Developers Shouldn't Use Cliff Notes.

Right off the bat, I should say that I'm really enjoying Castlevania: Lords of Shadow so far. I've only just started chapter 2, but I'm currently appreciating the slow-burn of both the game play and story. Be that as it may, I've already found my first brow-furrowing moment in the game. Ever heard of Shadow of the Colossus?

Well, the dudes at Konami sure have. The first boss fight in the game is, well, a rip-off from SotC. I don't say "complete rip-off" because the experience of actually fighting it isn't anywhere near as awesome as every encounter was in the PS2 classic. The fight in Castlevania is a dumbed-down version of the structure SotC used, but with a couple ground attacks thrown your way every now and then. Tell me if this sounds familiar:

First, you have to wait for the titan to slam his fist hard enough into the ground so that it gets stuck. When that happens, you run over to his fist and grab onto it, holding down the "grip" button so as to not fall off. You then proceed along the titan's body until you get to the round, glowing symbol, so that you can stab the shit out of it. Repeat on a couple more parts of its body, and you're done.

Yea, it's basically the Cliff Notes version of fighting a colossus. I could assume that someone on the development team just wanted to pay homage to a great game, and that would be relatively fine with me, I guess. But if you're going to steal from something, STEAL from it. Don't do a half-assed job.

A big reason the titan fight feels like a rush job is because your hand is held the entire time. Right when its fist gets stuck in the ground, the part you're supposed to latch onto starts glowing. Just as you begin holding the "grip" button, the titan's arm raises up and the next section for you to jump to glows like the last. There's not really any exploration or figuring out how to get around on its body; it's a shame, since those moments really stood out in SotC, and probably could have in Castlevania.

I ultimately came away from the fight with a better understanding of why no one has tried imitating SotC before now. It's hard to do well, and is made even harder by the fact that SotC isn't concerned with a lot of things other games are concerned with. SotC relies on atmosphere and implication for narrative; Castlevania's story is told in a similar vein to other action games. SotC's main game play mechanic involves giant, moving puzzles for the player to solve; Castlevania has multitudes of enemies, levels, combat, and bosses to take into consideration. What it all boils down to is the fact that such a boss design should at least be on par with its source material, or we're all just wasting our time and effort. I could go kill 15 other, better ones instead of a shitty retread.

I'm still enjoying the game, so I'll try to talk about some of the stuff I like next time. There's actually quite a lot.

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Cheap Thrills - Alan Wake

I recently reviewed Alan Wake for a school paper, so I figured I'd throw it up here. It's lengthier than most of the stuff I normally write, so be forewarned. I actually didn't get to address everything I wanted to because of length, so I might put up a separate post talking about those things. This one's worth it, though, because it's fucking awesome. Enjoy.


“But nightmares exist outside of logic, and there’s little fun to be had in explanations; they’re antithetical to the poetry of fear.” - Stephen King

Alan Wake, a psychological thriller developed by Remedy Entertainment for the Xbox 360, opens with the above quote by Stephen King, and the titular character narrating what seems to be the central theme of the game. According to Wake, the “Why?” is never as important as the emotions one goes through during a horrifying experience. There’s nothing wrong with that sentiment. In fact, I mostly agree with it. But Alan Wake forgoes the “Why?” almost entirely, in favor of nonsensical exposition and repetitive, tired shooting mechanics that would be more at home in Max Payne 3 than something rooted in psychological horror.

Alan Wake is a writer. After a string of best-sellers, he feels burnt out and ready for some rejuvenation, so he and his wife, Alice, retreat to the small town of Bright Falls. It’s a typical, if extraordinarily beautiful, mid-western American town, replete with trailer park communities and neighbors all on a first name basis. Bright Falls would normally make for the perfect getaway destination, but when Wake and his wife arrive, they quickly find something more sinister and violent lurking about the otherwise peaceful surroundings. His wife soon ends up missing, and the only clues to her whereabouts come in the form of torn manuscript pages from a story he doesn’t remember writing, but is obviously penned by him. As the game progresses, it’s made evident that whatever is written on the torn pages actually comes to pass. Armed with this knowledge, Wake tries desperately to find and save his wife from whatever is holding her captive.

Alan Wake’s premise was one of the things that caught my attention early on when the game was first announced. I figured the mountainous and woodsy terrain would make an excellent backdrop for psychologically-themed horror. Playing the first chapter of the game, which takes place inside one of Wake’s nightmares, communicates a world full of unique and scary situations. The very first enemy encounter is simply a man with an axe, but it’s not the weapon he wields that makes him terrifying. While blindly swinging the axe back-and-forth, the man assaults Wake’s fragile psyche by calling him a fraud and a horrible writer. The threat of physical harm may be obvious, but barrages of mental abuse, especially within the context of a nightmare, carry much more weight than wood and steel ever could.

Unfortunately, such a promising concept is all but abandoned shortly after the end of the first chapter. Gone are the venomous projections of Wake’s personal demons, and in their place are slews of non sequiturs about working at lumber mills and pumping gas. Part of who these people used to be is still inside them, but they are now owned by whatever entity is plaguing Bright Falls. That may sound intriguing, but by replacing the focus on Wake’s internal strife with random, nonsensical shouts about small town living, all the tension and fear is instantly siphoned away. Coupled with uniformly featureless faces and pitch-black appearances, the enemies in Alan Wake directly mirror the game’s inability to differentiate itself from countless other horror-themed experiences.

And at no time is that exemplified more than during a point about mid-way through the game, when Wake finds himself a guest in a local psychologist’s mental institution called “The Lodge.” Wake opens his eyes to the doctor peering down at him, telling him that he’s been a patient of his for some time. Wake’s wife died a long time ago, and he couldn’t handle the stress and grief, or so the well-meaning doctor informs him. This section of the game could have contained its most probing character study, but instead devolves into the predictability and repetition that plagues the entire work. Instead of Wake questioning his own sanity, cooped up in a loony bin with all the other fine patrons of the establishment, he never second-guesses himself. Within ten minutes, the doctor’s ruse crumbles against Wake’s underwhelming scrutiny. Once he decides to expose reality for what it is, all it takes is a trip to the main office, where records clearly exonerate him of his “fragile” mental state. Of course, after this information is obtained, enemies begin appearing, and Wake has to shoot his way to freedom. It’s also worth mentioning that once he makes it to the outside grounds, Wake must navigate through a Shining-esque hedge maze in order to escape. No, he doesn’t freeze to death while screaming “Danny!”, but that would have at least been unexpected.

