Gears of War 3

Well, it's finally come to an end. The trilogy of buff, grunting guys shooting buff, grunting aliens who don't like buff, grunting and glowing monster/aliens is over. It's been quite a ride. Remember that time that...or that one time that...

The first thing I noticed about Gears of War 3 was that I remembered next to nothing about Gears 1 or 2. I remembered a few names and some character relations but that's about it. I couldn't remember anything about the Lambent or the Locust or a million tiny things that seemed really important in this game. I was so lost. Of course, I just recently noticed that there is a cinematic which sums up the events of the past games, which would have been helpful. Too bad for me, I guess.

The game starts out on a ship. You are Marcus Fenix, Bender-voiced space-badass and player character for the past two games. Dom is back as well, sporting a well-earned sadness beard and a strange plant fetish. Cole, Baird and the new and improved Carmine weave themselves in and out of the story along with Anya who is strangely strong and not just a disembodied voice, Sam who is a new female character and strangely Australian, Jace who is the new black guy with no other distinguishing characteristics who strangely lives through the whole game. The story revolves around Marcus trying to find his father and other stuff. Really, that's the best I can give you. I never felt connected to the characters, I never got a sense of place or geography. With the exception of a few somewhat tropical locales, I remember a lot of dirt and broken buildings. The game goes by in the blink of an eye and all your left with is the weird image of Marcus and Anya (SPOILERS) holding hands. Nothing has ever looked so silly as Marcus's T-Bone-sized hand clasping Anya's circus midget hand.

I'm not totally down on this game, though, I'm not a complete douche. The game does have a few cool ideas. The gas barges, giant living airships, were cool. Of course I have a soft spot for zeppelins so I may be biased. I liked the non-twist about the origin of the Lambent that I won't give away even though it's super obvious. There were a lot of little moments where there were sparks of genius. The biggest pro I can think of is that, to be superbly superficial, it's fun. It's just a big, dumb bag of fun. There's vague allusions to the energy crisis, but this game doesn't have anything to say other than never follow Ice-T in the event of an apocalypse. In fact, the game is at its worst when it tries to transcend the standard of fun set by the 80's action movie. There is a death I won't give away in this game that everyone knows is going to happen from the very beginning of the game. When it finally happened, there was about two seconds where I almost felt something (mostly because of the song) before I didn't care again. Katie was actually laughing, but she may also just be very sadistic. The game's writers are not good enough to come up with dialogue that can convey the emotions necessary for me to care about these people, so all I wanted to do was go back to mindlessly shooting bad things.

I just don't have that much to say, really. It's a well done action movie of a game that feels exactly like the other games in the series. There's no real meat to it, although there is a strange issue I'll talk about in a later post, but it's still fun. I didn't get to the multiplayer because, frankly, I don't care. Multiplayer in Gears games has been awful in the past and I don't want to be hurt again. It's been a fitting end to the franchise with fun game play and a tidy ending which should make sure there is never another game in the series, which I really respect. If you've played the other games in the series, play this one too. It's probably the best one, even though they're all essentially the same awkward machismo-driven shootfest. I look forward to seeing what Epic does next. It will probably make me feel manly.

Now I can go back to playing Skyrim!

Open-World Games

Open-World is a term used for a lot of games. It can be used to describe games as different as the Grand Theft Auto series and the Legend of Zelda series. An open-world, in the context of gaming, refers to a game space which is expansive and does not have a sequence of levels which the player must beat. Usually there are quests, but the player is rarely required to do them. If they were so inclined, the player could simply run from one end of the giant map to the other. Of course such interaction is possible to some extent in all video games, but open-world games seem to encourage this. Their main goal is to a create a large space to enjoy at the player's leisure. So what, then, is their point? Why would someone give up so much authorial control? How can the developer say anything if the player has all of the control?

I was playing Skyrim on the first or second night it was out. I was at a good friend's house (he has a blog of his own here) and we were having a manly night of pizza, soda and large-TV-video-game-playing time. Most of the night was spent either on a quest for a (mediocre) sword or just kind of wandering around. At one point, around three in the morning, I was very tired and, as I trudged over a snowy mountain pass, a great sky opened before me. The night was cloudless with an orange moon seemingly threatening to gobble up the sky. The most amazing thing, though, was the aurora borealis. Great streaks of light and color snaked through the inky black and I felt something like awe. This is a video game. This is a program made up of an untold number of lines of code which is projecting pictures onto a television screen. It was still unbelievably beautiful and made me really begin to wonder just what it was that this game was trying to accomplish. Why would a person put so much time into something so detailed? It was beautiful, but what purpose did it serve? Well, as I may have mentioned before, Skyrim isn't about combat or magic or smithing or any of the other myriad actions one can take within the game. Skyrim is about exploration and, from a development standpoint, creating a world. This is the most important aspect of an open-world game. The world is the reason for the game. It seems likely that Rockstar thought of creating a world which reflected a gritty crime drama when they made Grand Theft Auto 3 before they came up with any kind of story. The world is the most important thing. The game play, on the other hand, needs only to emphasize the freedom of the world itself.

