The Republic of Thoronia

Resistance: Fall of Man and Resistance 2 are two action-shooter games that were released on the PS3. Generally speaking, action games have razor thin plotlines and thin voice acting, but Resistance: Fall of Man, attempted to expand on their universe creation by using History Channel-esque World War II montages with a voice over.  The first game was immersive and interesting, and the documentary style storytelling worked surprisingly well. However, the second game, which continues the story of the main protagonist, manages to drop the ball on the narrative, and more importantly, fail to live up to what was potentially a very interesting character development.

Often games will take pieces of history or other fiction to help generate an immediate response from the player. In Bioshock we were not only given a story that closely mimicked Atlas Shrugged, we were also given a character named Atlas, it was a nod that made the overarching world grounded in our reality, and helped push the player into the game even further. In Resistance, we get the same thing. Other than the game taking place in a alternate-post-war world, we also have a main character whose namesake not only predetermines the story’s ending, but grounds it into a reality that we can familiarize with.

Nathan Hale was an officer during the Revolutionary War and considered America’s first spy. He is most famous for the line “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country,” which he muttered before he was hanged by the British. Hale was well known to infiltrate enemy lines, disguise himself as a British soldier and would convey back to the American’s the British troop movements.

Lt. Nathan Hale is the protagonist from Resistance and Resistance 2. He is charged with infiltrating enemy lines to gather the information needed to take down an invading alien force known as the Chimera (another nod to fiction, the mythological beast, Chimera was said to be made out of several different animal parts. This plays into the story with a few allusions to the Chimera possibly being the first inhabitants of Earth and therefore being a mix of human and alien. Unfortunately this is never fully explained or detailed in any way). In his efforts he is infected with an alien virus. The alien virus will eventually take over his body and turn him into an alien himself, however, in the second game a doctor has found a way to inhibit the virus from overtaking him. Despite the suggestions from his officers, Hale decides to push on into the alien forces, refusing to break back to base to get his shots, effectively sacrificing himself to shut down the invading forces.

The Revolutionary War Nathan Hale is often cited as a martyr, Lt. Nathan Hale could be as well, (*SPOILER*) considering that he is killed by a fellow soldier at the end of the second game. This is a very straightforward story and it’s remarkable how Resistance 2 manages to lose ground on it. Namely, we are never given Hale’s back story, so we really don’t know why he’s even fighting in the military, he’s considered a mysterious hero throughout both games, which actually just means that the writer’s never bothered to pen a reasonable past. This makes the case for martyrdom all the more complicated if you do not care for an individual, if you cannot sympathize with their losses, it is difficult to care about their death. Hale obviously choses early on that he is going to sacrifice himself to stop the Chimera, and the writers and developers did as well, otherwise they wouldn’t have named him after a historic martyr. Knowing this, the developer’s still didn’t take the time to give Hale a sense of place or virtue. We don’t need a life story out of him, but any sign of emotion would have been nice. Even in his dying moments he is so crazed by the virus that we aren’t offered a look of worry or doubt from him, but by his killer, who seems, perhaps, to remorse slightly in his choice.

There are narrative follies abound throughout Resistance 2, like a first-time director with tons of new cameras and tricks, the game never seems to figure out how it wants to tell its story. It jumps from first-person to montage to third person so often that you’re constantly forced to reconsider whose viewpoint your seeing the story through, who the narrator is, and more often than not, what the characters are supposed to symbolize. Often in action games we’re given a series of archetype’s, and even here Resistance fails. Sure, we get the scientist that accidentally destroyed the world and is now trying to fix it, the big-mouthed fellow soldier that eventually does the right thing, and our protagonist, who, well, doesn’t fit an archetype. In the first game Hale rarely spoke, simply just fighting his way though the story as someone else narrated the events. Here, Hale won’t shut up, he has questions, complaints and directs the other troops around. But his purpose is just that, barking orders, being a badass, but never fully becoming any of these things.

Generally speaking, when writers pull from history to tell a story, they do so in a way that means something. Unfortunately, Hale’s story doesn’t mean much in Resistance and it’s too bad. It’s a classic action script that wouldn’t have taken much to make it great but in the end is unispired and sadly, uninspiring.