The more contiguous narrative problem goes back to Wake’s declaration that “Why?” is not a necessary component of effective horror. In the case of Alan Wake, its believability hinges on that question being answered. And to a degree, it is. Throughout the course of the game, the moment-to-moment narrative is explained well enough, but the bigger, game-spanning question of “Why?” is almost never even addressed. If the whole game takes place after Wake writes a story, then why are characters and situations he’s yet to encounter present in an unrelated nightmare before he even goes on vacation? Why is only his manuscript capable of changing reality? Why can demons that appear out of nowhere be killed with guns when light is supposed to be their weakness? Why does the evil entity even need Wake when it seems capable enough of destruction on its own? Why can’t Wake just write the happiest ending imaginable at any point during the game? All those questions are perfectly reasonable to ask, but they’re sidestepped in favor of vague premonitions or visions that don’t make much sense, even after the game is over.

Perhaps even more disappointing than the story are the mechanics. This might sound like a snarky question, but it’s an honest one: What the hell has Remedy been doing for 7 years? Their last game, Max Payne 2, released at the tail end of 2003, and they’ve been silent since. I could brush that aside if there was a reason to, but the core game play doesn’t feel like it’s changed much since their previous efforts almost a decade ago. Wake aims a flashlight at enemies, shoots them until they’re dead, and then does it again when necessary. That’s it. There’s really no finesse to speak of, and nothing interesting, evolutionary or innovative has been added to the static formula of most third-person shooters. What that boils down to is the unfortunate fact that I could have played this game 7 years ago and been fine with it. But at this point in the lifespan of the medium, to only require such a rudimentary and rote skill set speaks volumes as to the mindset of the people responsible for implementing it. Enemies never change, and neither do the tactics for dispatching them. If there are too many to handle, just pop a flashbang or use a flare gun to thin the crowd. Always aim for the head, and reload often. Those tips shouldn’t be applicable in the slightest in a self-proclaimed psychological thriller. After all, shooting everything that moves seems pretty physically thrilling to me. In any case, Alan Wake’s game play is a textbook case of wash-rinse-repeat, only in the blandest way possible.

One of the most egregious examples of Alan Wake’s stale mechanics again takes place at “The Lodge.” Once Wake finds the evidence of his still-reigning sanity, he has to get out of the asylum as fast as possible. But first, he must do battle with inanimate objects come to life - a notable Stephen King trope - in order to get outside to safety. Floating couches and barrels might be scary in a movie or book, but when “defeating” them entails the exact same shooting mechanics employed against human enemies, I have to wonder why the game even bothered to include them.

After having valiantly and courageously struck down a possessed Art Deco ball sculpture, Wake heads outside, where the aforementioned hedge maze awaits him. What kind of surprises could be hiding in the bushes? If you guessed “shadow people,” you might have a job opportunity as a Remedy scriptwriter in your near future. Just like every other encounter in the game, Wake is tasked with putting bullets into people while running forward (technically in a zigzag pattern). But what stands out the most in a long line of miscalculations is the decision to turn the psychologist from the beginning of the chapter into just another faceless goon. A potential story-defining character is reduced to acting out enemy behavior whose redundancy knows no bounds. There is a clearing at the end of the hedge maze, and in the middle of it stands the good doctor, patiently waiting around for Wake to show up. Once he does, the doctor reverts back to the supposedly antagonistic cries about work-related situations that have already grown tiresome. Such is the cure-all in a game more able to deal with the illusion of fear, rather than the reality of it.

There are some great environmental effects, such as the trees and wind looking as if they’re being perpetually rewound in a VCR, and gigantic trees crackling and buckling for seemingly no reason, only to fall directly in your path with a deadening thud. But those effects are wasted when the whole game consists of the same few tricks repeated ad nauseum. If having explanatory power is antithetical to the poetry of fear, then predictability should be a cardinal sin of writing horror. Even when certain plot points are explained at the end, the only thing that I came away with was the fact that an even bigger mystery just supplanted a smaller one. Ambiguous endings have their place, and when done well, they can turn befuddlement into a praise-worthy event. Without giving anything away, Alan Wake basically ends with “…and you thought THAT was weird!” As a matter of fact, I did, and I also realized that there have been dozens, if not hundreds, of similar experiences in different media that far outweigh this game’s blind repetition and reluctance to explain anything of importance. If the devil’s in the details, Alan Wake is as angelic as it gets.
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Level 3.

No, that's not the name of the game pictured above. Instead, it's how far I leveled up in Fragile Dreams before I decided to shit-can it from my collection. Why? It's quite simple, actually: the combat really, really sucked. Like, really. "Oh, but if you can muster enough strength to power through the combat parts, the rest of the game is a lot better," some might say to me. Sorry, but I shouldn't have to muster the strength to get through a game. If I'm not convinced I should even be holding the controller, it's a safe bet I shouldn't be. It's a shame, though, because everything besides the gameplay was working for me. The atmosphere was foreboding and desolate; the score hit all the right notes; the story had a lot of potential; and yet I traded it in after only about two hours of game time. Sad day.

OK, so, the combat. Not one aspect of it did anything for me. I started off with a stick, and I hit some dogs over the head with it. Fair enough. But then I hit some floating jellyfish with it. Then I found a bamboo sword and hit some dogs and jellyfish with it. Then my bamboo sword broke, so I switched back to the stick. Then it broke, as well. As it turns out, a broken stick was the last weapon I was able to wield before I gave up, and that doesn't sit right with me. Oh, well, I guess, because maneuvering around borderline-retarded enemy A.I. that have the worst dodging abilities known to man or computer didn't really make me want to find a better weapon. Take the dogs, for example. When you hit them, they automatically jump backwards, no matter where they are. So my main plan of attack was to always angle my swing towards a wall or object in the environment, that way when they jumped back, they didn't actually move. Instead of the dog leaping out of harm's way, it just backwards-dry-humped the wall while I beat it in the face. Not how I would like to go out, but I'm not a post-apocalyptic canine that appears into, and disappears from existence whenever a human being walks past me.

