The Republic of Thoronia

If I was 14 I would think that Little Big Planet was the stupidest thing in the world. If I was 8 I would love it. I’m 27 and I think it’s one of the best things to hit this generation of console’s since… well, since Metal Gear Solid 4, but other than MGS4 nothing has it beat. Why? Well, in case the media hasn’t shoved it down your throat yet (or you’re one of the many, many readers that don’t admit to loving video games), Little Big Planet is adorable, it’s girlfriend/wife ready, it’s kid ready and it’s some of the best fun playing a game you’ll have all year.

In description, the game is nothing more than a platformer, you run and jump and grab things. But the design of the game is what carries it over the edge. The entire world is created with fabrics and stitches, cardboard and sharpies, and it looks like a massive art-school student’s final diarama project.

But we’re still not to the part that makes Little Big Planet stand out from the rest. The kicker, the big deal, the shabang is the user-created levels. Hundreds of thousands of levels are already up and available to play online, with a friend or by yourself. The developer’s integrated a full-blown level creation system into the game — something that PC users have had for years with mod’s and source codes — but this is the first time it has hit hard on a console system. Feeling a bit creatively stifled? Or perhaps you just work better as a team? Get your friends together not only just to play, but to create. We’ve all heard of the collective conscious, but a collective creative element is simply unheard of on a console system. If creating your own level sounds a bit too complicated for your taste, or perhaps you’ll argue that you’re “just not that creative” LBP has an answer: Play through the game. By the time you’ve finished the game you are aware of how each lever and pulley works, your creative juices are flowing and lightbulps are exploding over your head. Or not, and that’s okay too, you can rock every one else’s levels any time, and there are hundreds of thousands of them to dig through.

Hardcore platformer dudes will argue that the game’s spotty control scheme might turn off those that spent hours getting through Mario as quickly as possible, but the other side of the argument is that LBP didn’t settle on predetermined physics to base their game. Argue away about the precision of your sackboy, but you can’t argue with the amount of fun you’ll have pulling down a felt cloud or riding high on a piece of cloth attached to some wings.

In the end, it’s difficult to explain all the things that make this game great, but if you’ve had doubts put Little Big Planet on at a party and watch as everyone gathers around the TV, helping each through levels, wanting to get a shot, and gracefully asking, “how much does one of these PS3 things cost anyway?”

When I was a little kid I loved running and jumping on things. Living in the mountains made this task easy to find, and I would seek out new boulders and mountains to climb up on. It’s that beautiful childhood feeling of making it to the top, the feeling that you’ve accomplished something that makes Mirror’s Edge such an interesting game. It can be described in just a few words, you run and jump on stuff, you climb, then you run and jump some more. Regardless of the mixed bag of reviews that the game has gotten, it seems that many people have missed one of the most overwhelming points: it’s fun.

Mirror’s Edge is frustratingly fun, it’s Ninja Gaiden II fun, it’s scream at the TV and nearly throw the controller at the screen fun. It’s unrelenting in its demand for pinpoint precision on jumps and that’s what makes it a good game. Well, that and the fact that it’s a first person game in which you can actually see your feet when you look down.

Yet that’s the game’s biggest downfall, the feet that is. The developer’s spent so much time creating your existence inside Faith’s body, from the hands to the feet, you see your legs when you jump and hear the pulse of blood through the heart as you run — then the game switches to a cut scene sequence that looks like a badly done Flash animation or Esurance commercial. The story itself isn’t that interesting, your sister’s caught up in a scandal and you have to rescue her, which, oddly, seems pretty close to the old Nintendo games that Mirror’s Edge evokes. But the world, the world is utterly beautiful, a clean, nearly gray-tone city highlighted with bright primary colors.

It’s too bad that the developer’s dropped the ball on the story because the world itself has enough potential to make for an interesting tale. The point of view is perfect for storytelling, which is proven throughout the game with several first-person cut scenes that, had earlier parts of the game been done properly, might have had more impact on the player. The way your head and body moves is deeply immersive, but when the story jumps to a cut scene, the feeling is immediately lost. It’s bizarre to me that nobody would have mentioned this during the developement stage, because it would have been cheaper and easier to just use the games engine and point of view to tell the story — and also would have added a bit more meaning to the games opening sequence in which you run and jump onto a helicopter and are flashed a mirror image of yourself in a polished office building.

