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GTA Chinatown Wars – “Diminished”

I was quite surprised with the reception “Chinatown Wars”, the portable “GTA”, got in the video game media. I guess I’d never expect such acceptance regarding a game that leaves out so much of that which reviewers tend to demand in home console games. “Chinatown Wars” has a very simple and neat design, harking back to the simpler days of the mid 90’s, and while incredibly polished and detailed – something we know Rockstar has the money and quality standards to back – we’re basically talking about a re-invention of the original 1997 title. The old bird’s eye point of view makes a comeback, complex control schemes for elaborate shooting sequences are left in the drawer and the cartoonish aesthetic and tone are revived with social issues once more delegated to not-so-subtle comedy gags. Sure, there’s the issue of increased side-quest variety, the linearized storyline and the QTE-style mini-games, but apart from those minor details,  this is once more that pure sandbox experience where you can get your kicks out of blowing stuff up. And in that regard, this portable iteration is surely more effective and to the point than its older siblings.

Lamentably, entertaining as it may be, “Chinatown Wars” loses the crucial aspect which made “GTA III” and its followers a different brand of game – the subjective perspective. “GTA III” isn’t heralded as masterpiece because of its increased scale or side-quests breadth. “GTA III” is a landmark in video games because of its ability to make you feel a part of that world, to immerse you in a virtual reality that is tangible to your senses. As you explore liberty city’s streets, you’re inhabiting that space, experiencing a simulated stroll through that avenue, driving your car, watching people pass by, hearing their banter muffled by the sound of passing vehicles, listening in on the radio, watching as day and night change, rain and fog give their way to the sun’s light… you’re living in that reality, a reality which with you can identify, a gorgeous and lively 3D painting that your senses immediately relate to real-life experiences. And you just can’t pull that effect, by looking downward on the action as if you were some bird of prey, flying guardian angel or police chopper. Your mind simply doesn’t connect, no matter how well the game renders its city and environments. You’re just not inside that place, and that is the best sensation you can get out of a “GTA” game, so if it isn’t in there, it just seems as pointless and diminished as any other well designed ludic game.

score: 1/5

2010
02/06
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CATEGORY
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Assassin’s Creed II – “Authorship by Proxy”

Has it really come to this? I remember a time when designers, whether good or bad, creative or conformed, loved or despised, were authors. A time when authorship lived and died by their creators’ passions and views on what a video game should be like, and regarding a select few, their values and ideas on life.  Sadly, “Assassin’s Creed II”, in more ways than one, reminds us that in the video game medium and business, there is no such thing as an author. There is an audience and its proxy and a whole bunch of middle men. Naturally, the job of the Proxy is to serve as conceptual avatar to the audience’s demands, whichever they may be. If the audience finds the game not to be as fun, violent, lengthy or varied as they want, it is the Proxy’s job to channel those expectations into a neatly fitted piece of game design worthy of their money. It makes me wonder if it still makes sense for game designers to take courses on the subject matter… it’d be easier to just let the marketing blokes take them instead, since it is obvious they are currently in charge of video games’ authorship. I know, I know, disheartening, is it not?

Take “Assassin’s Creed”. A game Patrice Désilets and Jade Raymond claimed, with a little help from a well crafted marketing campaign, to be the first ‘true’ next-gen game. A game so revolutionary, it would change the medium’s landscape. Despite its new take on the genre, some black sheep (myself included) disagreed on the game’s status as groundbreaking masterpiece, though the game still sold millions. “Assassin’s Creed” had some glaring flaws: quests were composed of generic tasks, game design was limited and ill-fit with the subject matter (an assassin that kills by day, and spends most of its time fencing with soldiers, had anyone heard of stealth?), story was under-developed, and to nail the coffin, the game repeated itself far too many times, with the game’s nine levels being exactly the same, with merely different wallpaper cities in the back. Flash forward two years down the line, and the accolades are plentiful – “Assassin’s Creed II” is a reinvigorated sequel, its flaws completely corrected, its charm fully blossomed. What changed? Actually, nothing did, except that the audience’s desires having been answered.