The way weapons break in Fragile Dreams is just about the stupidest thing on the planet. Apparently, there's no formula to follow or weapon HP to keep track of. Shit just breaks sometimes. And I can say from experience that my only two weapons (which sucked anyways) both broke shortly after about an hour of playing. If the developers wanted to force people to use different weapons, hey, I'm all for it. But they can't make it happen by random chance. Theoretically, then, it could break after the first time I used it. There's no strategy or brainpower needed to play along with that scenario; it's called shitty design. And compounding the brain-dead weapon system is the fact that it can be overly-cumbersome to aim and successfully hit enemies sometimes. If I press down on the nunchuk, I would normally expect my character to turn towards the camera. Oh, no. Not in Fragile Dreams. It works similarly to Silent Hill: Origins, only less-so. I had to maneuver the flashlight with the Wii-mote in order to face the enemy I wanted to hit, and it got obnoxious pretty quickly when I was whiffing half of the time, only to get hit for 50 damage from a fucking jellyfish. Why are there floating jellyfish? I don't know. And I didn't mention this before, but why are there person-less pants with blue flames instead of upper torsos laughing at me? I don't know, but whatever.

The main point I want to drive home here is that the first few hours in a game are arguably the most important. And with a game like Fragile Dreams, I was looking forward more to the adventuring aspects than the combat. What I found, however, was that the world made me want to push forward, but the game itself kept holding me back. It's one reason I can't stand most JRPGs, but I thought this one could have been different. Sure, it could have been, but the gameplay is sadly but surely stuck in the same boring and tedious level-grind mentality that plagues pretty much all the games I hate. So, in the end, hate wins out again. This is one giant victory for hate.


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John Marston is the anti-Niko Bellic.

Really, it's true. And it's a funny thing that Dan Houser wrote one of the absolute worst video game characters in history and also one of the best. I think Rockstar was trying to create a John Marston-type of character when they made GTA IV, but for whatever reason they failed miserably. The 2nd time was a charm, however, because Red Dead: Redemption accomplishes everything narratively that GTA IV tried to.

The first, and most glaring issue with Niko Bellic was his motivation. Namely, he had none. Why did he continue to murder, steal and be an all-out asshole in the face of his repeated lamenting of that lifestyle? Beats me. As far as I can tell, he's just a poorly-written dick. He came to America with the hope of starting fresh; killing was a part of his past, but he tired of it and wanted to be a better person. That's what we're supposed to believe, anyway. But as the story unfolded, I couldn't help but shake my head at the horrendous dialogue and situations Niko put himself in, and for no reason. The whole game is done a huge disservice by having the main character make absolutely no sense, and it's one - but not the only - reason I'll never bring it up as a high or even interesting point in gaming. It's just a big, sloppy mess.

Fast-forward a couple of years and we have ourselves a masterpiece in Red Dead: Redemption. Is the game perfect? Not at all. Does it erase all the past mistakes of Houser's writing? I don't know about erasing them, but it sure as hell washes the bad taste out of my mouth (interesting fact: epic fail tastes like the ass-end of a chicken). John Marston is basically the same character as Niko Bellic, only with real motivations, a believable moral code, and a surrounding game world with much less disconnect between the player and the "reality" presented. All of those things combined to make a more engrossing experience, and also stop me from puking in my mouth a little once I finished the game. I was pretty grateful for that last part.

But why is Marston more believable? Well, the premise of his single-mindedness is simple: he had to track and kill people or his family would die. In the changing world of the early 20th century, the newly-formed U.S. government was totally fine with resorting to thuggery to get a job done, and Marston was the perfect pawn for their plan. And in a stroke of narrative genius, Houser made sure Marston never got too caught up in other people's problems. Sure, he helped out a lot of people and even felt bad for some of them, but he constantly reminded the people he was helping exactly why he was doing it. And there were some folks Marston absolutely hated, and it was during those moments that the player became privy to his darker side. Marston, at his own admission, wasn't a "literary person." He was, however, someone who tried to start a different life and got savagely pulled back into the one he already left. The difference between him and Bellic, in this regard, couldn't be any more stark.

There's a lot more about Red Dead: Redemption to talk about - and I've only scratched the surface in terms of Marston's character - but I'll save it for future posts. I think I'll just end by saying I have renewed faith in Rockstar as a developer, and for game writing in general. I think it might have a bright future after all.

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Red Dead has blurred the line between games and film

We all know by now that Rockstar Games "Red Dead Redemption" is out and enjoying universal acclaim from fans and critics so there's no point in reviewing this absolutely must buy title. The only thing I care to add at this point is that RDR will stand proudly beside the best western films that I have in my DVD collection. It is that damn good.

Last night as I finished a major section and started a new one, Rockstar very effectively blurred the line between Hollywood and the digital realm. Just thinking about it still gives me goosebumps. I've played for several hours now and former outlaw John Marsten has formed alliances, gained new enemies, and explored just one section of a frontier that's bigger than most open world games. All of the friends he has made, and all the work he has accomplished simply vanish as he must now venture deep into Mexico to bring his former partner in crime to justice. He is alone, acting only off a hunch, and the thought of completing his task and reuniting with his family seem nigh impossible at this juncture. The sun was setting over the red dusty cliffs and an explosive display of orange and purples filled the sky as I steered John and his horse into uncertain territory. Then this song started playing (hear below) and immersed me into the character and game world like no other has done before.................or will again.


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Splinter Cell: Conviction or; How Not to Write a Story.

I didn't read too much information about Splinter Cell: Conviction before playing it. I also didn't watch a lot of videos. The bit I knew really intrigued me: Sam learned his daughter's death might not have been an accident, and he heard some names floating around. The interrogation bit in the demo certainly led me to believe he was on a personal mission of vengeance. Right or wrong, he was going to get the information he needed, the way he needed to get it. The premise was instantly thought-provoking. With a story like that, there are multiple ways to go about exploring themes, such as moral ambiguity, blind rage and the consequences of it, and learning to let go and move on with your life. As you can probably guess by the title of this post, the kind folks at Ubisoft decided to shit all over themselves.

I'll just get right down to it, because, frankly, I'm really pissed at what they did to the story. If you don't want to know what it's about, then stop reading right now.



So, it turns out his daughter is still alive, and she's initially being used as a bargaining chip to make Sam do some dirty work. Really? Because what that translated to was this game being just like every other Splinter Cell game ever made. The personal side of the story was totally squashed in favor of bland spy fiction theatrics, and that really made me mad. I was all ready to learn more about Sam's life beyond Third Echelon; maybe find out what his marriage was like or get to interact with a part of him that I've never seen before. Nope. "Hey, Sam, I know where your daughter is. But before you can reunite with her, go slink around breaking necks and figure out this conspiracy involving an attempted assassination of the President and EMP weapons smuggling with your former company." Ugh. Again, I ask, really? Sam's daughter goes from the center of his suffering to the backdrop for some boring crap about the President wanting to shut down Third Echelon. Since Lambert died, the new director apparently decided to take the spy group down a shadier path, and he wasn't very happy about the prospects of being out of a job. So he starts smuggling weapons into the country and conspires to kill the President and install the Vice President as their lackey. Basically. Oh, and apparently Lambert told Sam that his daughter was dead so that he would have the resolve to be a better Splinter Cell.