2008 was  a year of missed opportunities. Companies, as usual, rushed to the holiday storefronts and delivered lackluster products in order to keep them timely. One company did this more than any other: Ubisoft is the winner of the year for Best Games That Were Almost Perfect Yet Still Managed To Have One or Two Fatal Flaws That Ruined the Whole Game for Many People award. Some of these games were released with regular old bugs, some with game play flaws, some with graphic flaws, and one game was released with no flaws whatsoever, but being the type of game that it is didn’t garner that much hype behind it. Either way, here we go, the rest of the best of whatever it was I got my hands on this year!

Resistance 2 — Action games are usually pretty easy to execute, run kill run kill run kill story run kill run kill. Resistance 2 tries to be something more with absolutely horrid results. The game misses a giant, easy to hop onto barge when it comes to it’s story. *SPOILER ALERT* The plot follows the continued adventures of Nathan Hale, a soldier infected with an alien virus. Yeah, it’s stupid, but being the second game we’ve gotten used to the premise and even might have gotten close to Hale. Quickly that closeness is removed with shotty storytelling and phoned-in voice acting (literally, the voice acting sounds like it was recorded on a analog tapedeck, run through a washer, put out to dry and then played over a phone line to a Radioshack microphone). What’s worse is the fact that the story is so easy to tell that you’re constantly slapping your forehead as you play: Man sacrifices self to save humanity. Easy-peasy yeah? You’d think that Sony, a gigantic company could’ve hired at least one writer for this script right? A script about a man that is willing to die for his country, that, in fact DOES DIE FOR HIS COUNTRY. And how did I feel when I got shot in the face and the game ended? Happy. Thank goodness they killed me, I thought, happy days, I thought, but, why? I was just shot and I don’t care at all. Okay, okay, some of you are screaming that action games don’t need plots, you don’t need to care about your character… my only response is that if action games don’t want plots then don’t tack them on, don’t decide early in the game to kill your main character at the end if you don’t want to attempt to illicit an emotional responce from the player. So, the story was bland and uninspired, big deal. But the game was an action-game, and action games are no-nonsense fun right? Not with Resistance 2, apparently. The game doesn’t reward you for learning its mechanics or trying out new methods, it rewards you for dying. It’s this type of trial and error game play that, although interesting and fun in the 16-bit era, isn’t really interesting or fun now. Sure, it’ll get the job done, but isn’t advanced AI, player choice and a sense of intelligence and accomplishment where the industry should be heading by now?

Dead Space — Ah, survival horror, the genre that seems to be lost and confused and unable to rescue itself. Dead Space promised to revitalize the genre, give us back something, something new and exciting, a story, a universe a world a theory a blast. It was so damn close — but lacking in some major ways. The world that we get is created through out of the box movies, comics and shorts, the world exists around the game, but fails inside of it. Unfortunately, Dead Space’s biggest flaw comes from its ambition. It really wants the player to buy into the world with an inventive HUD, System Shock-esque storytelling and in game cutscenes. Unfortunately, they forgot to make the ship that you spend the entire game on believable as a living habitat. I’ll take the world, I’ll accept the twisted Scientology-esque plot line, I’ll even accept the girlfriend-gone-missing-turned-ghost part, but could we get a little bit of trash on the spaceship? Maybe some bathrooms? A kitchen? I wanted to believe in this game, to inhabit its world, but EA failed on one of the simplest parts. Dead Space 2? Trash? Bathrooms? Ducking?

NHL 09 – I love hockey, but hockey games aren’t really a yearly necessity for me. I’ll pick one up every few years, or even as rarely as once a generation. However, NHL 09 isn’t just another sports game — and regardless of your thoughts on the sport or sports games in general, it’s difficult not to love NHL 09 for what it accomplishes. Not only are the animations, physics, game play, modes and controls all superior to prior versions, it also introduces the closest thing to an MMO for sports nuts ever seen in sports game. Full online leagues, 6 player co-op, experience points, tournaments — this is the WoW for people with a crush on Mike Modano, Warhammer for those of us who dance in glee when a game is actually broadcast in HD. Simply put, NHL 09 is the best sports game in recent history.