What is it that you can do in Grand Theft Auto 4? Well, you can kill anyone you see in the city. You can hire a prostitute. You can steal vehicles. You can play darts and other bar games. You can play video games to create video game inception. There are plenty of other things, but the point is that you can do a lot. This is all that's required of these games because the player simply needs to be able to do what they want, when they want. In fact, one of my biggest problems with Grand Theft Auto 4 is that there's too much story. A Scorcese-esque crime story can't fit into a game this schizophrenic. The point is to emphasize the interactivity which is at the heart of games themselves. They allow the player to do whatever they want any time that they want, though for different effects. Grand Theft Auto's open-world scheme is to allow players to feel a sense of power, allowing them to feel as if they own whichever city in which the game takes place. Elder Scrolls games, especially Skyrim, emphasize exploration and a sense of wonder, encouraging players to search every nook and cranny for great loot and easter eggs. 

The popularity of open-world games has lead to some weird speculation. I've heard from a few people who have suggested that virtual reality is the next step. We will one day have actual entire worlds to explore and be able to do literally anything within them. I don't think this is true. It seems to me that there will be a point where a player has too much they can do. At some point, when you can do anything, it ceases to be a game and starts to be an exercise in tedium. Imagine a game that is just like Skyrim, only it's  almost two million square miles, like the Earth. In it, you can pick your skills and everything, just like an RPG, but you can do anything you want. You can shoot down airplanes, you can become President, you can marry a dog or whatever it is you want to do. You can manipulate the tiniest blades of grass and make yourself a bracelet if you wanted to. That game would be a chore to play if, for no other reason, it would be just like real life. Everything would be so spread out and disconnected that it would be hard to figure out everything you can do. Even if you set it in a fantastic realm, eventually there are going to be so many little tasks possible that the player is going to be bored out of their minds. This is extreme, of course, but what if a game was the actual size of the US? It would still be too large. Just like every other kind of game or even every other kind of media, open-world games are made possible by their limitations. If everything was truly 100% open, you would never find anything and you would be so caught up in tedium that you would quit. Instead, you have a large game world which allows you to do a lot of stuff, but doesn't bog you down in minutia (although smithing in Skyrim cuts it close.) This makes everything fun and rewarding. 

So open world games can use their large area to create a sense of power or of awe, inspire mayhem or intrepid exploration. Though they can never be entirely open at the risk of losing all focus, they still allow players to be lost in a world which has been lovingly built by skilled artists. As graphics improve, so will the quality of these deep, rewarding games. As long as the world is well thought out and the game play is satisfyingly unrestrained, this genre will continue to impress. 

Skyrim: The Basic Rundown

I don't know where to start is a statement that sums up both this game and this review. Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim is a ridiculously huge game that also happens to be exceedingly well done. It's entirely possible that I am too easily impressed, but this is one of the most fun, engaging and beautiful games I've ever played.

It's funny, because part of me wanted to hate it. Skyrim is the fifth in a string of successful first-person fantasy RPG's developed by Bethesda Studios and I agree with those that say we need more variety in video games. However when something is this finely crafted, who the hell cares if it's a little bit derivative? Yes there are Orcs and Elves and all of those other lovely Tolkien creatures, but there are also Mammoths which are herded by giants. There are dragon languages which result in awesome powers. There are seemingly and infinite amount of quests which I may never complete (especially if they are infinite. That's kind of how infinity works.) I've been unable to put the game down since I got it last Friday at midnight and it seems as if I've barely started.

In an attempt to tone down the fanboy in me, I do have to admit some problems with the game. There are glitches. Lots and lots of glitches, to be frank. Sometimes missions don't work or buttons don't work or mammoths just fall from the sky, which I believe is not supposed to happen. While this can be annoying, it can also be endlessly entertaining if you have friends in the room. A friend of mine fought a bear for twenty mintues or so because it kept using hit and run guerrilla tactics against him. Every time he tried to shoot it, it would run away only to return a second later from his side, claws slashing. Many posts have already been made on Reddit about the seeming indestructibility of the game's horses. Another small problem is that the voice acting isn't always the best. Really, though, that's it. I'm not very far into the game, to be sure, but those are the only real problems so far.

