Tag Archives: Notes

Why Hitman (2016) Works

Posted on by

hitman-episode-one-review-501715-22The superpower of the protagonist of most challenge-oriented videogames is time travel. Through the loops of failure and dressage that conventional videogame design depends on, the player fails at a task again and again until they have memorised how to proceed through the events that, on the current playthough, have not actually happened yet. This might be a muscle memory, ingraining in your hands the exact rhythm of movements required for a Rock Band track or a Super Meat Boy level. Or it might be a more traditional memory of remembering placements and patterns: the trap door full of monsters you could not have predicted in Doom kills you once and then, on the next attempt, you’re ready for it. Instead of dying you get a glimpse at what is about to happen. You remember what hasn’t happened yet.

The analogy has been made by various critics in the past (I think Janet Murray might have been the earliest) that the videogame player is not unlike Bill Murray’s character in Groundhogs Day, repeating the same system over and over again: at times taking it seriously, at times playing with the system, at times bored and frustrated by it. The more recent Edge of Tomorrow provides a similar conceit, but is I think more accurate of how videogames train players, killing Tom Cruise over and over again on the battlefield until he makes the exact right movements to get through it alive—exact movements he can only make with the memories possessed from the previous attempts. Edge of Tomorrow is how videogames work to train their players; Groundhog Day is more the wide range of emotions that players go through while existing in such a temporal spiral.  Continue reading →

Notes on Titanfall 2

Posted on by

bt_thumbsup

1. Titanfall was very good. Considering it was made primarily by former Infinity Ward members, it very easily could’ve just been Call of Duty multiplayer but with giant robots. But it managed to be more than that. Respawn thought carefully about the game’s balance. They had to. The giant robots couldn’t just be an instant win. Counterintuitively, if the game was to be about how amazing these big robots were, there needed to be advantages to not being in a robot. The obvious way to deal with this was level design: doorways and building interiors that a titan can’t fit into. Each Titanfall map had a mixture of wide roads and open areas for the Titans and twisting corridors and rooftops for the nimble Pilots. Make it so the player has to leave the titan sometimes. Easy.

The less obvious approach: make not being in a titan feel really good. If the titans are giant, clunky, invincible machines, then the pilots have to be the opposite of that. This isn’t just the default Call of Duty first-person controller. You can auto-dash, wall-run, slide, double-jump. The repertoire of your character opens up Titanfall’s maps in exciting ways. When you are clomping around in your titan, pilots could be anywhere around you while you are stuck in your little area. Titanfall didn’t just make the robots feel good. It ensured the robots and the humans felt polemically different, each contrasting and accentuating the strengths of the other.  Continue reading →

They’re good games Brent

Posted on by

shiren_05-05-16

I’ve played some really fascinating games lately and have wanted to write about them, but have not had the time to do so.Instead of a post on each game (which each truly deserves), here are some quick and messy thoughts I’ve been having about three games.  Continue reading →

Notes on No Man’s Sky

Posted on by

No Man's Sky_20160813174845.jpg

1. No Man’s Sky is a small videogame made by a tiny, indie studio that, like most small indie videogames, is clearly trying to achieve a very specific experience for a very specific audience. No Man’s Sky is a massive, triple-a videogame being released by Sony on a disc for a full sixty bucks that, like all triple-a games, has to please everyone who plays triple-a videogames. Both these statements are true, which, if nothing else, mostly highlights how categories like ‘indie’ are constructed more from a perceived sense of performed ‘indie-ness’ rather than any quantifiable factors. How you perceive No Man’s Sky is intricately tied up in whether you think it succeeds at being that particular thing for a particular audience, or whether you think it fails to be the next big triple-a open-world game for all gamers that it was set up to be (in part by marketing and in part by those gamers).  Continue reading →

On The Beginner’s Guide

Posted on by

I didn’t spend too much time with Davey Wreden’s previous game, The Stanley Parable. I felt like I got it pretty quickly. I did, however, spend quite a lot of time watching students play it and listening to game scholars talk about it. While thematically I found it pretty to-the-point (all choices and agency in videogame play is an illusion), it was quite spectacularly put together. Just really beautiful and clever environment design.

What I couldn’t stand about The Stanley Parable was most of what was said about that game. I have an issue with analyses (especially academic analyses) of games whose themes are incredibly obvious. Suffice to say, I could live the rest of my life without seeing another conference presentation on what The Stanley Parable says about choice or what Papers, Please says about ethics or what This War of Mine says about war. It’s not that I think any of these games are bad, but more that they are games that I guess I don’t think require any thematic analysis. It’s pretty obvious what they are doing! Analysing how they do these things is still worthy (the difficulty of desk space in Papers, Please, for instance) but simply pointing out that The Stanley Parable is about choice just seems… boring and easy. To stress: this isn’t a fault of the games themselves.

