Rock Band 3 and Rhythm Games

Music and rhythm games have been around for a long time. Dance Dance Revolution, Rez, Space Channel 5, and even the mini-game in Ocarina of Time are all prime examples. However, for a very long time they were a niche genre. Unless they were part of a larger game, music games didn't sell particularly well and most didn't consider them to be a part of the enormous pantheon of classic games. Then there was Harmonix.

Harmonix is a developer that deals almost exclusively in music and rhythm games. In the early 2000's, they released Frequency and Amplitude. In the game, the player took control of a weird, futuristic DJ. Using a track-and-button system not unlike their later Guitar Hero and Rockband games, the player would pound out notes using a regular controller rather than an instrument peripheral. The player also controlled every track of the song, rather than one instrument. The games garnered plenty of critical respect and a loyal cult following. A few years later, in 2005, they released the first Guitar Hero game through Activision for the Playstation 2. Obviously, this game came with the guitar peripheral developed by Red Octane. It was, again, a big success critically, but not hugely popular with gamers at first. However, it started to gain traction and by the time Guitar Hero 2 was released the following year, it was huge. Harmonix then decided that they wanted to expand the instrumentation to drums and vocals, as well as the guitars already in place. Activision laughed in their faces, so they left to make the Rockband series.

For a while, in the late 2000's, the Rockband and Guitar Hero series were the best selling games on the market, though they were popular for slightly different reasons. Guitar Hero was slightly more competitive with it's face-off mode pitting two guitarists against one another, while Rockband was symbiotic with everyone coming together to finish a song as a band. Their business models were very different, with Guitar Hero pumping out full-blown and full-priced games multiple times a year and Rockband focusing on downloadable content. After a few years, the market became saturated to the point that no one could figure out any reason to buy a new game. With a full band of plastic instruments cluttering their apartments, people had had enough. It was in this market with this mindset that Harmonix released Rockband 3. 


Rockband 3, to its credit, tried to revolutionize the genre. Rather than release a $60 game that could have been sold as DLC and made much more money, Harmonix decided that they were going to actually teach players to play the instruments they'd been pretending to play for the past few years. Pro mode was going to be their crowning achievement and the the ending to an inevitable progression. And there was no way in hell it was going to work.

The drums made sense. They'd released cymbal expansions a few years ago that a person could put on their kit for little more than aesthetic value, so with a quick update, the player could play the drums when the game said drums and cymbals when a new round symbol came flying down the track. The keyboard (a new peripheral) was also fairly easy since the piece of equipment was new and was cheap enough to include in a bundle with the game without being totally inconceivable to buy. Nothing was needed to make the vocals pro, though they did throw in three-part harmonies that no one ever used. The only thing left was the guitar. There were two guitars; a plastic one and a real one. No one wanted the plastic one, because it was stupid. It was a replica of a Fender Mustang that had a button where each fret should have been. It also had less fret than a guitar, so the whole goal of teaching the gamer how to play the guitar was lost. the only option was the real Squire that Fender had made specially for the game. It was cool, though it was over $300 before you bought the adapter necessary to interface with the game. No one was willing to buy a substandard guitar that they could use to play a video game and the whole experiment flopped.

Nowadays, Rockband still quietly sells tons of DLC to people who still enjoy banging away on those plastic instruments (myself included.) The Guitar Hero franchise, which was taken over by Tony Hawk developers Neversoft for some reason, is apparently dead. There are many reasons for this, most notably over-saturation (There were twelve different games released in five years, not counting mobile and portable games,) and a weird decision to add vague story lines and gimmicks to the games. While rhythm games focused on dancing are still seemingly popular (including Harmonix's Dance Central series,) the heyday of plastic instruments seems to be over. The Rockband developers have wisely moved to building their music library and releasing the tracks through digital distribution rather than releasing new games every few weeks.

