Far Cry: Blood Dragon

           Video games have a problem with being serious. I’m not sure when it happened, but sometime in the past decade or so developers decided that a video game needed to be super serious to be taken seriously. It needed to tackle big themes, make a statement about humanity, and chide us for enjoying violence as we shooting the weaponry they programmed into their game. This hasn’t necessarily been a bad thing. Great games like The Last of Us and Bioshock: Infinite have been a direct result of this movement. Unfortunately, it also gave us the four player-character deaths in Modern Warfare 2 and the whiniest narrator since Holden Caulfield in Max Payne 3. The quality of the writing separates these games. Modern Warfare 2 is not exactly narrative heavy, while the story in Max Payne 3 serves only to slow-motion jump the player from one set piece to another with little to no regard for character development. A lack of awareness of how absurd they are also holds the games back from narrative greatness. The Last of Us and Bioshock: Infinite take a lot of time building characters and setting the rules for their respective worlds so that nothing feels out of place or too silly. Modern Warfare 2 has you fighting Russians in a fast food restaurant with Keith David. So what does any of this have to do with my game for the month, Far Cry: Blood Dragon? Well, to understand Blood Dragon, you have to understand the current climate surrounding game narratives and you have to understand its parent: Far Cry 3

            Far Cry 3 typifies games that take themselves too seriously. It tries to tell an affecting narrative sharing similar themes with Heart of Darkness while it also throws ridiculous drug-fueled hallucination sequences and one-dimensional characters at you. It expects you to care about a bunch of rich white kids with little to no redeeming qualities while the main character, king of the rich white kids, lives out his own personal white native/white savior narrative. Then to make the disconnect even greater the game plops you on an open world island which makes forgetting the gist of the story very easy, and gives you a number of silly missions to take away any of the power the story has left. The narrative is atrocious, especially considering how much time they apparently put into it and how much game journalists apparently loved it (just read their Wikipedia page.) The game is saved by its stellar gameplay, which eschews any pretense of a serious game and lets you blow up sharks with grenades. So after playing this slog of a campaign and joy of an open-world experience, I was more than a little surprised to find out about Far Cry: Blood Dragon. I thought it was a joke at first; Far Cry 3 with 80’s home video trappings? It doesn’t make any sense. And that’s the beauty of it; in Blood Dragon Ubisoft has made a strong statement against their own game. They’ve made a campaign that is both compelling and fun. Unfortunately, they raised a whole new set of problems that prevent Blood Dragon from achieving greatness.

            First things first: the setup. You are Sergeant Rex Power Colt; a cyber commando just trying to make his way in this mixed up, post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland. After unearthing a plot to destroy the world, you are forced to destroy the madman who thought it up by any means necessary. The odds are not in your favor; if the Omega soldiers don’t get you, the bevy of mutated animals probably will. But if you have enough skill and enough balls, you just might make it through…

            The writing in this game is seriously brilliant. Though the comedy may lean a little too heavily on references sometimes, Colt’s dialogue never fails to make me laugh. It doesn’t hurt that the man speaking that dialogue is none other than Kyle Reese himself, Michael Biehn. His gruff, sarcastic tone screams action hero, and his one-liners never grow old. The story is ridiculous, but it’s supposed to be and it never wears out its welcome. Some things that try to be bad (read: Syfy movies) succeed without being entertaining. They’re made that way simply because they know if they make something sound crazy enough people will watch it. Here, the insanity is genuine. You can see there is real love for the aesthetic and the style of the time. This especially shows in the obscurity of some of the references. The shotgun is called the Galleria 1991, a Terminator 2 reference. The game starts with an assault on a base from a helicopter while Little Richard’s “Long, Tall Sally” plays; a reference to Predator. It’s not subtle, but even if you don’t get the actual reference it enhances the experience. You know that “Long, Tall Sally” is the only song that would fit that sequence even if you’d never seen Predator. You inherently understand the African-American sidekick who needs to slip curse words into every sentence even if you’ve never seen a buddy cop film or The Thing. It’s ingrained in our cultural memory. The narrative isn’t Dickens; it’s Bruckheimer, and it’s perfect.