Prince of Persia — Wow, I haven’t seen a game get hated on, loved on, and talked about this much in a while. For a game so polarizing you’d think people would have more concrete ideas, but even some of the best critics still seem to be a bit confused about whether or not they actually enjoyed themselves while playing. Personally, I just bought the thing yesterday for less than $30 which means that my expectations for the game are a bit lower than people people that paid $60. If I enjoy the game for 6 hours I’d say that I’d have gotten my money’s worth. PoP is one of the examples of Ubisoft missing it’s mark again, regardless of my own playthrough reactions (the other times being Far Cry 2 this year, and Assassin’s Creed last year). The company is getting damn close to a great game, but keeps on falling short. You can read what many, many others have said about Prince of Persia by following these links:

• Brainy Gamer’s 4 Part Take on the Game
• Graduate School Gamer
• Variety
• Game Critique

And that’s pretty much it for me. A few DS games popped onto my screens, some downloadable’s, small stuff that I don’t really feel like going to in-depth about. 2008 was, for the most part, a good year, one that showcased the release of a few games with startlingly large ambitions. It’s those ambitions that make 2009 and beyond so exciting. So what do we in Thoronia want to see in the future? Well…

• New IP Price drops — Games like Dead Space, Mirror’s Edge and Little Big Planet would have been better received had they plopped into the marketplace at $40. Game companies need to remember that games, like all medium benefit highly from word of mouth, and if we all chip in to talk about new titles they’ll eventually sell well. Every other media-industry is willing to give early-adopters a price break, why not video games?
• Reviewers need to judge games based on what they do – It seems like the 20-something nerdballs that have become game-reviewers for the major online sites have got the pretension stick so far up their ass that they’ve forgotten that there are hundreds of different types of gamers out there. We all can’t be fit into the two main categories of hardcore and casual. Reviews need to look at a game and what it is supposed to accomplish and judge accordingly. Oh, and online-centric games like Left 4 Dead or Socom need to be reviewed AFTER the launch. I mean, c’mon, how can you review a game without actually playing it? Oh, and on the same topic, reviewers need to finish the games they review. Too many this year have fessed up after the fact that, “well, I’m only on the third level, but I really like it so far…”
• Games need to find their place — We the community and we the gamers need to let developers figure out what they’re doing this year. We need to give them a bit of lee-way as each director and producer learns their place in video game creation. Not all games are going to fit easily into a category and subsequently not all categories are going to hold all the games. In order to expand the medium into something truly special, gamers need to stop crying foul when a developer tries something new. Actually, gamers and fanboys really just need to shut their mouths when it comes to things they don’t understand. I haven’t chimed in on the goofiness of Gears of War 2 for a very distinct reason — I don’t care. So if you don’t, then don’t say anything. The internet is unforgiving, and trust me, when you’re older, and you google your name and find the stupid things you’ve said, you’ll feel, well, stupid.
• DLC needs to go away, patches need to come quicker — Microsoft, don’t be a bunch of dicks. If a game, especially an online based game launches and needs some patching, let the developer do it quickly. And developers (Bethesda, I’m looking at you), don’t charge us the price of another game for expansion packs. Look, Fallout 3 was great, but I already paid $60 for it. Now you want me to spend another $30 on your expansion packs? The ones that easily could have been included on the disc if you weren’t so keen on getting it out for Christmas? No. No. No. This market isn’t going to sustain you’re stupid additions and you need to look at companies like Valve to understand what keeps gamers happy and ready to come back for more. Free upgrades, map packs and patches.
• Trust us, developer’s we’re smart — Game companies and developer’s need to realize that a growing majority of gamers are intelligent and willing to let a game challenge their mind as well as their ethics. We are well read and understand complex concepts, you don’t need to dumb down, or worse, remove idea’s from games because you think we won’t get it.
• Rereleases and sequels — You know how the movie industry is always made fun of for doing stupid things like My Bloody Valentine 3D? Or Spiderman 3? Well, you’re doing that too. Stop. Come up with new ideas or take a cue from a series like Final Fantasy where a game might just exist in a world, or format — we don’t need to continued versions of your already despicable plot lines. Spiritual successors are all well and fine with us.
• Social Components — Not all games have to be online. Not all games need to shared. We, in an era where games are loved for their multi-player to the point of a lack thereof takes points away from a score, need to remember that playing with yourself can be just as fun and relaxing.
• Downloadable Titles — Which is different than DLC, mind you. The three console networks have at their fingertips the picture perfect distribution system (look at Steam console makers). Unfortunately, this has so far been wasted on titles that would be better suited for an arcade than a living room (or again, back to the rereleases: emulation, Dreamcast games, HD upgrades (wherein they make the game kind of blurry and put some artistic bars on the sides of the screen), and a surprisingly large amount of SCHMUPS on the 360). Of course, there are exceptions, but games like Everyday Shooter and Braid proved that a single person could make an amazing game and get it out to hundreds of thousands of people. Sony , now is your chance to showcase your innovation by latching onto more innovative developers. Quick, while Microsoft is busy trying to update Bad Boys to play on the 360, find a help release more games like Flower and Nobi Nobi Boy. Show PS3 users, even if it’s for pretend, that you’re all about the little guys.
• The Cross-Platform Multiplayer Pipedream – It’s 2009, there are three main consoles and PCs. Most games are developed for at least three of these major four. Add onto that we’re also in a recession were few people own multiple systems. Now, I’m not a huge online guy, I prefer a good single player experience. But games like Call of Duty 4 and Left 4 Dead were great life-distractions (if I didn’t have Call of Duty 4 while I was unemployed I don’t know what I would have done with myself). Unfortunetly, I’m a one console person, and it’s difficult to talk friends into buying the PS3 version of games due to the stigma attached to PSN. Now, if PC games can run on a number of systems I don’t see why I wouldn’t be able to play COD4 with a XBOX, I realize Microsoft is money hungry and loves charging for all of their services, but I’d be willing  to sacrifice a little bit of cash for some cross-platform play, and I’m sure others would as well. But then again, maybe that’s why I’m not working in the marketing department anywhere.