Getting bored yet? I am, and I'm having to use the brain power to write about this vapid shit. I can only imagine what the leisurely activity of reading it is making you feel. Anyways, Grimmsdotter knew the whole time, I guess, and decided to tell Sam about it so that he would help her take down the new Third Echelon director. OK, I'm done explaining. Who cares? I didn't, and I don't expect anyone else to, either. I only saw Sam's daughter, like, twice during the entire game. I'm telling you, she doesn't matter in the plot. Ubisoft could have replaced "they killed my daughter" with "they strangled my dog" and it would have had the same emotional impact to me. If it was the dog, there would at least be that heart-warming moment where Sam would have to bend over to pick up the puppy and be vociferously licked all over his face, while everyone looks at them, smiling and hugging as flowers bloom in the background and PETA guns down the bad guy in cold-blood. There could be the whole juxtaposition thing, with classical music playing while slow motion blood spray is going all over the place, slightly out of focus. What I got, instead, was the daughter "story", and my impatience with it almost sent me into an aimless, murderous rampage. What a fucking waste of time and effort.

It's really too bad, because there are elements in the game that do hearken back to the story that could have been. For whatever reason, the things that really worked, such as a flashback of robbers entering Sam's house as he's putting his daughter to bed; or a flashback to Iraq involving Sam and a war buddy, end up being one-shot deals in terms of the narrative structure. Overall, the game is nothing more than every Splinter Cell objective you've ever had to get through in the past. Why? Why did it have to be this way? Did they really want the story to be uninteresting and overly-elaborate? If they didn't, well, someone needs to ask Ubisoft if they can tell the difference between their ass and a hole in the ground. Read more...

Holy Shit, You Have a Nice Ass!!!!.......Ummm, Sorry Miss....

So, I promise this isn't just me cribbing from Kotaku's post about Lost Planet's female character models. I watched the Youtube clip they made available (which I will, as well, after the jump), and I couldn't help but think about Heavy Rain. Hah, not where you thought this was going, was it? Sucka!

First of all, I most certainly don't expect a game like Lost Planet 2 to depict females (or anyone, for that matter) in a realistic manner. I'm not a moron. However, it made me think about my time with Madison Paige while I was playing Heavy Rain. The first time I took control of her character, I felt uneasy and vulnerable. That feeling didn't last the entire game, but it started a train of thought that, oddly enough, has ended up here. I want a game with a female lead that portrays them as an actual person, dealing with very real, very personal problems. I guess I want to play as a female in this situation because in real life I'll never get to know, in any real way, what it's like to be in the shoes of the opposite sex. After all, one aspect of playing video games is role-playing and escape from reality, is it not? What better way to do so than strapping on a dress and experiencing things from a girl's perspective? Mind you, the ideas I have for this kind of character-driven game could actually be done with either a male or female lead, but it's the role-playing aspect that's getting a lot of value here.

When I said personal problems, I didn't mean when it's that time of the month. I meant playing a very adult drama, where, perhaps, the main character is a rape victim who has to come to terms with what happened to her. The game could be about that character having to learn all over again how to interact with other people without freaking the fuck out and shutting down emotionally. It could be a mix of genres, with some horror aspects due to the traumatizing nature of the crime perpetrated against her. Drama could come from her meeting a guy, and getting to play through the steps necessary to form an interpersonal relationship with someone. I don't want a dating sim, where the goal is to get whoever to kiss you or like your outfit or whatever. I'm talking about adult relationships here. Something that would resonate with me, having been through a serious relationship before that ended up not working out. It's interesting stuff to think about, especially when I look back at the history of games. There's really not much out there when it comes to concepts like this. Be it technological constraints, creative ineptness, or just a lack of interest, these kinds of subjects haven't been treated correctly, and, in my opinion, need to be properly handled in this medium for games to be looked at as a true art form. But that's just how I see it. Or, we could just have some more space pirates showing tits and ass. Hurray for tits and ass!!




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Well, Now I'm Just Creeped Right Out.

I think I just experienced the first real "should I be doing this?" moment in my game playing history (with qualifiers, if asked). So I'm playing Heavy Rain, and I take control of Madison Paige for the first time. She wakes up in the middle of the night, apparently after falling asleep on the couch. The t.v. is still on, which I turn off. I have her look at her watch, and it's almost 3am. She seems frustrated at the late hour, so I figure she could use some freshening up. I start walking around the apartment looking for the bathroom, and I find it soon enough. But once I enter it, my mood changes from curious to thoroughly disturbed. I've never played anything like this before, and that includes Indigo Prophecy or any other narrative-driven game.

Once inside the bathroom, I head straight for the sink. I turn it on, and she splashes water on her face. Mission accomplished so far.

I want to quickly digress to make a side point. The Uncanny Valley is a very real thing, and it's no more evident than with Heavy Rain. Everything looks so authentic and genuinely impressive that it's the little things that stand out. For example, as Madison goes to the sink to splash water on her face, she turns the faucet on and water comes out. So far so good, but when she cups her hands and motions toward her face, the water disappears. Nothing actually splashes her, and her hands don't make contact with her face. Things like that are instantly noticeable when everything else is so incredibly detailed. I'd venture to say this could be the best-looking game I've ever played as far as believable, real-world environments and characters go, but it's evident that true photo-realism is still a little ways off. However, the strides that have been made toward that goal are immense, and such efforts will only get better with time.

Anyways, back to the reason for this entry: me being creeped out. After splashing the water on Madison's face, I look around the bathroom, and move her towards the toilet. I've had two other characters use the bathroom so far, so why not her? Well, that was the first wrong move. As she was sitting down on the toilet, the camera switched angles multiple times, and some of them were wide shots of her sitting. It felt invasive and weird to watch her, and I wished I had skipped that action almost immediately. But once that was over, I had her walk around the other side of the bathroom near the shower. She has a big-ass shower, by the way. Three nozzles in a row, even. So I decide to have her take a shower, and that's when I started really feeling like I was doing something inappropriate and sleazy. For starters, there are two contextual actions: moving the analog stick up, or down. When moved up, Madison takes her shirt off. When moved down, she takes her underwear off. Then she immediately walks into the shower and turns it on. There are gratuitous close-up shots of her breasts and ass, and multiple camera angles from which the show continues. It goes on for what seems like forever, and once she's finished, I had to manually put her clothes back on again. I wasn't sure at first the reason I felt so uneasy about this. After all, I've seen hundreds of movies with this exact same scene before, and I'm not sexually repressed, so what's the big deal?