It had been a long time since I'd played Rockband when I picked it up this week and, to my surprise, it's still really fun. My fingers don't remember the brightly-colored frets of my old, white Explorer controller as well as I'd hoped, but I fudged my way through my Jimi Hendrix DLC and old enemies like "Green Grass and High Tides." There's nothing really to say about Rockband other than it's a great game to play drunk and rowdy with a group of dorky friends. I once saw a man get through "Almost Easy" while he was on acid and I had to wonder if he was the reincarnation of John Bonham. You don't get that same experience out of Halo or sports games. This is less of a review and more of a message that you should try these games again. You may have forgotten how much fun they can be.

Half Life 2

Recently there was a push by people on Steam, developer Valve's digital distribution service, to force Gabe Newell and the other folks at Valve to say literally anything about their most anticipated game; Half Life 3. Since releasing the Orange Box set in 2007, no one has said anything about a Half Life: Episode 3 or the more likely, full-length follow-up to the genre-defining series. In an attempt to persuade Valve, some Steam users played Half Life 2 in an attempt to rocket the game up the play-charts and send a message that Gordon Freeman had not been forgotten. The game only got to number eleven on the chart over the weekend and Valve has kept mum on the subject of a sequel. This got me thinking about the game again, however. Half Life 2 was my first favorite game, and it is an extremely important one to many people. The entire series has shown that first-person shooters, a genre notorious for attracting meat heads of the highest caliber, can be art. Just thinking about it makes me feel fuzzy inside.

It's impossible to talk about the merits of Half Life 2 without first discussing the merits of its predecessor, Half Life. Half Life was released in 1998, spewed from the churning cauldron that was the modding community. It was built with a heavily modded version of the Quake engine. The game is notable for many reasons, including AI that was extremely advanced for the time and its position at a weird crossroads between shooter and platformer. However, most would say that its most important contribution to the world of video games was its narrative. The story itself wasn't deep, although a quick Wikipedia search will reveal a deep world outside of the game-space. The player character was a theoretical physicist by the name of Gordon Freeman. He looked a little like Ed Norton with a goatee, glasses and a super advanced Hazard suit that worked as a suit of armor that shielded him from environmental hazards as well as attacks. In the beginning of  the game, an experiment Gordon is involved in results in a catastrophic event known as a resonance cascade. The resonance cascade rips open a hole in space-time and sends forth a variety of monsters from another dimension known as Xen. The rest of the game is simply Gordon trying to escape. Much happens, of course, but that is the basic structure.

The dreaded zombie from Half Life 

What was remarkable about the game was the lack of cutting. There were no cut-scenes or cinematics in the game. The only reason that the player knew what Gordon Freeman looked like was from the art on the box. This continuous game play was a huge step forward. It made the player feel closer to Gordon. Freeman never speaks throughout the game, either, allowing the player to project their own thoughts onto him. One of the most riveting scenes in the game is one which normally would have been glossed over in cut-scene. In the introduction scene of the game, the player stands in a high-tech tram. This tram lowers into the Black Mesa Research Facility at the start and takes the player on a tour. there are giant machines and bubbling vats of neon-green ooze. There are giant metal blast doors that take a few seconds to open, building the tension and player's curiosity. At one point you see a man in a business suit; the great enigma of the series, the G-Man. Eventually, the player arrives at their destination, and the game begins. That scene illustrates perfectly the pacing and narrative control that Valve used in this game. The concept is very simple (aliens come from another dimension and you have to escape,) but with the build in tension and the multitude of problems Gordon must overcome, the game starts to feel epic and because of the lack of cut-scenes the player is always a part of the action.

After Half Life, fans were rabid for a sequel. While Gearbox developed some competent expansion packs, everyone wanted Gordon back. It didn't happen until 2004 for a variety of reasons including, but not limited to, the development of the Steam distribution service, development of the Source engine, and a German hacker stealing their source code. When the game was finally released in 2004, it was a revelation. 

Welcome to City 17

The game looked beautiful, and I think it still does. Gordon finds himself in City 17 after something that happened at the end of the first Half Life that I don't want to ruin for anyone who hasn't played it. City 17 is one of many urban centers controlled by the Combine, an alien race that has enslaved the human race. As with the first game, there is an introductory scene in which there is no real action where the world is revealed to the player. Everything is very 1984, with the smiling face of this universe's big Brother, Dr. Breen, slathering propaganda onto the newly arrived visitors. There are hints of atrocities and oppression all around. Nothing is over-the-top and very little is actually said. It's very obvious through little actions and snippets of dialogue that everything is very wrong. From there, the action picks up considerably, with portals and teleportation, vehicle sequences and intense gun-fighting. The story is even more engrossing than its predecessor, with characters who are actually likable (something that doesn't happen often in video games.) The world feels more realized than in the first game and everything shines. 