In terms of the good stuff, the short answer could be just about everything. As with the other Elder Scrolls games, Skyrim emphasizes exploration over combat. Of course, combat is a major part of the game, but walking will take up a much larger portion of the game. Part of the reason I love this game is my adoration for the beauty of cold climate. Every inch of this world has been lovingly rendered. I get a thrill whenever I wander through a snowstorm or a frosty forest. It's in my blood, I suppose. The combat is rewarding, the quests are entertaining and there simply isn't a moment wasted in this game.

I haven't mentioned the story because I'm really just around the beginning. I've killed my first dragon, but I immediately began wandering the snowy wastes after that. I know that the main conflict in the game is a civil war between the Stormcloaks, a Nord nationalist group, and the Empire. There is also a question about why dragons are coming back when they were all killed off one thousand years ago. However, there are also around five guilds to join, each with their own intense quest chain. There is a lot to keep a person going.

This has been a really short review because I really don't know what to say. Skyrim is a fantastic game. It's huge, and will take a long time to get anywhere near completion, so be ready to lose yourself in a large, detailed world if you buy this game. I plan on playing this for a while, so look for more articles on this game for the next...oh let's say month or two. I haven't even scratched the surface.

Rage

Rage is a game that has been in production for a few years now. It's been eagerly anticipated by Id fans and now it has finally been released. However, the game falls well short of greatness from a myriad of problems. There are some great aspects to the game that could have made it enthralling, but the game is bogged down by poor decisions.

From the very beginning of the game, the cliches are prevalent. Your character (no name given) awakens in a stasis chamber called an Ark. You see, there was this big asteroid that came down from the sky and destroyed all of civilization, with the exception of a few towns, raider groups that seem to have an infinite amount of members and hordes of mutants. For an asteroid that destroyed everything, it left a lot of people alive. Anyway, the Ark program was set in place to make sure that some people, such as the player character, survived. All of this is very similar to the vaults in Fallout, but much less compelling because everyone was just asleep. You don't have the interesting things that went on while everyone was cooped up in a little vault. The style of the game is also very similar to Borderlands from the faux-Western aesthetic to basic missions to the driving even.

The rest of the story isn't much better. In fact, for the first disc or so (there are three for the Xbox360) there doesn't seem to be a story at all. The player character is simply set out by forgettable characters to do...things. Usually it involves killing something. Eventually a conflict is set up between the Authority, which represents authority, and The Resistance, which is the...resistance to that authority. The battle is so archetypal that the two sides of the battle actually sound like terms someone would use to define those archetypes. I would go into more detail, but there really isn't any. Through some weird providence, Rage shares the same core complaint I had with The Saboteur in that they cannot make me care. There is just nothing to the story or the world that invested me in this game.

That's not to say that Rage was necessarily as boring as last week's game. Rage actually has moderately fun game play. The shooting feels very old-school-shooter, which is appropriate since this was made by Id (developers of Doom, Wolfenstein and Quake.) The guns feel powerful and can hold a seemingly endless amount of bullets. However, the foes are also quite powerful. In fact, the enemy AI in this game is some of the best I've seen. They actively seek cover, and even while bum-rushing you like a PCP freak they have the presence of mind to dodge the player's gunfire. This is what kept me playing the game; the sheer unpredictability of the enemies. It's really hard to get a bead on them and, since they can take more bullets than your average Call of Duty enemy, shootouts become frantic trigger-mashing parties as you scream obscenities at the screen. Also, the killing itself is very satisfying, as morbid and disturbing as that sounds. The animations for the enemy deaths are amazingly varied; its very rare that you see the same animation twice. There are also juggernaut-type enemies that take so many bullets that you feel a real sense of accomplishment when you take one down. However, the power and interest of these features becomes diluted after playing the fifteenth mission in which the player has to go into a strangely circular base, kill everyone and fetch item x. There is also a lot of driving, which is adequate but not particularly interesting, and races which were so easy that a racing-hater such as myself finished with ease. There's also a crafting system, but again, it's lackluster and usually amounts to creating some kind of ammo that you'll never use. Add in a save system that forces you to save every five seconds lest you be tossed back across the wasteland to three missions before you died and you've got a game that just barely avoids being a total mess.

Despite my cynicism, I cannot overstate how good this game looks. Id is, if nothing else, a company that knows its tech. Since they've been working on it for four or five years, it makes sense that the game would be gorgeous. As a tech demo, the game is flawless and I expect great things from the Tech 5 engine.

It seems like, more than anything, this game is confused. It doesn't know if it wants to be an RPG, with it's somewhat open world and crafting system, or a standard FPS. It also straddles the line between what shooters were and what they are doing now. Yes, you have big guns with lots of ammo, but you also have regenerating health thanks to nanobots in the player character's bloodstream (kudos to Id for actually explaining the regenerating health device for once) and cover is occasionally necessary. At the same time, cover can be hard to find without a prone position. It's a lot of broken ideas with not enough interesting missions or anything resembling a story to cover it up. The reason World of Warcraft players perform menial tasks over and over is because they are invested in the story to some extent and, much more importantly, the development of their character. When your character doesn't have a name and doesn't change more than a little, there had better be some ridiculously exciting things to do.