            In the middle of all of this 80’s nostalgia, however, are a lot of references to video games. Of course a lot of the references are to games at the dawn of the medium. For instance, the cut scenes in the game are not fully animated. Instead, they are drawn figures which move stiffly around a background. If you’re having trouble picturing it, imagine a child moving a paper doll around a picture of a house. Basically, it's this with better English. However, there are a lot of modern touches as well. They have a comically extended tutorial that includes a joke about free-to-play games. Also alongside a tracking bar that fits awesomely into the 80’s pastiche, there are hints and tips. This has been a very modern addition to the world of games and is used extensively in Far Cry 3, except that in Blood Dragon none of it is helpfully. It’s all painfully obvious tips like grenades explode or silly such as one that wonders why zip lines aren’t called sky ropes. It’s hard not to joke about the genre you’re working in when making a parody, but these jokes really stick out against the neon background of the game. Blood Dragon constantly jokes about the over-the-top style of these cheesy films, but it never questions why they existed. On the other hand it seems to constantly question the modern conventions it lampoons, especially those prevalent in Far Cry 3. A great example is the collecting missions. The player collects video tapes, watches TVs, and collects notes of one of the head doctors working with the main bad guy. This is similar to the idols and letters you collect in Far Cry 3. Whenever you collect something in Blood Dragon, though, Colt feels the need to say something like, “Six million credits to rebuild me, and I’m doing this?” The player-character actually thinks it’s pointless. This treatment of the different elements actually gives the game something of a message against all odds. Blood Dragon is constantly questioning why we aren’t making ridiculous things like we used to. Why do we have brown military shooters full of burly guys that say “Stay frosty” when we could have beefy dudes in jungles shooting aliens while insulting their mothers? It’s a plea for a badly needed does of invested frivolity; pointlessness with soul, if you will. Blood Dragon tries, even if just for a second, to teleport us to a time when film and the media were like vacuous babies. Everything was new and exciting, with insane outfits and androgynous men lived alongside ripped action heroes and a ridiculously folksy president. We still had the Soviet Union to direct our irrational hatred towards, and everything was right with the world. Blood Dragon wants everything to be simple again.

            Unfortunately, just like its vision of 80’s pop culture, this game is deeply flawed. For one the gameplay somehow, in some small but important way, took a hit. The guns just don’t feel right. Gone is the thrill of creeping through a jungle stalking bands of mercs. Most egregiously, the world is way too dark. In an attempt to make the neon of the lasers and the general Tron-inspired glow of the place pop, the environment is almost completely black. It’s incredibly difficult to get a sense of where you are and where you’re going when you’re lost in a great void of a landmass. It was hard to connect to the space on any level. The same can be said for the bases. One of the nice touches in the Far Cry 3 was that every base was different. The differences in Blood Dragon are so minute that they may as well not exist for the most part. This all held the game way back. Setting, level design, or mise-en-scene if you’re a fancy cinema studies major like myself is one of the most important aspects of a game. It is where your player will be spending most of their time. It’s one of the best ways to convey the story without exposition. When you decide to make it black with a kind of red, hazy miasma hanging over it, the player will not connect. Also, as great as the story is, it falls into the anticlimax trap that Far Cry 3 has. I can't say more without ruining the whole game.

            We can never go back to the 80’s; at least not until we invent a time machine. The culture of the time period was born of fears surrounding the changing political and social landscapes combined with a swiftly diminishing innocence that can never be replicated. Even for all of its love for the time, Blood Dragon is steeped in reference and irony because it has to be. We live in a time where everyone knows and understands where this is coming from, and to not wink is to not be in on the joke. The 80’s died, strangely, in 1993 with Last Action Hero. I can still appreciate what Blood Dragon is trying to do, though, and certainly champion a restrained version of the gospel I’m sure I’m only reading into it. Games do need more silly, over-the-top games with no agenda other than excitement and entertainment. We need crazy ideas. We need originality, even if we have to steal from other generations to get it. Blood Dragon needs more polish and a gameplay tune-up to be sure, but it was so much fun and seemed like it was so much fun to make that it hardly seems worth it to complain. If this review seems mixed, it is only my feelings are equally so. I want so badly to live in a time where I can see “G.I. Joe” cartoons and think they’re awesome without qualifying how silly they are, but I also understand how far we’ve come as a people since Reagan hand-delivered the first vial of crack to the inner city. It's hard to reconcile, just like its hard to reconcile that I love the style and tone of this game more than anything I've played since Infinite, but the gameplay felt so weird and unpolished. 