Mirror’s Edge also suffers deeply from the economic woes of the rest of the country. The game takes about eight hours to complete, and sits nimbly on a $60 price tag. If 2008 has proven anything it’s that gamers aren’t willing to shell out that kind of cash for a mediocre-reviewed game that is not only a new IP, but is also short. “It’s a rental,” they’ll say to themselves, or, “I’ll talk a friend into buying it so I can borrow it,” they’ll mutter. What video game companies need to walk away with from this last year is that gamer’s aren’t stupid and they aren’t full of money. We, just like the movie industry, just like the music industry, need launch sales. We need $20 knocked off for the first few weeks, especially with a game like this. Mirror’s Edge is the type of game that is going to strive best on word of mouth, not reviews. It’s the type of game that friends recommend to friends… not review site’s, not magazine’s. Mirror’s Edge isn’t a blockbuster hit and should never have been marketed as one. It’s a game that is going to garner a cult following and be a small, but loved franchise. That is, if EA bothers to release another one.

What Mirror’s Edge get’s right far outweights the things it gets wrong. Simply put, if you’re a gamer that has patience and enjoys dying a lot, you’ll get a kick out of it. It captures the exhilirating feeling of accomplishing something, of getting to the top of the mountain and looking down on the world, and as you wipe the sweat off your brow and grin you can turn around to see another way up, another boulder to climb, a task to complete.

When I was a kid I leaned more towards PC gaming then console gaming. Sure, I had my Genesis and my N64 and my Super Nintendo, but for the most part I enjoyed PC games (probably because the computer was in my room whereas the Nintendo was in the living room). I would go to the grocery store with my mom and eagerly run off to the magazine section to flip through copies of Electronic Gaming Monthly and PC Gamer to read about all the new games.  Unfortunately, EGM has shut its doors on the brink of its 20th anniversary, and its sister site 1up.com is being downsized significantly.  This story isn’t really related to Fallout, but sitting on those cold King Sooper floors and eagerly reading magazine’s was the first thing that popped into my head when I heard the news of EGM’s closing yesterday, and that time period reminded me of the first time I read about Fallout. It was the days before video previews or video reviews, back when you would find a particular reviewer that you learned to trust over time as they reviewed countless game after game. I remember being a kid and thinking to myself that EGM was more grown up than Gamepro, but not as grown up as PC Gamer. It’s strange the way kids rationalize the world, and even stranger that many of those thoughts stick with you for so long.

I wish all the writers who’ve been laid off from EGM and 1up the best of luck.

And onward!

Fallout 3 was one of the biggest games of 2008. So, likely, if I sum it up as an open-world RPG that takes place in a 1950s post-apocalyptic world in which most people want to kill you but some like to talk and you really really want to find your dad but keep getting sidetracked by bright objects and the promise of money or exploding heads, that should suffice. Yeah?

The part about Fallout 3 that I’m interested in talking about is the eerie quality of a go-anywhere do-anything game that demands my complete attention as well as my own moral values. In the game you can kill anything, steal everything and wear whatever you want (in my current game I’m wearing an Ant Super Hero Costume that lowers my Charisma but raises my Agility, it also prompts random children to ask me for an autograph and oh, did I mention? It makes me look like an Ant Super Hero). You can talk your way out of situation or blast your way, steal or outsmart, brains or brawn and you get the point eh?

So what do I do? Do I act out unfulfilled fantasies and attack and steal everything in sight? Do I punch the rude doctor? When offered the opportunity do I detonate a nuclear bomb and explode a whole town? Nope. I act like I do in real life (well, close anyway). I’m polite to even the rudest people, I try not to kill if I can talk my way out of situations and I carry small firearms as opposed to big ones (which, as we all know I generally walk around the city with a rifle slung over my soldier). I decorate my house in science-themes and worry about my pet dog. I don’t take drugs and I wear suits. I sneak around enemies, avoiding conflict whenever possible. Why do I do this? It’s a video game, right? I can do whatever I want, I can get things done the easy way (shooting) so much easier than my stupid methods. Perhaps it’s the post-nuclear D.C. wasteland that pushes me to rise above the rest of the world. I want to help rebuild this society, make it better for everyone. I want to give the poor men water, destroy the evil scientist’s bizarre ant breeding plans and rescue the damsel in distress.

When games give you every opportunity to make yourself evil it’s interesting that many of us take the high road (okay, I’m assuming that others took the high road? None of my close friends did, oddly, which makes me a bit weary when I’m around them now), that our own ethics could have an impact on a game’s play. This time around I’m trying to be evil, but I really have to try, I have to convince myself to steal everything I can, and it’s honestly rather difficult for me. If a game is making the player think this thoroughly about their own moral compass it has to be worth playing, and playing through again and again. Never mind the hundreds of locations to discover and explore, never mind the numerous missions to undertake — the most interesting aspect of Fallout 3 isn’t it’s expanse, but its introversion. A player can feel not only like they are really there in this world, but like their choices matter, like the non-player character’s opinions matter, like perhaps, if you do good in this world, it might reflect how you’ll act in the real world.