The big deal is agency. I had to take her clothes off and get her to take a shower, and I sat there and watched while she did it. It felt like a huge, huge invasion of privacy, and also manipulative. It was exactly like all those movie scenes I've watched, but with one big difference. I actually felt like I was preying on her in some strange way; like she just didn't know I was watching her every move. This brings up a very unique situation for me, and it's one that I wish more games were capable of handling. Heavy Rain doesn't feel anything like the countless fantasy or role-playing games I've played in the past. All those games had stories and dramatic character arcs, but none of them ever made me feel like I was watching and interacting with someone else's life. Heavy Rain does that for each character, and with Madison Paige, for the first time in a game I felt like I shouldn't be doing what I was doing. If she knew about it, she would be horrified.

There were other reasons for my unsettled nerves, though. As I said, it was almost 3am, and all the lights in her apartment were either off or very dim, and her waking up the way she did made me apprehensive about....something. Also, I tried putting some clothes on her besides basically a bra and panties, but I couldn't. I was forced to have her walk around a disturbing environment in what I deemed a vulnerable state, and I wasn't happy about it. Now, bear in mind that the opening scene of the game entails a man waking up and taking a shower (if you so choose, which I did). I felt none of the emotions I was experiencing with Madison, and for good reason. The character in the beginning of the game seems at peace with himself and his surroundings. Everything is nice and bright, almost idyllic. There's a beautiful back yard that's accessed by an awesome balcony, and I was able to have him lazily walk out and stare out at the nice, sunny morning. When I had him take a shower, there was nudity, but it was relatively quick and it just felt natural. He's in the shower, so he's naked. No big deal. But as I watched Madison take hers, the shots lingered, and I also had much more agency with her character. Couple that with the uneasiness of the surroundings and it's easy to understand the difference between the two scenes.

All these feelings came about before Madison started seeing things. As I sat her down to flip through a magazine, she suddenly looked up and became startled. Did something move? I wasn't sure, but I decided to have her walk around a bit. Once she made it to the other side of the apartment, I turned her around, and the fridge was open. I had literally just closed it, so I immediately wanted to get the hell out of the apartment. I tried to put some clothes on her but there was no option for it. Again, the vulnerable state of a woman by herself when something seems off started freaking me out. There wasn't anything really happening at this point; it was all just in my head. And to those who would say that I shouldn't be feeling like that because a woman can take care of herself, give me a fucking break. There are factual differences between men and women, and there are times when a woman is more vulnerable than a man would be in the same situation. This was one of those situations, and I didn't like it. Anyways, like I said, I've never played a game that presented me with something like this before, and I was really conflicted over how the overall scene made me feel. It was almost like I was the person stalking her, while at the same time acting on her behalf. I'm pretty sure the confusion was on purpose, and it definitely set the desired mood for what was to follow.

And this, my friends, is the nearly untapped potential of gaming. Agency can elicit all types of emotions, but up 'til now it's only given me a very narrow spectrum of samples to choose from. Heavy Rain looks to be significantly broadening the scope of what a game can be, despite some shortcomings I've noticed with certain characters. The voice-acting is really hit-or-miss, depending on who's talking. But when it's good, it's damn good. My hope, though, is for it to continue poking around inside my head, looking for different responses than I'm used to giving to a video game. And even if it can't sustain itself for the duration, moments like tonight will stay with me for a long, long time.

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And Now, For Something Completely Different.

Going directly from Bioshock 2 to Heavy Rain is jarring. Both games seem to have clear purposes, but their implementations couldn't be any different. One is philosophical in nature and hits on what it means to be part of human society, and the other is, in part, about a family tragedy. Bioshock makes you think, while Heavy Rain makes you feel.

I only played for a couple of hours, but the most startling thing about Heavy Rain so far is its capacity to move me. The game starts as everyone's morning usually does: getting out of bed. Only it's not a cut scene. I used the right analog stick to manually rise out of bed, go to the bathroom, take a shower and get dressed. From there, I went downstairs and drank a cup of coffee before the wife and kids got home from shopping. One of them was having his birthday party later in the afternoon, and the gameplay consisted of getting some things ready for the party. After that was done, I went outside and had some fun playing in the backyard with the kids. This might sound boring to some, but it was an epiphany for me. The emotional strings are going to be pulled tightly with this game. Never have I projected my wants and desires so fully onto a digital world, and that was only within the first fifteen minutes. The only reason it's not revolutionary is because Quantic Dream tried the same kinds of visual tricks and gameplay with Indigo Prophecy, but the emotional impact was nowhere near as profound as the opening of Heavy Rain was for me. So, evolutionary seems to fit a lot better. The one thing that was noticeable for me right away, though, is the sometimes-awkward voice acting. The line delivery isn't always good, which is odd for a game that thrives on believability in terms of characters. But it's not nearly enough to really pull me out of the moment, at least so far.

After a bit of foreshadowing involving telling my son that death is something that just happens even if we don't want it to, I got the feeling everything was just too perfect. This family is everything I now want in life, but Heavy Rain being a thriller about a serial killer, I was waiting for the other ball to drop. And drop, it did. Once tragedy hit, I found myself in control of a completely different character. For the moment, I'll just say that all the characters I've played as so far have their own immediate draws to them. It's late and I need some sleep, so I'll save more of my impressions for later. But holy hell, this game is impressive. It's looking like my 2-plus years of waiting won't be for naught.

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Re-Surfacing.

Before I played Bioshock 2, I wasn't sure if sequelizing a masterpiece was a good idea. I couldn't think of any ways to substantially improve the experience, and rather than bring the series down by adding a second, lesser game, I was of the opinion that Bioshock should have stood as the lone entry in the franchise. While my opinion has changed, I still maintain that the tale was already told to my satisfaction the first time around. That being said, Bioshock 2 came relatively close to equaling the magic of the original. Story and gameplay contrivances brought it down a bit, but overall it was rewarding and thought-provoking to see the same Rapture with different ideals making the wheels turn. And it helped that the ending was much, much better.