I would rather analyse games that aren’t so obviously about a specific thing. Perhaps this is why I end up writing more about blockbuster titles than indie or amateur titles despite the latter two almost always doing something far more interesting. Writing a critical analysis of a blockbuster title is more difficult and thus (for me, anyway) more rewarding.

So on the one hand, writing about Wreden’s second game, The Beginner’s Guide, seems like a pointless thing to do as the game pretty explicitly tells you what it is about. The Beginner’s Guide is games criticism so to analyse it would almost be an excruciatingly meta exercise. My three favourite essays on the game so far (Cameron Kunzelman, Laura Hudson, Cara Ellison) all kind of circle around this challenge in different ways (and each has far more interesting things to say about the game than I do). It is an incredibly meaty game for a game critic to latch onto, but I’m also wary that perhaps that is because it is just too obvious what it is doing and, thus, any further analysis might not even be necessary. Continue reading →

On Super Mario Maker

Posted on by

I didn’t grow up with Super Mario. My experience of Mario games is for the most part fragmented and third-hand. A friend owned a copy of Super Mario All Stars so I would see the first few stages of each Mario over and over again every time I visited. In high school, when I was getting into emulators, I would load up the same games, play for five minutes sitting stiff-backed at a keyboard, then never play again. In the last couple of years, I played both Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario World to completion on my WiiU and felt like I finally understood why these games were significant beyond the fact that many of my peers played them as a child.

And despite my frustration with the narrowness of videogames’ accepted canon (“Oh wow you’ve never played Super Mario World before??”), these are important games. They’re elegant, clever, well designed, imaginative. They’re the kind of games that if I played them in the late 80s or early 90s I would have been absolutely captured by their charm and the way they suggest through hidden paths and invisible blocks the existence of countless mysteries to discover.

Most crucially is the movement. The “sticky friction” of Mario’s inertia that makes momentum so crucial and movement constantly fluctuating between frustrating and fluid. While other platformers see movement as just the baseline on which ‘real’ interactions are developed, the Mario games understand that movement itself (of fingers, of avatars) forms the base pleasure of videogame play.

It’s for this reason alone that Super Mario Maker works as well as it does. Outsourcing level design to players was always going to result in an overwhelmingly number of mediocre levels. But that’s okay, because each and every level give you a new environment to move Mario through and a constantly new environment to explore. Movement and exploration have kept Mario fresh for thirty years now, and Super Mario Maker taps into this. Continue reading →

On Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

Posted on by

(I have avoided explicit spoilers through this essay, but I do mention moments from within the game and suggest themes and topics that emerge during play. If you are yet to play the game and would prefer to go in blind so that every little thing is a surprise, you probably shouldn’t read this.)

There is no denying it: the second of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain’s two chapters is an unfinished mess. The intent was clearly that after chapter one concludes what has until that point been the main plot (while leaving various other threads open), chapter two was intended to feel like a return to normality for Big Boss and his Diamond Dogs private military company. The intent was clearly to feel not like a story was progressing but like everyday life was just going on while this or that plot thread resolves itself. In reality, though, the progression of this second chapter is inconsistent and unsatisfactory. Majority of the missions are not new but repeats of earlier missions with harsher conditions; they feel like the kind of tasks you would unlock post-completion, which was perhaps the point. Plot progresses with occasional cutscenes rarely connected to any particular mission: you’ve played for long enough to see the next story bit. These story bits do not conclude, however, as the final mission that would conclude them never made it into the game. The ending we do get is one I found satisfying, but it has no connection to anything the player is doing at the time. It has no connection to anything the player has done at all, really, since the game’s prologue. Everything the player does in the game is ultimately pointless, a distraction. But, then again, perhaps that was the point. 

From the video that shows what would have happened in that final, abandoned mission, it seems Hideo Kojima’s ambitions got ahead of him. It would have required a massive new area to be created on top the game’s existing two huge environments and the immaculately detailed hospital of the prologue. It’s through chapter two—both what is present and what is absent—that the tensions between Kojima and Konami that ultimately led to Kojima leaving the company can be seen most clearly. Kojima wanted to make his epic bigger and bigger to an absurd and (from a capitalist perspective) irrational scale. Kojima wanted more time and money for a whole third chapter, if rumours are to be believed; Konami wanted this game to just hurry up and ship already. I can’t really be angry at either party for this.