In the first twenty minutes or so of Rage, I thought it was a great game. After that, fatigue started to set in. There are some cool ideas here, and I applaud the old-school game play and graphics, but the poor save system, lack of missions and overall lack of interesting content kills this game. Id has a style that has some merit, but they definitely need to refine it if they want to stay relevant.

Edit: I forgot to mention that the female characters in this game are surprisingly attractive for not being real. Do with that what you will.

The Saboteur

Its seems appropriate that I'm reviewing The Saboteur on the day that Rockstar released their first trailer for Grand Theft Auto 5. The Saboteur shares many traits with that most famous and oh-glorious murder-simulation series. It's open-world, features car-jacking and third-person action and has car physics that make you want to pull your hair out. I'm getting ahead of myself.

The Saboteur, the last game from developer Pandemic, is a game set at the beginning of the occupation of France during WWII. The player character is an Irish bloke named Sean Devlin, a whiskey-drinking stereotype who is some what, kind of, not really based on an actual figure in the French resistance. He is a race car driver (one of the things that is actually true about the real man, I was surprised to learn) who's friend is murdered in a case of mistaken identity at a German motor race. Then Sean swears revenge and Germans start blowing up. The story is so standard and poorly executed in terms of pacing (it's slow) and voice acting (it's bad) that I stopped playing those missions altogether and started doing one thing the game executes extremely well; sabotage.

I love blowing up Nazi things. It is strangely satisfying to plant dynamite on a truck or a sniper's nest or even just a loudspeaker and watching it blow up. All you have to do is press a button, then hold a button while not being seen and you can blow up almost anything that the Nazi war machine is using. Sure, you get money for it that you can buy new weapons and ammo with from black market dealers, but who cares? While the WWII shooter genre was ridiculously over-saturated last decade, I do miss the simple joy of eliminating Nazis. They're like zombies; you feel little to no remorse for killing them. Of course the rank and file German soldier wasn't a super villain in real life so much as a commoner that had been caught up in a conflict they didn't fully understand, but not the ones in this game. No, they're ALL evil. And if you still feel a twinge of regret, there are generals that the player can pick off. They have to be evil. They're Nazi commanders; kind of like how Cobra henchmen may not be evil as they are just following orders, but Cobra Commander sure is as he is whose orders they are following. To make a long story short, killing Nazis is fun, blowing up the things Nazis is more fun and The Saboteur handles both of these aspects very well. I also like the feel and the setting of the game. The music is good and the idea of the color is cool. In the game, everything is in Sin City-style black and white until the player frees them from Nazi control. Then the color comes back into that section. It's a very cool visualization of the idea that the player is bringing hope to the French people and gives a real sense of progress. Then again, the black and white makes seeing difficult sometimes. There was more than one time that I got lost because everything looks the same. 

Beyond the cool use of color and reckless destruction, however, the game is seriously lacking. The animations and controls are very clunky. Sean often engages in Assassin's Creed style climbing (and if anyone doesn't like that comparison, one of the cars in the game is called Altair, so Pandemic knew what they were doing,) but he doesn't enjoy that series' smooth mechanics. The player has to mash the jump button over and over again as he jumps clumsily around like a drunk monkey. He also has a habit of getting stuck on ledges where he thinks he can't climb higher, even though he clearly can , and forces the player to move him slightly to the side before he will climb up. There are the aforementioned driving mechanics that makes it feel as if the player is continually driving through deep mud. Perhaps this was on purpose, as cars in the 40's probably didn't have the best handling. This is also true of the climbing. Maybe Sean is intentionally bad at climbing, because why would a random Irish guy be a free-climbing master? If this is the case, then why is it in the game? Both of these things are maddening. 

The thing that really kills this game, though, is that it's boring. The missions are all the same repetitive missions we've seen in every Grand Theft Auto game. The story is lackluster with forgettable characters. All of the controlling mechanics are sluggish. It just isn't interesting. To give an idea of how boring this game was, there is a sequence which takes place on a zeppelin that is simultaneously in the air and on fire and I was bored. I love zeppelins, Led and otherwise, and yet I could not wait to get out of the burning blimp simply so I could go around blowing up some more fuel depots. If that or boring GTA clones is your thing, then go out and buy this game right now. I usually try to talk about some of the meaning in the game and other such academic, smart Alec-y things, but this game is just too mediocre for consideration. Sometimes, games are just games and that's all.