I was actually going to knock the game for the pacing of its narrative, but it's deceptively simple. For the first 3/4ths of the game, there is precious little in the way of revealed plot points. Mostly, all that is given up is incidental happenings from a wide cast of characters that have no sway in the proceedings. Sofia Lamb, of course, has a lot of preaching to do, and she gets her point across rather well. I'll get into her ideology in a minute, but she's like Andrew Ryan in the sense that they both have no problem giving you an ear-full of why their ideas are so fantastically brilliant and yours are so full of shit. One of the biggest draws to the series for me is listening to these so-called leaders spout their crap about bettering society and our species, while experiencing first-hand just how bad a job they're doing. I mean, seriously. Delusions of grandeur can be quite amusing to observe, but there comes a point when you just want to sit people like Lamb and Ryan down and tell them that the world isn't as black-and-white as they see it. But I'm digressing a little too early; my original point was that the lack of narrative for around 15 hours was disturbing, to say the least. But once it kicked in, it really kicked in. I was also more than a little alarmed at that fact, because I figured way too much was going to be crammed into the end and it would feel slapped-on. Thankfully, I was wrong. Maybe the implementation was still flawed, but the narrative itself wasn't very complicated. Not in a bad way, mind you. There were only a small handful of people to come into contact with, and their roles were pretty straight-forward. Despite my earlier, misguided belief, 2K Marin didn't try to replicate the same character reversal from Bioshock. Instead, they focused more on showing people for who they were - or who they thought they were.

Take Sofia Lamb, for example. She despises everything about "the self", and makes the distinction between intelligence and consciousness. I agree that intelligence doesn't necessitate consciousness in the way she defined it, but it's ridiculous to say that being self-aware is the worst thing that could happen to us. It's an oft-used visual, but would she rather humans were more like Lemmings? It's in being self-aware that we're able to find meaning in life, and seeing her version of utopia serves only as confirmation of that fact. Ironically, Lamb stated that Ryan's vision brought about a sort of religious following, which she detested. Oh, really? That would be nothing like the cult following you accrued by drilling into their heads the ultimate value of being part of a collective, right? This is what I meant when I said the game focused on showing people for who they thought they were. Being self-aware, in some cases, can cause you to ignore reason and logic in the pursuit of personal happiness. Such is the case with Lamb. Her happiness had to do with "curing" society's ills at any cost - even her own daughter's life. She said she would never be able to forgive herself for it, but it was obviously a sacrifice she was willing to make. I guess it's not much of a stretch for her, though, since she was already using her daughter as a tool to further her own cause.

Speaking of Eleanor, the final bits of the game with her in it were a vast improvement on the original game's ending. Bioshock ended with the standard video game boss encounter, and I really hated that. This time, though, 2K Marin addressed that flaw and made the experience much more aligned with the narrative instead of actively working against it. Also, the Little Sister sequence took me by total surprise. It was great to see the world through the eyes of one of them, and there were a lot of little touches that made it rather humorous, such as the Big Daddy posters proclaiming "Daddy is so strong!" And for the most part, when I thought Bioshock 2 was going to re-tread some of the same narrative tricks from the first game, it instead varied the formula in some interesting ways. There's still the hunt for suit parts, Little Sisters are again used as a necessity for escape, and your character is artificially compulsed to complete objectives. But instead of simply powering up for a final, physical confrontation, the build-up felt organic to at least the way I envisioned the narrative flow.

I'm not sure if I saw what I think I saw at the very end. When Sofia Lamb and Eleanor are in the escape pod, Eleanor is talking to you about forgiveness. It looks like she put an oxygen mask on Lamb instead of letting her drown, and that perplexed me at first. I thought to myself, "Why the hell would she do that?" Let's face it, Eleanor hated her mother and everything she stood for. Why ,then, would she start exulting forgiveness after a life spent in captivity? Well, I think it ties back in with Lamb's wrong-headed thinking. She reasons that "the self" is the cause of everything evil inside us, and so she set about completely wiping Eleanor's ego and replacing it with the collective hopes and dreams of an entire civilization. But in rejecting those ideals and then, in the end, still choosing to save her mother, Eleanor exemplified with a single action what Lamb couldn't see within an entire city full of people. It was Eleanor's conscience that allowed her to have compassion and forgiveness, and nothing Sofia Lamb could ever say would change that. So I think one thing to take away from this is how we all have the capacity to do harm, but it's our capacity for individual goodness that makes life worth living. Even if we have a huge propensity towards hurting each other, being at least conscious of that fact and trying to work for a better existence is where human beings shine.

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The Plot Thickens.

As a warning, I'll be going more into specific plot points and characters in this post.


Dionysus Park seems to mark the beginning of the end of Bioshock 2. Before I got to this point, I had received precious few tidbits of story specifics, and I was actually wondering when it was going to get a head of steam going. Well, the steam is starting to build now. I've learned some things about my character and what he did 10 years ago, and also what the catalyst was for the events taking place during the game. I'll guarantee you some douchey self-interest was involved, as well as unscrupulous back-stabbing. But what it basically boils down to is this: someone deserved to get it, and I gave it to him.

The first thing I noticed when I stepped out of the airlock was a sign that instantly brought me back to 2007. I forget the actual name on the sign, but apparently Sander Cohen had an art gallery of sorts, and throughout Dionysus Park there were scratched paintings, broken sculptures and destroyed statues, all pointing to one of my favorite characters from the last game. It just put a smile on my face to see his name again, honestly. There aren't a lot of direct tie-ins to Bioshock in the environments, so it was a nice touch to finally offer something familiar. Obviously, though, Sander Cohen didn't make an appearance. Instead, the deal-maker this time around was Stanley Poole. I had already collected a few audio logs of his beforehand, and he didn't come across as the straightest shooter. That's probably the understatement of the year. Without going into too much detail, Poole is responsible for your situation. He's also responsible for the death of a lot of Sofia Lamb's followers, and for much of what happened to Eleanor. It's all pretty fucked up, and this guy deserved everything that came to him (despite the same binary choice that seems to be the default conundrum in Rapture).

Poole worked as a reporter in Rapture back when it was still kicking, and Ryan had hired him to infiltrate Lamb's cult by pretending to write a tell-all book about the fall of Rapture. Once he got on the inside of the cult, it pretty much went downhill from there. As far as I can tell at this point, no one benefited from Poole's involvement in any of this. I don't want to go into any more details, but suffice it to say this guy is a total asshole. Once I got to Dionysus Park, he was immediately on my case to take care of all the Little Sisters in the area. He felt threatened by them collecting the Adam from corpses because of the DNA memories stored within, and his deal with me was to get them out of the picture. In return, he would open the control booth to get the train started. That was pretty much it, really. Dionysus Park was fun to explore, and so far every area in Rapture has been very noticeably different than the last. And adding to the constant scenery change is the steady addition of more enemies. In Dionysus Park, it was Houdini Splicers, and I made sure I had fully researched them before I moved on to the next area. It definitely pays to do so, because the most beneficial reward is being able to tell where they're going to re-appear much more easily.