Ultimately, I find The Phantom Pain’s unfinished state charming. This does not feel like a lazy sort of unfinished but an overly-ambitious sort of unfinished. It feels like a modern day equivalent of one of those huge cathedrals the architect was never really going to finish in their lifetime. I want to make comparisons to Wagner’s Ring Cycle or Hugo’s Les Misérables or Wyler’s Ben Hur. It’s a work that impresses through its sheer, intimidating size. By this I don’t just mean how big the map is (but this as well) or how many dozens of hours it takes to see the story through (but this as well). There is an audacious attention to detail in every single moment of The Phantom Pain that marks a confidently inefficient use of a production budget. I think this tweet of Matthew Yaeger about Quiet’s armpit and these tweets by Robert Yang about animations only appearing once in the game are great examples of this. Phantom Pain is wasteful in its enthusiasm, its inefficiency. It’s a heightened level of enthusiasm for itself that I can’t help but find infectious. The game is an incomplete mess, there is no denying it; but it is the very clear ambition that I find truly exciting. Continue reading →

On Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture

Posted on by

I think it’s fair to call ‘walking sims’ a genre now. The term started as a snide quip towards those exploratory games where the player ‘does’ nothing (in lieu of any attempt to understand how the player actually does engage with said games), but it does adequately describe (mechanically, at least) a collection of works. I think this is an important point to start this post with as I think Chinese Room’s Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture was most impressive for me in the way it forwarded the walking sim genre into new territories.

*

Chinese Room’s earlier game, Dear Esther, was an explicit attempt at mechanical minimalism. Dan Pinchbeck said in multiple interviews (including one with me for an Edge feature on walking games) that he wanted to remove as much gameplay as possible to see what the bare minimum requirement for an interesting engagement would be. So they threw out everything except looking, listening, and moving.

Dear Esther would find itself centre stage in the incredibly boring and reductive debates about just what counts as a videogame. This is something I found ironic as, for me, Dear Esther is an exercise in videogame formalism. It is an exploration of just how players meaningfully engage with videogames once you move beyond the marketing promises of surmountable challenges and consequential choices. It provides a space to explore and the means to explore it. It challenges narrow understandings of what counts as ‘interacting’ with a game, putting to the fore the interactions had with eyes-on-screens and ears-at-speakers.

(In one of my favourite essays of his, David Kanaga says:

We can move or play in videogames—not much more can be said definitely. I am interested in a formalism […] that builds from this premise, that regards this movement in much the same way that musical movement is regarded, which has meanings, but meanings which are unspeakable, which are living in the material itself, and which mean very little divorced from the context.

I think walking sims exemplify this. Especially Dear Esther with its strict commitment to walking, listening, and looking as the only possible engagements.)

*

After and around the same time as Dear Esther you have Journey with its focus on graceful movement and companionship; Proteus with its musical and relaxing islands (a ‘sit’ button replaces the more typical ‘jump’ button); Gone Home provides a singular but intricate space to walk around, objects to handle in a more traditional style, and a clever play on horror conventions. No shortage of individual creators have created their own games that could also be classified as walking sims. Blockbuster games such as Alien: Isolation have included extended sequences where the player does nothing but walk and look and listen (and of course such sequences existed long before ‘walking sim’ was formalised as a name). The genre has come into its own to an extent that I feel comfortable calling it a genre. Continue reading →

On Appreciating Final Fantasy XIII

Posted on by

I remember in the past how I felt the only correct response to “Are videogames ‘games’ or ‘stories’?” was “Yes”. That is, rejecting the false dichotomy of the question that implies videogames can only be one or the other. More recently, however, I feel like my answer to this question (if anyone still asked it) would be “No”. That is, still rejecting the false dichotomy of the question that implies videogames can only be one of the other, but also expressing my feeling that neither existing category of ‘game’ or ‘story’ is really capable of encompassing just what the videogame form is capable of. Each has come to feel like convenient ‘close enough’ categories in lieu of actually understanding the particular (but not necessarily unique) engagements we have with videogames.

This felt particularly vivid while playing through Final Fantasy XIII these past few months. On multiple occasions I went to write a tweet about just why I was enjoying this much-derided game so much (and enjoying it I certainly was). I wanted to say that it wasn’t because of the story that I was finding it so satisfying, but I knew that if I said that then people would instantly assume that I am enjoying it for mechanical and systemic reasons. But these weren’t necessarily the reason I was enjoying it either. Neither category of ‘game’ (in the traditional sense) or ‘story’ (in the strictest sense) could adequately function as a shorthand for what I was finding so satisfying about this game. Words that would more adequately fit would be rhythm, style, pace, audacity, flamboyance. None of these really stand on their own as shorthands in casual game discourse, though. For that we have game (gameplay/mechanics/systems/rules/etc) or story (narrative/character/themes/lore/etc) and that’s about it. Box one or box two.