I suppose the only way to see how I’d truly act is to start a nuclear war, escape to a vault, wait for the world to be safe to walk in again and find out for myself. For now, Fallout 3 is easier. Now if I could just get those dang super-mutants to like me.

With all this blasted schooling and such I haven’t had much in the way of time to explore something that I have relearned to love very much, video games. I realize of course that this is strange to some folks, but considering I’m getting my Masters in “creativity” it has become an important facet to my life, namely because I can play, analyze and enjoy it without it intruding into my own work (my pre-Grad School hobbies namely included movies and books, two things that don’t blend well with reading 1000+ pages and writing 50+ of original works). Personal facts aside, I’m going to dedicate the next six days (January 12th means returning to school) to some of the most interesting titles I played over the last six months, today we get Far Cry 2, followed by Fallout 3, Little Big Planet, Mirror’s Edge, Metal Gear Solid 4, with nods to Dead Space and NHL 09.

Far Cry 2 is a difficult game to describe to people. On the surface it’s a shallow first person shooter filled with random encounters, broken gameplay and guns, lots and lots of guns. But it isn’t what Far Cry 2 is that makes it interesting, it’s what it is trying to become.

Immersion is a word that gets tagged and misused a lot in video game journalism, there seems to be a rift between reviewers, critics and players as to what makes a game immersive — some would argue it’s a well tailored world, others a perfectly sculpted story, perhaps some would even say it’s just an addictive quality. FC2’s take on immersion is straight forward: You are in Africa. You are put between a rock and a hard place (er, two waring factions). You must decide what to do next. Sure, it’s not perfect, you don’t really get to chose sides, which arguably is more realistic than if you did, you also don’t ever really get a complete grasp on what exactly is going on, which is likely just the nature of a game that was forced out the door a few minutes before it was done (or perhaps a statement by the developers that, put into this situation, you likely wouldn’t have a clue what was going on… of course, if it was me, even surviving an afternoon would be a feat). What you do get is your hands, and you’ll be seeing a lot of them. Whether it’s by pulling a bullet out of your thigh with pliers, looking at your map (which handily auto-updates objectives while it’s in your pocket), or holding any of the two-gazillion guns in the game. Of course, all this wouldn’t mean much if the game didn’t look good, and rest assured it looks miraculous — it’s the little things that count they say, and maybe I’m the only one who cares, but I was jumping up and down when I noticed that when I walked into a plant… well, just that I walked into a plant, it folded underneath my foot. I didn’t just pass through it magically.

Of course, with all the attempts at realism, a game, as many developers seem hell-bent on reminding us, is just a game. We need save points, an abundance of health packs (does everyone in Africa use a syringe of morphine, like, all the time?), we need mission objectives and friends, we need fetch quests and unlockable guns, weapons dealers on every corner and random attacks (okay, maybe we could have done without the random attacks). FC2 is, noticeably, a game. It isn’t a life simulator, you can’t change your clothes or even your personality, but it does put you in a terrible situation and trusts you to figure out how to best take care of it.

And that’s what makes Far Cry 2 a step above nearly every single game that was released in 2008. It assumes that the player is smart. No tutorials, no buttering up of an evil world, no lies (okay, some people in the game lie, but you have to figure out who is lying, or what their agenda really is). From the second you launch the game you are screwed, running around a nameless African country with a machete and a crap pistol, picking up broken weapons that explode in your hands while you have to figure how to get rid of your malaria and find the arms dealer that you are supposed to kill. If you chose to find background information about the characters, or meet other people like you, you can, and you’ll gradually begin to understand the war economy, the different factions and the repercussions of what you’re doing, or, you can just run around blasting things to bits, your choice (and the important thing here is that the game itself never really informs you of this choice, you just have to figure it out on your own).  Oddly, as the game progresses and you continually accept missions with a growing number of karmic grievances (for instance: Please go and destroy the water supply of our enemy because it will piss them off. What? Oh, yeah, well sure a whole village will likely die, what’s your point?) you begin to wonder how killing the arms dealer, which was your original mission and only intent, could possibly fix all the trouble that you’ve caused.