Every single critical voice was heard. The People demanded more quest variety – the Proxy gave it. The People demanded “Prince of Persia”-like linear platforming sequences – the Proxy offered them. The People demanded a meaty storyline – the Proxy obliged. The People wanted to swim – the Proxy cast the game in Venice and gave the People swimming abilities. It’s almost pathetic how Ubisoft simply bowed down and let every suggestion become an integral part of the game’s core. Where was Désilets, the quote on quote, “creative director”, during this process? Instead of analyzing his game’s faults, something which requires a deep understanding of game design and its intricacies, he appears to have been occupied checking boxes in complaint lists from a (sadly) uneducated mob. Think about it, does it really matter that you can now explore five generic cities instead of three, undertake a dozen bland side-quest types for obtaining bland generic collectibles instead of just half a dozen, and go through a story with twice the archetypal characters, triple the pseudo-historical context and an exponentially raised number of events that still do not make the plot move one tiny bit before the grand final twist? Oh, but you can now customize your character, with some vague, inventory-oriented character progression system, wonderful! Did I mention, there’s also some of the best (read worst) cut-scene directing and animation in a top-tier game in years? These now revised minutiae were never the problem, but a symptom of “Assassin’s Creed” malady. Of course, the People careth not about such negative ramblings, and looked in awe at all the new blessings the Proxy had giveth them, and all was made well.

I’m not saying that everything is ill about the sequel. The new-age meets catastrophe movie sci-fi plot and Italian setting certainly make it far more compelling to explore “Assassin’s” world, and some of the cities’ real-life monuments are rendered with an architectural beauty worthy of gawking in amazement. Moreover, the original’s parkour platforming and elegant combat system haven’t aged one bit and are still  some of the most enticing interactive mechanics in the action-adventure genre. But make no mistake, “Assassin’s Creed II” few artistic merits can never hide that the sequel still is a hollow, generic, procedurally generated, author-less piece of game design. Alas, the People rejoiceth, for the Proxy has listened.

score: 2/5

2010
02/04
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CATEGORY
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Machinarium – “I think, Sebastian, therefore I am.”

Some games I haven’t the courage to approach with a review. Partially it’s because I don’t think I have the right knowledge or literary technique to express my views or to dissect them properly, but also because I have this unconscious fear of objectifying them in such a way that will make them seem less… special. Like a beautiful, fragile Ming vase, I fear touching them will break it to pieces. This is such a game.

“Machinarium” is, to put it simply, the story of a boy who must free his loved one from captivity. Bullied by nasty ruffians, the young couple was split: he was left to die in a garbage dump and she was imprisoned in a towering dungeon. You follow their journey to escape a corrupt city, as the little boy goes from rebuilding his own body in a scrapyard, to flying away in the horizon towards freedom. Perhaps I forgot to mention we’re talking robots here? Well, as the name so implies, “Machinarium” presents a dystopia whose inhabitants are machines made out of metal foil and rusty screws. But these machines are living creatures in every sense of the word, expressive little buggers whose eyes and bodies move as if they were flesh and blood… their animations (Václav Blín and Jaromír Plachý) are an exquisite exercise in the elegant conveying of intelligence, conscience and, more importantly, emotion. Every character has its distinct personality, simultaneously familiar and alien, but always endearing and lovable. It’s as if someone had given you a magic mirror where you could see this enigmatic reflection of our own children tales, just with robots in the place of humans. The setting itself retains characters’ beauty and strangeness, with each of the game’s backgrounds (by Adolf Lachman) looking as if it were a painting drawn by those same bizarre creatures.  The atmosphere borders the ethereal, thanks to a moody color palette and the superb ambient score by Thomas Dvorak.  And though “Machinarium” is unequivocally a land born out of the eccentric mind of Jakub Dvorský, this world isn’t as idiosyncratic as “Samorost’s”, marking a departure from that surreal, somewhat comical ambiance, to an almost dreamlike fusion of children animation’s naiveté with classical science fiction aesthetic.

As expected in video game land, the little boy’s ICO-esque quest can only be conquered through the solving of several puzzle-like contraptions. But unlike the nigh non-diegetic barriers that adventure games so oft use to imply interactivity and challenge, each puzzle in “Machinarium” is an intricate part of its world. In other words, puzzles are there for a reason other than you solving them. This subtle twist makes the game’s challenges mirror the fiction’s semantics – construing the odd gadgets thus becomes part of the act of understanding “Machinarium’s” world: its past history, its characters and society. This is the defining element that elevates Dvorský from mere story-teller to video game author – he expresses his ideas with rules and interactions, and not just images and sound. His story, so primitive and universal, beautiful and touching, is a story told through the complex language of video games… it is a story worth playing with.

score: 5/5

2010
01/25
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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 – “Can you spot the differences?”