Continue reading →

On Hotline Miami 2

Posted on by

hotlinemiami2_838351

At the end of Hotline Miami 2‘s tutorial, your playable character rapes a woman. It’s not a “real” rape, in the sense that moments too late a director just off-screen calls out “Cut!” and you realise you are just an actor in a film. But it wouldn’t be a “real” rape anyway in the sense that “you” are not the “actual” instigator of your various crimes throughout Hotline Miami 2; your character is. This is obviously the point: a deliberate, ambiguous blurring between actor (player) and character. Yet, as Cara Ellison noted when she first played a preview of the game nearly two years ago, this neither excuses nor justifies what ultimately feels like a gross, empty scene run purely for the shock. It feels unnecessary when a simple execution of a mob boss (a horrific act much more inline with Hotline Miami 2′s themes) would have sufficed. It’s emblematic of Hotline Miami 2 more broadly: as long as it sticks to what the original game did best, it’s fine; when it tries to branch out—either thematically or mechanically—it falls apart.

For a while, Hotline Miami 2 does manage to both recapture what was special about Hotline Miami and also expand on the original in a way any sequel should. Most people thought the first game was trying to be a deep musing on virtual violence, for better or worse. Some saw it as a really insightful reflection on the messed up shit we do in videogames. Others saw it, much like Spec Ops: The Line, as a developer absolving themselves of wrongdoing while putting all the blame on the player, like how companies go “Hey, it’s what the customer wanted”. For me, however, it was the game’s superficiality that I appreciated. I don’t think it was trying to say “something” so much as I think it was unabashedly committed to not really saying anything and being okay with that. It felt less ironic to me and more ambivalent. “Yeah. This is fucked up. Whatever.”

For a large part, I feel like Hotline Miami 2 manages to do the same. There’s not a whole lot of places a story can go after the end of Hotline Miami, and so the game doesn’t really try to advance it. Instead, the player jumps from character to character (practically always men) and vignette to vignette. Some of these characters are getting the weird phone calls, other seem to be the ones making those phone calls. Others still are just detectives or actors killing a bunch of people. I haven’t finished the game (and for reasons detailed below I probably won’t) but as of yet very few of the stories have hinted at any interrelationship. For the most part they’re all just kind of happening and you’re not entirely sure what it going on and that’s okay.

It’s style over substance. Hotline Miami was always style over substance. It’s all neon and music and rhythm and pulsing and swaying and splatting more than any attempt at a deep, thought-provoking story. But of course style versus substance is a false dichotomy and Hotline Miami‘s substance is in its style. It’s substance is that glorious, satisfying blend of music and violence. It’s the hypnotic backgrounds and the way the camera tilts around as you move and the really satisfying *crunch* of a baseball bat against a skull. It’s in the really quite remarkable detail squeezed out of so few pixels. Hotline Miami is much more concerning with being satisfying for the body than for the mind, and that is entirely okay.

So. Hotline Miami 2 is a sequel. It can’t just do the same thing as the original. It should be commended, I guess, for the ways it has tried to mix things up. For the most part, the core vocabulary hasn’t changed: hold one weapon at a time, melee weapons and guns kill instantly, throwing weapons or punching knocks enemies down for executions. Most stages take the exact same vocabulary as the original game and try to twist it to write sentences the first game never expressed. It’s a commendable approach to creating a sequel, but not one the game is entirely successful at.

Levels are larger, and more enemies are armed with guns. As such, it’s often less strategic and more twitchy than the first game and, consequentially, loses the magic from the first game to instead feel like a frustrating and pretty but ultimately bog-standard twin-stick shooter. Most frustrating, enemies have a longer viewing distance than the player, often able to shoot you from way off screen. The words that Hotline Miami used are all there, but they just don’t go together well.

But worse still than the general failings of the level and puzzle design are those stages that try to change that base vocabulary. One mission sends you off to the jungle for a particularly bland series of stages. Here, you character has a gun and a machete, and is incapable of dropping weapons for new weapons. Worse still, you are incapable of picking up extra ammunition for the weapon you are unable to drop, since the game was never built for an undroppable weapon. So you run out of ammo and then are stuck with this machete you can’t even throw (Update: turns out there are ammo crates around the level! That was not clear at all.). Any attempt at interesting strategy goes out the window as you stand behind a door and peek out to convince baddies to run at you one at a time. Instead of the satisfaction of rushing around a stage painting it with corpses and blood, you end up with a comical pile of twenty corpses behind a door.

A later level swaps you between characters on different floors of a building. Whereas the first game gave you a range of masks to choose from, each with its own skill and demanding a particular approach to that level, this later stage forces you to use a different masked character for each floor. One floor has you controlling a character with deadly punches but, again, incapable of picking up weapons. An enjoyable alternative way to play, perhaps, but not something I want to be forced into.

Thematically and mechanically, Hotline Miami 2 tries to differentiate itself from the original game and in each it comes up short. Just as its superficial, ill-conceived, and offensively flippant engagement with sexual violence jars completely with the otherwise enticing rapid-fire hyperviolent vignettes, every attempt to change up what made the first game so hypnotic and intoxicating instead makes the game frustrating and banal. Hotline Miami 2 is, ultimately, a sequel that has failed to convince me it needed to exist.