In fact, of all the available research subjects, I only need to finish the Big Daddy, Brute Splicer and Security. Unfortunately, I keep forgetting to snap the pictures of cameras, turrets and bots, so I barely have any progress on them. There was even one room with at least 6 cameras and 2 turrets, and I took exactly zero pictures. Way to fail.

But the further I get in the game, the more impressive the presentation is becoming. Not many games can make the lack of interaction a strong suit, but Bioshock 2 does it constantly. It's funny, then, how the simple act of just meeting up with another character gets me all excited to get where I need to go. Like I said in another post, these people I'm interacting with almost don't seem real, so when I get the chance to see them, it does nothing but strengthen my resolve to push forward. Bioshock, in general, is all about conflict and resolution without much in the way of positive reinforcement. You have to get shit done or die trying, which brings me back to another point I made in a previous post. Stanley Poole is another guy I wouldn't mind getting to know a little better, but the game structure doesn't allow for that to happen. The only real way to accomplish that would be to make a prequel, so again, my fingers are crossed for that to happen some day.

I also need to mention that even though Andrew Ryan and Sofia Lamb are both extremists, from time to time they make valid points. I even find myself agreeing with some of the things they say. It's too bad they can't (or more accurately for Ryan, couldn't) get past their own myopic views to see the bigger picture. Both espouse to be working towards that bigger picture, but the only way to do that is through some form of compromise. That's one thing life is full of, and neither Ryan nor Lamb have that quality in them to allow for less than their every desire. I have more sympathy for Ryan, though, because I think he's a more noble person. I'm not saying he's not horribly flawed, but in direct comparison to Lamb, I'd side with him probably every time. Still, that dirty "c" word will continue to inhibit Rapture from ever becoming what it could - and should - have been.


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Cults and Crosses.

Having finished Siren Alley about an hour ago, I'm struck with just how much Rapture has changed. Gone are the statues portraying Man looking up to the heavens, and in their place are shrines for Man to bow in deference to the very thing they formerly aspired to be. It was strange being in a traditional church setting, but the cult vibe permeated the air far outside of the Temple of the Lamb. I think one of the most appealing things about this series is that it makes you constantly think to yourself, "Wow, I'm glad I don't live there." No matter what is going on in Rapture, I can't help but feel the hopelessness and futility of everyone still roaming the once-great halls. The feelings I experience while playing Bioshock 2 are, for some, the same things video games allow them to escape from. I use games for that purpose as well, but it's not often for a world as rich as Rapture to exist in the form it does.

Siren Alley is the sanctuary (or at least one of them) for the cult following of Sofia Lamb, which, it seems, has built itself a strange form of Christianity. There's a lot of talk about The Almighty Lord doing this and that, and sin and redemption. Numerous Holy Bibles are littered around nightstands and counter tops. People seem to want to be forgiven for the things they've done, and in wanting their burdens to be lifted, they've allowed extreme thinking to alter their minds. It's really no different than what happened to Rapture before, but this time it's for a totally different reason. Lamb has some secret stuff going on behind the scenes, which I'm still trying to puzzle out, but I have at least an idea of what she's doing now. All I'll say is that having an army of people convinced of something with everything inside them can be very, very useful for ulterior motives.

The characters in this area, in a way, almost made me wish the structure of the whole game was different. Most of the time in Bioshock, every different area has a sort of "boss" character. They each have their own little block of Rapture carved out for themselves, and the goal of the area basically boils down to exploring their weird little world and then confronting them once you've discovered everything there is to know. The same holds true in Siren Alley, but I really wanted to get to know the central characters better. I could smell a good story coming from their relationships, and I wish there was a logical way to elaborate on it without bringing the whole game to a screeching halt. There's no real way to do it, so it's not something I begrudge the game itself, but I do think it's too bad I'll never really get the chance to explore the lives of these people a little more. In the end, I'd call it a massive compliment to the game world and the ability of the designers who crafted such a believable and interesting narrative. Leaving the player wanting more can sometimes be the best thing a storyteller could possibly do, and in the case of Bioshock's characters, it is certainly the case.

I'm also starting to get a lot more plasmids and tonics now, which is further opening up the gameplay for me to experiment with multiple ways of totally ruining people's shit. Spider splicers seem a lot quicker, but it doesn't really matter when I have a home-made shotgun with tesla coils sprouting from each side. I think I'm going to be using the next few hundred Adam I get to buy up every tonic slot, because there are just so many stackable benefits to be had from them. I don't want to have to be continuously switching them out at the gene banks, so I'll just kick ass and equip as many as possible. I'm not really sure if I'll be able to buy every plasmid in the game, but I've already pretty much found my stable of a few abilities I consistently use. There are quite a few plasmids to be had, but some of them don't seem particularly useful to me, especially with the tonics I already have equipped. For example, there are both tonics and plasmids that deal with elemental damage. Having both equipped would be stackable, but it seems like overkill and a waste to use them at the same time. Needless to say, I have a lot of options in front of me.

The last thing I'll mention is that as I was walking around in Siren Alley, I saw a Little Sister start harvesting Adam from a corpse that wasn't a corpse until I showed up. So, my initial reaction was spot-on: any corpse will do for collecting Adam. Sometimes I hate being right.

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Introducing the Pii.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

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Deeper, Still.

As I played through some four more hours of Bioshock 2, I continued to be in awe of the world Irrational Games (2K Boston) created. I've never played System Shock or System Shock 2, but man, would I love to. The price for System Shock 2 on Amazon is unfortunate, to say the least, so it looks like I won't be playing it in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, that game's so-called spiritual successor is keeping me plenty busy in the mean time.

Tonight I went through Pauper's Drop. It's where, according to Augustus Sinclair, at least, the dregs of society hang their weary heads. The place is directly under the Atlantic Express line, and everything about it is fittingly shanty'd up. Pauper's Drop is also where the game starts to feel like it's opening up for me to do things the way I want to do them. Bioshock 2 is structured differently than the first game, because once you've left certain areas of Rapture, you can't go back. The game even gives you a warning that if you continue past point X, it's closed to you from then on. The great thing about this new area is that it's a lot bigger than previous areas, and the game's mechanics are starting to gel together to form the bigger gameplay picture.