            This is a blog that reviews games, but I also try to work in a little academic thinking and actual reviewing rather than consumer reports as often as I can. Unfortunately, whether its the cold I came down with this week or a battle between the part of me that loves great works of art and the part of me that loves terrible pieces of trash, I honestly can't decide how I feel about this game. I can't say whether this game is good or bad; it defies those labels. I hate having to be that ambiguous in a blog like this, though, so I'm going to put it this way. At one point in the game, Colt gets a hold of a Gatling gun he can carry around and use. It's awesome. What's even better than that, though, is that when he is shooting over an extended period of time he starts to yell like Johnny Utah wishing he didn't love Patrick Swayze so much. There is a distinct possibility that at some point in this game, you will walk into a base full of cyber soldiers and empty a Gatling gun that shoots lasers at them while screaming at the top of your lungs. For me, that makes up for pretty much any failing the game has. If it does the same for you, play the game. You'll love it despite its flaws. If not, there's no point in you even thinking about it. 

           

           

            

Tiny and Big

           I am  a sucker for game physics, and physics are what has  made this generation and hopefully the next generation so exciting. A lot of people focus on the graphical power of a game, which is arguably one of the least important aspects of a game. As long as you can see what is happening and the developer has a good sense of style, things don’t need to be photorealistic. Sonic and Knuckles is still more beautiful than most of the brown military shooters that have come out recently. On the other handSonic and Knuckles. You can’t mess around with weight distribution and other physics based puzzles like you can in Half Life 2 either. That is the kind of evolution that impresses me. This is why Tiny and Big in Grandpa’s Leftovers (or Tiny and Big as it will be known hereafter) is so up my alley. The gameplay is all pulling, pushing, and cutting the sometimes massive setting elements in the game. It can be very impressive. Unfortunately, it is marred by a lack of polish that can make the game excruciating.

, you can’t blow up buildings in

            Developed by German development team Black Pants Game Studio, Tiny and Big has a promisingly oddball story. A nerd named Tiny is on a quest to retrieve a pair of magic underpants from a bully named Big. The pants, as he calls them, were given to him by his grandfather. In order to get the underpants back, Tiny must scale a vast and ancient pyramid while avoiding the doom which lurks around every corner. The game is funny in that quirky way so popular in independent media. The hand-drawn look of the game adds to this goofy strangeness. While often charming, the indie sensibility can also get in the game’s way sometimes. Tiny and Big seems to be a sequel, although I didn’t know this until I had already finished the game. I know nothing about the game that came before it, or if it was anything more than a beta version of the game I played. Either way I hope it explained or showed more than Grandpa’s Leftovers, because this game is confusing. While the basic storyline and motivations all make perfect sense, the particulars of the world don’t. I don’t actually know what Tiny and Big’s relationship actually is. At the end of the game they seem like they might be brothers, but you never get that through the rest of the game. Also the dialogue can be maddeningly obtuse.  The characters seem to always be saying things strangely or in a way that doesn’t quite make sense. This may be because of the translation, because I have to assume it was originally written in German. The lack of voice acting didn’t help. I don’t like reading my games unless it is subtitled or a JRPG.

            The gameplay, unfortunately, is haunted by similar problems. On one level, I really loved it. Tiny and Big is one of the purest platformers to come out in recent memory. Helping Tiny jump, cut, pull, and push his way up the temple can be very fun and rewarding. The laser is especially well done. There is something about cutting rocks into platforms or slicing off the entire side of the temple to reveal a secret area that is amazingly good fun. I would really like to see this style come back in another game. Then, just as you’re having fun, the lack of polish starts to show. For instance, it’s often difficult to tell exactly where a platform ends. There were multiple times where I accidentally fell off a ledge because I got a little too close to the edge, or I wasn’t paying attention and strolled right off a cliff only to find myself standing on thin air like Indiana Jones in The Last Crusade. The giant rocks you cut can smash you, which makes this aspect of the platforming fun and dangerous. However if said rock even thinks about rocking backwards it’ll squish you. The level design can be gorgeous with huge, sweeping vistas of desert or the impressive scale of the massive temple Tiny’s climbing. Then again, the whole place seems to be littered with crevasses you can fall through at any moment. There is little more frustrating in the world of games than falling for seemingly no reason. I almost quit the game a few times over it.