Back when I did my “World at War” review I mentioned how the “Call of Duty” teams, despite taking small strides in terms of capturing the essence of a powerful, dramatic scenario like war, were still clinging to an essentially game-y experience, laden with obnoxious elements, the most displeasing of all being the HUD. Well, someone at funny or die must have read my mind, because they edited a video of what would it be like to “play” – “Call of Duty” style – the Normandy scene from Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan”. It’s not only a funny video clip, as it ends up posing the same questions I (and others) have been making. Think about it, sooner than you think, we’ll have quasi-realistic graphics in video games, and despite the emotional, aesthetic potential of these superbly rendered images, games remain ever focused on crude notions of “fun”, rather than tapping the possibilities that come with that potential expressiveness. The “Call of Duty” brand is an excellent example of this. Despite their huge success, their creators are still delivering, detailed graphics aside, the exact same game as they were back in “Allied Assault”. And whilst their games are increasingly visceral and continue to establish powerful ambiances with their over-glorified engines and whatnot, all those elements remain effectively meaningless in terms of the interactive experience. It’s still a game about shooting lifeless dummies as well as you can. It’s still the game about becoming a macho warrior. It’s still a game about feeling empowered and invincible. And it’s still a game about saving the world from the big bad men. Admit it, we’re still playing “Wolfenstein 3D”. There is still no point to it, no emotional sub-text or rhetoric involved in the games’ discourse.

Which is why all the controversy surrounding the “Modern Warfare 2’s” infamous “No Russian” level just seems absolutely ridiculous to me. It’s crude, silly and completely out of context in the game.  I guarantee you that any emotion you might feel during that sequence will vanish after five seconds of you understanding what’s going on. Under the guise of forcing you to face the horrors of terrorists, the game developers  simply deliver the exact same game-y experience, but for one difference, your opponents have no weapons, and bleed more than your typical grunt. They shout screams of horror, but we are talking of the same mass of generic, cardboard beings which you happily kill during normal levels.  When was the last time you felt disgusted from killing a cardboard image? Were those you kill real characters, with a story, a livelihood, an expressive behavior… creatures that had some sort of emotional involvement with us players, and maybe the scene would go beyond mere shock value. Video games have done it before, even in the first person shooter genre. To add to the detriment of the scene, those strange ethereal stars and cross-hairs are still flying above them, and it’s still a level in which you have to kill to “win”. The whole matter is as controversial as funny or die’s video. It doesn’t matter at all how realistic the characters look, because they’re still over-glorified targets in a shooting range, as Eurogamer so elegantly put. There can be no drama in killing virtual plastic dolls, let alone when you’re supposed to be some super warrior out to save the world, who just happens to have shot those same models thousands of times before, only with different clothing and less screaming. Killing them is as controversial as watching “Rambo” hack away the innards of some poor schmuck that just happens not to have an AK-47 lying around. It isn’t dramatic. The schmuck is just a schmuck – an impersonal abstraction without any lifelike character, just like any other of the thousands of terrorists in line for a bullet in the brain.

This isn’t the same as saying that “Modern Warfare 2” is just another piece of trash the industry spewed at us. Infinity Ward may take itself too seriously for their own good, they may not know how to write or tell a story that goes beyond the most naive patriotic bull or right-wing of conspiracies and they may not grasp the most basic aspects on how to create a character with some mildly nuanced form of emotion, but… but they do know how to make things blow up. Even Naughty Dog pales in comparison. Which is why “Modern Warfare 2”, aside from the lackluster initial levels, is a trip worth taking, if only for the pure excitement it can deliver. Its authors have gone to great lengths to replicate some of the most enjoyable experiences from many other pop references, from “Black Hawk Down” and “James Bond” to “Resident Evil 5” and “Metal Gear Solid“. Sure, it’s dumb, rude and stupid, but it’s also a superbly well paced, stylish and epic spectacle. Alas, when the game does end, nothing will remain except for the notion that you just experienced the most guilty of pleasures, the kind that leaves aught behind except for a kindling sparkle of warm adrenaline. We’ve seen this before, it was great then, it is great now, but honestly, this is not what we need right now. We need more, and this just ain’t it.