As far as story and writing is concerned it’s about average for a video game world, which puts it at a sub-par “high-literary (we’ll use the term loosely here, like a joke, or perhaps in a mocking tone)” level. It’s unfortunate because there is a lot that could have been done with this, the immersive qualities of the gameplay and graphics hook the players and trap them in the world, so it wouldn’t have taken much more to push us over the edge. The idea of a dynamic, reactive story, which is what the developer’s set out to accomplish (and again, perhaps a rush to a pre-holiday release date might have broken this promise…. honestly, who gives an M rated game as a gift?), was and still is very interesting. It’s been a promise of video games for the last ten years since it was technologically feasible, but has still yet to be completely accomplished (and yes, Fallout 3 is another release from this year with the same promises). Is it too much to ask that if I kill someone in their sleep and return the next morning I’ll find their wife grieving or a funeral service? Or if a NPC dies while traveling at my side others may be less likely to join me on my journey for fear of the same thing happening to them?

In the end Far Cry 2 is an interesting and complex game. More importantly it sets a new standard for ambition in a first person shooter. Sure, it didn’t nail everything, but it did start a lot of fires.

Pop music relies on several different factors in order to survive. Namely, it has to be catchy. The song has to seize your ears and ask the question, “What is this?” After hearing the answer uttered by a record store clerk or radio announcer you’ll say to yourself, “Of course! I should have known.” Now, it’s time to be honest with yourself. Should you really have known who did that track? Do you benefit? Does the song benefit? Is the artist important to your decision to like or dislike a song?

In his essay, “Death of the Author” Roland Barthes states, “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified to close the writing.” Taking these ideas into account when looking at pop music allows for the over-the-top lives of most of America’s pop stars to be removed from the listener’s perception of a song. Acceptability is important to the success of pop music; the genre’s significance comes from its overarching appeal. By removing the artist the listener enables him or herself to truly understand the implications of a song. The signified is no longer implied by authorship, it is handled by the listener.

Pop music isn’t well known for its originality, but is often lauded for its ability to create a representation of society. “We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single theological meaning,” says Barthes, “but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writing, none of them original, blend and clash.” In this respect, pop music functions as a combination of influences the world over. All of which, without the star, can be heard and understood by a large nation and reflected upon differently. The listener can accept a star and their persona of the moment, hearing a song in various ways– even if a song remains consistent to the one moment of creation. Removing the artist it increases the longevity of a song and enhances the listening experience.

One of the most interesting aspects of pop music is its universal appeal to listeners. It operates in each and every moment differently, and can often transcend time. This is an important fact to consider when removing the pop star. If a song can be looked at individually, without the spectacle that surrounds a star, it can be deciphered and decoded much more accurately. This is helpful when considering that pop music often functions as a reflection of society’s ideals. Consider that after the September 11 attacks, John Lennon’s “Imagine” was one of the most widely requested songs at radio stations. At the time of its original release in 1971, the song’s meaning was drastically different than it was after September 11.  The lyrics, “Imagine there’s no heaven / it’s easy if you try… imagine there’s no country/ it isn’t hard to do / nothing to kill or die for / and no religion too” once symbolized a singers ideals and have more recently become an anthem for a nation in mourning. This was a case in which the listener was able to relinquish the star in order to apply their own feelings to a text, and exemplifies why the removal of pop-stardom is essential for a listener’s understanding both of their society as well a song.

Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” is another example of the death of authorship allowing for a new way to experience and understand a song. Regardless of his intentions, the song has become an Independence Day tradition. According to several interviews, the effect was unintentional on Springsteen’s part, but the fact remains that the collective listening public has decided that Springsteen’s intentions aren’t important. What is important is what the listener takes away from the listening experience, and in the case of “Born in the U.S.A.” it’s a sense of pride.

The two above examples came years after the songs were originally released. It may be difficult to imagine “Womanizer,” Britney Spears newest single being anything more than a sugar-coated pop footnote, but by removing Spears’ the performer and accepting the songs steady beat and simple message one may find oneself more open to the song down the road. By removing the stigma that is Spears, the song’s already universal appeal can be broadened even further, effectively selling more records and garnering a better following. There are pop icons who will argue that they are just as important as their creations, that these two things are inseparable. It is that egoism that keeps pop culture from being transcendent and from being truly universally appealing.

When a listener can remove a star’s identity, it allows for the music to speak for itself. With pop music it creates an experience that is shared with a large collective of people. The song is given the capacity to change meaning according to a societies need and the collective listeners are allowed to have their own signified.

In the end, the birth of the listener must be at the cost of the death of the star.