            The biggest failing in Tiny and Big is the lack of connection between the story and the gameplay. The story doesn’t really seem to enhance the actions taken by the player. I rarely felt connected to what Tiny was doing because I was kept at a distance by the strangeness of the dialogue as well as the lack of exposition. I didn’t understand what I was doing or why I was doing it most of the time. I didn’t even know WHAT I was supposed to be doing in a lot of cases. The game is not always clear about where you need to go. The most important aspect of any story is motivation. Go to any creative writing workshop and I can almost guarantee that they will talk endlessly about why the characters did whatever they did. We know that Tiny needs to get the underwear back from Big because it came from his grandfather and he cherished it, but that emotion never really comes through. We don’t know anything about his grandfather at all other than that he was an archaeologist that specialized in underwear for some reason. About halfway through the game I started to get really bored because I neither knew nor particularly cared what why anything was happening. I was just cutting down platforms, jumping on them, and all the time moving closer towards…something. It picked up a little near the end, but that middle sagged amazingly low for such a short game.

            So Tiny and Big is destined for the worst of all fates: mediocrity. There are really cool things going on in this game. The music is great, although obviously not so great that I remembered to mention it in the main body of my review. I like the gameplay most of the time, and the story has its moments. It all ultimately feels disconnected. The game simply doesn’t try hard enough to make you care about what is going on, and is somewhat shoddily assembled. I look forward to a better product next time, because this series has potential. I just hope that Black Pants Game Studio can get their act together. Also, maybe they could stop being obsessed with underwear. That would be nice.

I'm Scared: A Pixelated Nightmare

          Video games are a fantastic medium for the horror genre. The experience of controlling a character walking down a dark corridor is much more visceral and terrifying that watching someone on a screen or reading about it in a book. I haven't been truly scared by a film since The Ring came out in 2002. I can say, with some bruises to my ego, that I am still a little creeped out because of I’m Scared: A Pixelated Nightmare.

Video games are a fantastic medium for horror. There is something about walking down a dark corridor rather than watching someone or reading about someone doing it that makes the experience much more terrifying. I haven’t been scared by a movie since

            I’m Scared, which you can download here, is a first-person horror game developed by Ivan Zanotti.  The game starts with a completely silent screen onto which text appears as if it is being typed in real time. It seems to be a basic tutorial at first, but ends with the ominous words, “I’m extremely sorry. I didn’t really want to do that. Forgive me.” The player then awakens in a bare room with a table, a wardrobe, and a table. Once out of the room, the player wanders around, looking for a heart with which to open the door. None of this sounds scary written out, but in the moment it is chilling. Your footsteps sound like thunder when you walk. The low-quality graphics and low draw distance make everything fuzzy. Then, White Face shows up.

            I’ve never been more terrified by the prospect of wandering around looking for keys than I was during I’m Scared. The horror is perfectly paced. It doesn’t rely too heavily on jump scares like a lot of recent horror films, but it also doesn’t burn so slowly that it becomes boring like the rest of the recent horror films. I don’t remember a single scare chord in the whole game. All I remember is the hissing and the laughing that foreshadowed White Face’s arrival. The sound design in the game is impeccable. It’s jarring, creepy, and uncanny with its choppy synth qualities. I’m Scared is a game that knows that louder isn’t scarier. A soft electronic hiss and a squishy moan beats a roar any day.

            In tandem with the lo-fi, retro sound design is the graphics. I’m Scared has Superman 64- level graphics; just replace green smog with inky blackness. Contrary to popular design theories, higher graphics could have ruined this experience. The poor graphics are a great source of horror. Again, low draw distance makes it so you can only see a foot in front of your face. The blocky, dare I say pixelated environment naturally morphs common objects into unnatural shapes. The solid colors, which look like the result of a game developer overusing the bucket on MS Paint, serve as a perfect canvas for when the blood starts appearing. It all feels like, well, a nightmare; dark, confusing, and dreamy.

            Both the poor audio and poor graphics serve to remind us just how creepy early gaming could be. One the most unsettling piece of music to me, to this day, is the song that plays in Lavender Town in the original Pokemon games. There’s something about poorly recorded pieces of media that creep us out more than well-produced pieces of similar narrative quality. Look at Paranormal Activity. That movie is objectively idiotic with unlikable characters played by actors slightly above community theater, but it is still regarded by many as terrifying. There’s a fifth sequel coming out this year. That is not a typo.

            There’s not a whole lot to say about this game other than it is spooky as hell. The controls are all simple and fairly standard, and there’s not really a lot to do. The game is all atmosphere; a brooding and somewhat archaic experience similar to what Lovecraft might have made if he knew anything about video games. It’s also free, so I’m having a hard time really finding flaws with it. The low production value works in its favor, much in the same way as its popular predecessor Slender. It’s a prime example of how graphics don’t need to make a game more realistic to be effective. It’s also a lot of fun to play in the dark.