score: 2/5

2009
11/29
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Uncharted 2 – “Hail the King of Thieves”

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“Uncharted 2’s” introductory moments are an absolute marvel. Most importantly, they represent a clear break from traditional game design logic, showing off exciting new possibilities in terms what a video game can (should?) be. Interested? Read on. The game starts, as you may already know, with Drake, half-bleeding to death inside a cliff-hanging train (the game opens with a cliff hanger, one can only enjoy the irony). Drake soon realizes, verbalizing it in his signature “oh God…”,  that the train isn’t about to hold on much longer, and will soon plunge deep into the gorge. Debris suddenly fall over, plummeting Drake nearer to the precipice, as he desperately clings to a rusty bent hand-rail that stands centimeters away from nothingness. Up to this point it’s cut-scene territory, extraordinarily directed as in the previous game, and perhaps even more so. That warm sense of witful charm is reprised, once again heralding back to the terrain of summer blockbuster movies, of Spielberg and Lucas fame. But what was missing in the first “Uncharted”, soon becomes reality in the second: the embodiment of that same spirit during actual game-play sequences.

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As Drake dwindles in the rail, the game kicks in, and you’re in charge. Climbing the train is simple and intuitive for anyone who has ever played a Tomb Raider-esque action-adventure game. But, despite it being absurdly simple to avoid Drake’s death while climbing, it retains a sense of tension and dramatic peril that video-games seldom impose without resorting to actual game-over screens. The trick Naughty Dog employed is devilishly clever: they enunciate danger through pre-scripted events but… it isn’t really there. For instance, the moment Drake nears the end of the hand-rail he’s clinging to, it bends unexpectedly. As you climb, objects keep falling down… a bit too near Drake for his own sake. Later, the second Drake jumps away from another rail, it suddenly breaks and falls. This sequence is simply riddled with these small nerve-cringing incidents that give you the illusion of danger [as you can see for yourself here], without it ever truly existing, as you can’t really die because of them. The whole level, in fact, is nearly impossible to fail, shifting “Uncharted 2” away from a pure game, and into somewhat of an interactive, yet highly cinematic experience. The game becomes much more tense because of this, as you never have to repeat the sequence, thus maintaining its initial emotional impact intact. It represents as pure a translation as there has been of the concept of a film-like experience into video game terms; it’s all a matter of deception and misguidance, and the powerless witnessing of danger, as opposed to its confrontation, as is common for games. Something tells me that Spielberg would approve.

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From then on, the game continues this strategy to impose tension, throwing unexpected events at the player in any given situation. Trains explode, buildings crumble, bridges fall – the sense of playing a roller-coaster film is pervasive. This engagement improves significantly because of all the work and thought that was noticeably invested in understanding and replicating the cinematic language – from the outstanding set design of each exotic location, to the delicious voice and facial animation, notwithstanding the superlative use of camera directing (especially in-game). Cut-scene and game mesh in such natural and emotional ways, it almost begs the question of why didn’t anyone do this before. Nevertheless, not all is rendered with the manipulating edge of the first few moments of the game. As “Uncharted 2” moves on, it becomes an actual game, with the expected challenges and trial and error sequences. For the most part, it remains an expertly crafted work, exhilarating as few can be, despite the continuous interruption of death scenarios. There’s also the overuse of the by now blasé “Gears of War” combat, that insists on outstaying its presence, but no amount of slow crawling, tedious and repetitive cover combat can impair “Uncharted’s” sense of style and amusement, let alone its humor, both in and outside cut-scenes. It’s just a shame that such “military” influences are not toned down, as the action in “Tomb Raider”, as a way to punctuate the scale, instead of dominating every beat.

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“Uncharted 2” could have easily been one of the most important mainstream games in recent history, had Amy Hennig and the team at Naughty Dog had the courage to forfeit genre conventions and the ridiculous tick boxes which modern action games are governed and reviewed by, like multiplayer and co-op modes. Had that wasted energy been invested in further exploration of the subtle new grounds of action adventure experience which “Uncharted 2” skims by, and it might have been a shining new example of a new genre. As is, it’s still the best of its kind – as unoriginal in its game-play as others before it, though designed with a finesse, care to detail and artistry that its competitors are sorely lacking.

score: 4/5

2009
11/03
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
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