sections of each level to uncover, that may only provide a few power-ups or tape recordings but aren’t necessary points that must be visited to proceed. And seeing this paradise gone bad sprawled in front of you make these side trips far from tedious. Every new environment, every blood spattered wall and scattered corpse makes you speculate on what happened. BioShock does its best to disguise your predetermined path.

But why the lack of variety in enemies? While interesting concepts, the Splicers look too much like generic zombies, and the last type of Splicer you will ever see in the game is revealed in the third chapter. Big Daddies are also awesome to behold the first few times, but once I saw them as obstacles to more ADAM they were simply a tin can I had to blow up to get the prize inside.

If only there was more depth to this dynamic than a superficial guilt trip.

BioShock certainly illustrates an original gameworld and absorbing story, but most people who have played the game seem to attribute more to the game’s morality play in the way it presents the ADAM-hoarding Little Sisters, despite it being completely misplaced. Back to the RPG-lite elements: ADAM is an important resource in the game; you need it to purchase new Plasmids, upgrade existing ones, or buff base attributes like Health and EVE. If you choose to focus on developing these abilities through the game, the resource becomes quite critical. In fact, you need it to survive. And that’s where BioShock introduces the Little Sisters.

At one point in the beginning of the game, you witness a Little Sister injecting a Slicer’s corpse with a syringe. It’s a creepy scene that resembles a carrion bird picking through the leftovers of some derelict battlefield. The Little Sister is harvesting genetic material from these corpses, where it will be converted into ADAM by a parasite living inside the Little Sister. You learn this shortly after, when you are presented with a scene where a Big Daddy has been slain and the Little Sister remains. You already know the ADAM is valuable – that’s why all the Slicers are going after Little Sisters and the Big Daddies are required to protect them. You even know at this point that ADAM will be required to get through the game, though how much is the reason for the difficult choice that follows.

Do you kill the Little Sister and harvest the ADAM-rich parasite? Or do you save her, and submit to the possibility that you will eventually be rewarded for your mercy? The game even makes a big deal out of it by presenting a giant dialog box to confirm the choice. At that point, you only have the word of Dr. Tenenbaum to go by. The problem with this setpiece is that you aren’t given specifics for a critical decision that will affect the outcome of the game. Will you still get ADAM? Or something else? It isn’t made clear, and at that early point of the game there is not enough information given to the Player to make an informed decision, especially with ADAM being the most essential resource in the game next to EVE. Or maybe bullets. Since ADAM is needed to progress, the cautious player will always lean towards harvesting the ADAM – it is needed to “level up” the main character. Had Tenenbaum alluded to the quantities of ADAM that would be received (even just outright saying you’ll get half), perhaps players would approach this pivotal scene differently.

However, this is ultimately where BioShock fails as a game that offers up morality for debate. The true effect of that moral choice is limited to this first encounter with a Little Sister, because even if you decide to save her, but still go on to kill Little Sisters for their ADAM, you will be painted as the antagonist for the rest of the game. Thus the choice is detached from a simple resource-collecting mechanic, and ADAM becomes just another item to collect from enemies like money and EVE to get through the game. And make no mistake, by default the Little Sisters are enemies in the context of the game, because at the point I am introduced to the dynamic between Tenenbaum, Ryan and Atlas, I have no idea who to trust. Plus, the Big Daddies are trying to flatten me.

Following the first few frustrating one-sided battles with Big Daddies it is a completely normal reaction to want to get the reward afterwards: lots and lots of ADAM. Any impact of a moral choice or negative reaction in the decision to kill is lost amongst the flying rivets and shattered glass. Kill Big Daddy, harvest ADAM, move on with the rest of the game.

The game is also inconsistent in the way it presents the act of collecting ADAM. The Little Sister will struggle in your grip, the screen goes dark, and the deed is done. The pangs of guilt are supposed to lie beneath the surface, as what you have just done has surely ended the life of the Little Sister, but you don’t know what happened. While I’m not expecting any ultra-violence, this separation of the player from the act that is supposed to make them feel remorse for his actions seems like a cop-out. And near the end of each level, the game itself reminds players that there are unharvested Little Sisters remaining, noting that ADAM is required to survive, or else the game will get difficult. This statement can be taken either way: kill Little Sister – get ADAM, or save Little Sister – get a little bit of ADAM, but it makes the completist in every gamer want to go back and grab the whole lot to maximize the number of Plasmids they can obtain.

After revealing that Ryan is your father, and Atlas is really the nefarious Fontaine trying to gain the final upper hand, you embark on what is little more than a revenge mission to unseat Fontaine. At this point, the game began to unravel. Dr. Tenenbaum gets involved at this point – the creator of Little Sisters and their repentant savior – who assists in your escape through a Little Sister. But why would they help me when I had spent most of the game up to that point harvesting ADAM from them with cold, calculating efficiency? Sure Tenenbaum was upset with me, but then she continues to help me escape Fontaine’s mind control – only so I can roam the streets of Rapture freely again and harvest more ADAM from the Little Sisters. It didn’t matter if I changed my ways after that encounter, as the game’s ending would prove. Between Fontaine’s big reveal and the game’s ending, there was ample opportunity for Jack’s redemption with regard to the Little Sisters, but the game didn’t capitalize on it. Instead, it forces you to dress up like a Big Daddy and pretend to be friend to the Little Sisters, a parody of the entire game’s depth.

The Little Sister escort mission that led me to Fontaine’s base of operations further cemented the game’s disregard for it’s own play on morality and consequence: I let each one of them die every time, and yet I was able to call more to help me without any penalty. It became a series of chaotic firefights where my only priority was saving myself from the waves of ADAM-thirsty Splicers, which became only annoying obstacles, their aura of creepiness long since depleted.

All this, only to be treated to an embarrassing endgame involving a battle with a purple Hulk juiced up on ADAM, where crossbow bolts are more effective than Plasmids. In this battle the Plasmid and Tonic system completely disintegrated, its superficiality thunderously confirmed. After defeating Fontaine, the offensively short ending basically took my character’s actions at face value and labeled me a cold-hearted bastard. From what I have read about the “good” ending, it isn’t much better. The prospect of Splicers on the surface world is surely terrifying, but it offers little closure to Jacks’ story, and like the disappointing ending of Half-Life 2 relies on fan speculation and sequels to answer these perfectly legitimate questions. And for a game that makes such an effort to convince players there are moral implications in the game, it does very little in offering the Player a reward for changing their outlook after Fontaine’s revelation at the middle of the adventure. If your actions prior to the encounter with Ryan predetermine the outcome of the game, the irrelevance of the morality behind harvesting ADAM from Little Sisters is all too apparent.

BioShock was fun to play for a while, and did its best to offer up a genuinely unique single-player experience. I wanted to call BioShock the most overrated game of 2007; the smug bastard inside of me thought that would be the only fitting tribute to this gaming spectacle. But I don’t think that’s very fair, because there is enough going on in this game to elicit the sorts of reactions where people actually have to explain themselves instead of allowing knee-jerk responses to its quality. BioShock approached the threshold of a memorable gaming experience for its story alone; if only it had taken a simpler approach to revealing its strongest attribute. What should have been a captivating adventure devolves into yet another shooter with only token responses to player actions, resulting in a game that is satisfied with only giving the impression that there is something more instead of actually following through on its promise.