Little Inferno

            It’s been snowing for years and nobody knows why. What do you do? Burn everything you own, of course! Little Inferno, the arson simulator developed by the Tomorrow Corporation, is a darkly comic and vaguely moving tale about a boy who buys things and then lights them on fire. The gameplay consists of lighting various objects on fire in different predetermined combos. For instance if you burn the toy pirate and the bicycle together, you get a combo. Combos give you money with which to buy more stuff to burn and stamps to deliver the stuff to your house faster. After getting enough combos and buying all of the things in your catalogue, you can buy…a new catalogue full of new things to burn and new combos! It all sounds kind of pointless written out here, and it is. That’s the point.

            The story doesn’t seem very interesting at first. Again, you’re a boy burning things in his shiny new Little Inferno Playset from the Tomorrow Corporation. Yes, the corporation in the game has the same name as the development team (which consists of three guys, by the way.) Then, a little girl named Sugar Plumps starts sending you letters. She is a little crazy, to say the least. Whenever one of her letters arrived, I always wondered if they had Adderall in this universe and, if so, how she had managed to stay off of it. Her letters, as well as letters sent by the head of the Tomorrow Corporation and a weatherman, all work together to reveal bits and pieces of the world they live in. It’s really cold, namely. Everyone is burning as much as they can to stay warm. Honestly it would have been nice if they’d been a little more specific with their story. Like Dear Esther and a lot of art actually, Little Inferno remains intentionally ambiguous to allow for discussion and the ideas of the audience to influence the narrative. It’s not exactly a blank slate, but more of a Rorschach test. You get a vague impression of what’s going on, but everything’s so abstract and sometimes downright random that it’s hard to pin. I think, for instance, that all of the Little Inferno sets are contributing to the cold snap. The soot is building up in the atmosphere and causing the Earth to cool, which in turn causes more burning. It’s the opposite of a runaway Greenhouse Effect. It never states this though so there’s no way to know. It’s just a theory I have.

            Though the narrative lacks substance, its integration into the gameplay is very well done. One thing that is certain about this game is that it is a commentary on the games we play today. Again the actual message is maddeningly up for interpretation, but consider the point of view. For most of the game all the player sees is the Little Inferno. The edges of the fireplace/toy form a graphic match of a television. The game consists of putting objects into this screen and then destroying them, which is essentially how developers make their games and the audience plays them, respectively. If I had to guess, and I do because I’m that type of person, I would say that this is a statement on modern gaming. The simplicity and the potential tedium of the gameplay points out how much we are willing to go through to achieve an end that doesn’t actually mean anything. It’s a satire about how we play games that even goes so far as to question whether or not we should play games anymore. This satire mostly comes from the gameplay itself. While the letters and some late-game developments put it into sharper focus, it’s all there in the fire. The different objects you can order from the catalogue all have different effects when they are burned. Some pop, some change the color of the fire, some freeze things, some just scream horribly. When you are burning a teddy bear that watches you as it burns, it’s hard not to question whether or not we've

gone a little far in the video game violence department. It’s lightened slightly by the dark and referential humor in the game (the video game catalogue is the best) as well as the Burton-esque art style, but the deep disturbing knot in your stomach is still there.

            Little Inferno isn't a great game, but it’s got a lot of great ideas. It can be tedious, and the lack of story details can be frustrating. It tries to be artistic, weird, and enigmatic, and it achieves that to some extent but occasionally at the cost of fun. The best way to describe it is quirky. Quirky is an overused term that lost a lot of its meaning once Zooey Deschanel became famous and everyone started trying too hard to be different. That’s how this game feels. It’s trying too hard to have a different and interesting story. It’s trying too hard to connect with the fringe. It’s trying too hard to be weird and artsy. Again to its credit, Little Inferno is often effective and boasts some really interesting ideas and commentary. I thought the beginning of the ending was extremely well done, which will only really make sense if you play the game. I thought the creepy toys and the little touches like the music that plays while perusing the catalogues were also inspired. But then the actual ending comes and it makes you wonder what the point of it all was. I encourage everyone to try the game if they can. The developers deserve to be rewarded if only because they tried to make something deeper than Call of Duty: Dog Simulator. It’s a beautifully flawed work of art. Maybe next time, just don’t try so hard?