People have incredibly strong feelings in regards to the Metal Gear Solid Series. It’s one of those “love it or hate it” franchises that sparks massive debates by bloggers and critics — yet in a critical score generally receives high marks. The video game community has poured over this title like no other this year, with exception perhaps to Little Big Planet and Grand Theft Auto IV. It was marketed as not only a PS3 seller, but a perfect conclusion to one of the most cinematic and confusing stories to ever hit the consoles. You won’t be hard pressed to  find information about the game on the internet, so if you’re interested feel free to do so. What I want to talk about here however, is the metagaming that Metal Gear incorporates so well.

Metafiction, much like MGS, is a love it or hate it genre of fiction. It’s often called experimental, cheap, or on several occasions, childish. It has been used as a technique for storytelling in countless books and films ranging from The Neverending Story to House of Leaves, from If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler to  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. By definition, it is fiction that is self-aware.

Few games are willing to break the fourth wall, and while many tinker with it (say Super Paper Mario), few dive in completely. This year we had two titles that used the technique to varying degree’s, No More Heroes on the Wii, which used super-stylized metagameness to create a bizarre world in which having a character named Travis Touchdown become an assassin who uses a lightsaber to hit baseballs back at pitchers, and Metal Gear Solid 4, which used meta-gaming techniques to break immersion then subsequently to create a new kind of game experience. While No More Heroes was all in good fun, the literary equivalent of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or Breakfast of Champions, Metal Gear Solid 4 takes the House of Leaves approach (with about as many characters and plot points to keep track of as well).

Metal Gear Solid 4 has its quirky moments, from jokes about the Xbox 360’s storage capacity to player-triggered flashback sequences, but some of the game’s best experiences come when the game reminds you that is is just that, a game. Take one of the games ending sequences in which the aged and near death Old Snake is forced to crawl through a microwave to get to computer server in hopes of shutting it down. Everything at this point in the game is falling apart, friends are getting shot, cut, slapped down, shot at, Snake’s gear is falling apart, the world seems on the brink of destruction. What one would expect from a game of this nature is a big, catostrophic cutscene that moves the story along. That is, essentially what you get, however instead of the game letting you sit back and watch it all happen, you are forced to push the triangle button to get Snake to proceed. At first this is a simple task, but as he gets further and further into the microwave, he begins to collapse to the floor and the player has to keep pushing the triangle button. For what seems like several minutes, with your hands getting numb, Snake crawls across the floor, and you continue pounding on triangle, scene’s cut through across the screen of everyone else in your party going down, and you continue to press the triangle button. This does absolutely nothing in regards to breaking any illusion to the fact that you’re playing a game, but it does make you feel the torment that Snake feels, you are tired, weary and sick of doing this whole thing until, finally, with carpal tunnel setting in, you make it. Triumphant isn’t generally a word associated with a single button press, but here it is one of the most relieving and self-aware moments in gaming history.

There are several more events throughout the game, but it’s up to you to find them. The point here is that Metal Gear Solid 4 enjoys breaking the fourth wall, it relishes in it, and somehow, regardless of the constant reminder of its medium, the player feels a solid connection to Snake. A connection that would be impossible if we were just given a set of hands holding a gun, or even feet that we can see while running. In the end, it proves that immersion doesn’t have to always mean the same thing, and for that Metal Gear Solid 4 is a rewarding and intelligent experience that, although bloated at points, silly in others, is one of the best video game experiences of the last decade.

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.