My favorite part of the game is later on, when you find a car. As you're driving along a coastal road, you are constantly attacked by Combine forces. Sometimes this means you have to stop and snipe them with a crossbow, sometimes it means surviving an assault that feels eerily lifelike. If you aren't paying attention, they can sneak up on you and get you with that shotgun. All the while, the most beautiful scenery every put into a game is on display. It feels like the Pacific Northwest, actually. I felt like the bridge could have been found in Astoria. Large pine trees are everywhere and you can feel the mist on your neck. It's a glorious sequence. There is also the famous Ravenholm sequence featured in the demo of the game. It's essentially Valve's take on a zombie film (at least before Left 4 Dead) and it needs to be seen by everyone.

The physics, appropriately considering Gordon's profession, were also a major step forward. For one of the first, if not the first, time in gaming history, there were actually puzzles based around the physics of the game. I remember the first time I figured out that putting bricks onto one side of fulcrum weighed the contraption down enough that I could run up the side like a ramp and jump onto a ledge. It was exhilarating.   Then there was, of course, the Gravity Gun. I like to call it the Zero-Point Energy Field Manipulator, but that might be because I'm a giant dork. The idea of a device that can pull or push random objects in game space was genius. It was a revolutionary idea that is still being ripped off today. There is little more terrifying in the world of games than hearing the pitiful moans of a zombie, and little more satisfying than launching a saw blade at the abomination and slicing it at the midsection. 

Speaking of sound, there has never been better than the sound in Half Life 2. There is a crispness to it like it was recorded in an autumn morning. Everything is so clear and concise; the crack of the crowbar, the snap of the pistol, the boom of the shotgun. That piercing screech and hoot of the fast zombies would make Bruce Lee soil himself while the headcrabs had an almost adorable chirp until they latched onto your face. The aural qualities of the game were immediate and sharp, only adding to the immediacy and the beauty of the game. 

The game deals with issues that all good games deal with; namely, control. Control is an inherently big issue in the world of games because control is the very foundation of games. Without control, without gameplay, a game is just a very awkward animated film. Control is everything. In Half Life 2, you have the G-Man silently observing you, and you get the feeling that he is somehow responsible for all of this. There are the Vortagaunts, aliens who were former slaves with no free will. In the previous game, you were forced to kill in the first game because of their bondage to a massive alien by the name of Nihalenth. Now, they help you and worship you for freeing them from their shackles. They sometimes speak of seeing a million eyes through Gordon's, a possible allusion to the players of the game. Breen is controlled by the Combine, but the Combine appears to be controlled by some unseen force, as Gordon is. Everything that happens comes back to one decision made at the end of the last game, and who controls whom. 

I cannot speak highly enough of this game. It is damn near perfect with beautiful visuals, incredible sound design, fun game play and the most enthralling storyline of any game I've ever played. Most great games have some of these qualities. I don't know if I've played another game that has all of them (maybe Portal, but it's still Valve and they're in the same universe so doesn't matter.) If you haven't played these games, play them.

And I would do horrible sex acts to Gabe Newell if he'd release Half Life 3.

NCAA Football 12

Dear five or so readers,

I was going to write a long piece about genre and how video games are simultaneously three things: games, narratives and simulations. It was interesting, but ultimately had nothing to do with this game. Let's face it, it's a game about playing football. You get a lot of options in terms of player stats, conference realignment and plays. If you like college football, you'll like this game. If you don't care, you will care even less about this. It's fun, but ultimately extremely stupid. Not even my uncanny ability to bullshit could connect this game to anything deeper. I've got some homework to do, and then I'll see about writing something a little deeper in a few days. 

                                                                                                                          Love,

                                                                                                                          Drew Norton

                                                                                                                          Writer/World-Class Assassin