For one, there is more than one Little Sister in this area, which means twice the amount of protection segments. Sure, they're absolutely, transparently artificial, but it's still fun to set up a fire zone and wait for the horde of splicers to come happily running to their fiery doom. The one thing that bothers me, though, is that other Little Sisters can walk around willy-nilly, jabbing syringes into whatever the hell they feel like without getting so much as a fart in their general direction. Randomly, firefights will erupt between a Big Daddy and some dude with a bandage on his head, but it's nothing near the all-out chaos that occurs when I decide to harvest some Adam. Whatever, I have cyclone traps now, so they can suck it. Besides the added mass splicers-as-lemmings carnage, the research camera becomes available part-way through the area. Just like in the original game, the camera adds a bit of depth to multiple gameplay aspects. Not only is it more fun to take snapshots of enemies before beating them to death, but taking good pictures gives you bonuses such as tonics and added damage against certain enemies. The combat feels like it has more than one dimension to it now, as it should. I maxed out all research tracks in Bioshock, and I imagine I'll do the same again. I wonder, though, if any part of Bioshock 2 will be able to best Sander Coen's game of take-pictures-of-corpses-so-I-can-get-off-on-it, while at the same time wondering if the ash-covered dead people are going to eat your face off. That shit was fucked up.

I also appreciate the scaled-down approach to such a large game world. In Bioshock, there was a lot of running around between areas with tons of real estate. This time around, the world feels just as big, but it's sliced into smaller chunks that the player has to tackle one at a time before advancing. It's nice this way, because it cuts back on the risk of backtracking too much or going in circles trying to find that one door or thing you missed. The map seems to be a little more helpful, as well, but that could just be because there's less square footage involved. Either way, the game feels a little more focused and intent on making sure the player has just enough space to work with. I've heard the game described as more linear, but that's a bunch of bullshit. You're still dropped into a wide-open arena full of things to do, and the ways and means of accomplishing specific goals are totally up to you. I, for one, feel like I have total control over the way I'm playing.

Very briefly, I feel the need to mention something I brought up in my previous Bioshock 2 post. I mentioned the moral "decision" regarding the Little Sisters, and how the choice is nothing more than the simplest of dilemmas, especially when stacked up to what the rest of the story has to offer. I experienced the same sort of thing tonight in Pauper's Drop. There's a character in the game whom you can either kill or let live. It's presented as some big choice for you to mull over, but the whole kill-or-spare version of morality is getting a little stale to me. Why does it have to be such a drastic choice? Why can't the game be filled with smaller, more subtle choices that add up to something in the end? Mass Effect sort of goes down that route, but I also have problems with Bioware's system. All in all, I've yet to see a game fully realize a "moral compass" within the constraints of a narrative. I'm sure it'll happen one day, and I'll blog my happy little ass off about it.

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A look back at: Heavy Rain.

Shortly after finishing Heavy Rain, I thought to myself: Did I just finish 2010's game of the year? It's barely March, and already we have been blessed as gamers with the likes of Mass Effect 2, Bioshock 2, Darksiders, and more. But, as I sat there on my couch watching the credits, I couldn't help but think: "What's going to beat Heavy Rain?"

Moreover, is Heavy Rain even a game? Well I guess that depends on your definition of "game". If to you, a game is you controlling a character on screen and running around environments, then yeah, Heavy Rain is a game. The difference here is that, instead of moving level to level taking out bad guys, then encountering a boss, you are really just interacting with scenes.

And these "scenes" are what set Heavy Rain apart. By presenting the gamer with scripted event after event and letting you make decisions that impact each character, Quantic Dream grips you the way that a great movie would. Fully invested in these characters, each with his/her own demons, you care that much more about them. Couple that, with a good story, and you have a great piece of entertainment.

So that brings us to the presentation. Heavy Rain is a great looking game, not the best, but great. What really helps the presentation here is how everything flows together to make a cohesive experience. The camera angles are well done, often adding to the drama. The biggest part of all this is the "Quick Time Events" that make up a major part of the gameplay. With Quantic Dream's last game, Indigo Prophecy, the QTEs were always right in the middle of the screen, more times than not punishing you for paying attention to the scene rather than the button prompt. In Heavy Rain, they are used to draw your attention to the action by putting the QTE in the middle of the action. This really does go a long way to drawing the player into the scene.

Will Heavy Rain be game of the year this year? Way to early to tell. But what I can tell you is that I am ready for more of this "Interactive Drama".

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Journey to the Surface.

Sequels can be funny things. Sometimes they vastly improve upon their predecessors, and other times they take a step backwards. Mostly, however, they're a combination of the two. Take Bioshock 2, for instance. There are immediate and obvious improvements to the game - most of which are mechanical - and they go a long way in allowing me to continue to enjoy my journey into the depths of Rapture. But what is the cost of these rote additions to the nuts-and-bolts of the game? I don't mean to suggest that one aspect of a game has to suffer in order to improve upon another; I'm simply wondering where the priorities were for the folks at 2K Marin while they were developing Bioshock 2.

Don't worry, I'm enjoying the game quite a bit so far, but there are certainly flaws I feel the need to point out. For starters, being a Big Daddy should come with immediate advantages. It certainly does when you're dealing with regular ol' splicers, but when confronted with taking down another Big Daddy, the encounter exposes what's really going on with the gameplay. Visually, you look and feel like a lumbering behemoth that could wreak havoc at will. In practice, you're exactly the same as you were in the first game, only with a different character skin. You'd think that being inside an enormous diving suit would afford you some luxuries in the defense department, but when a crazy lady with a pipe hits you for a quarter of your health in 3 seconds, all pretenses of power are dropped. But my problem isn't really with normal enemies. I noticed this disconnect mostly when I encountered my first Big Daddy/Little Sister combo. When I was about to engage him, I thought to myself, "Alright, Big Daddy on Big Daddy, dueling drill arm action. May the best man win." Once it was over, I was painfully aware there was only one Big Daddy during the fight, and it wasn't me. Why is it that when I swing my gigantic drill with thunderous force against the armor of the Big Daddy, he seems to shrug it off and in one fluid motion knock me half-way across the room, taking half of my health with it? I thought we would be evenly matched as far as brute force goes, but I was sorely mistaken. I'm not complaining about actual difficulty, mind you. I'm noticing the difference between what the game is telling me I'm capable of doing, and what it's actually allowing me to do.

I completely understand that if I were able to just obliterate everything in my path that the game would be a simple matter of pressing the "kill things" button while walking forward. Perhaps, then, the basic concept should have been completely different. Maybe they should have done what I've been wishing for since finishing the first Bioshock: a full-on prequel. I want nothing more than to be able to walk through Rapture at the height of its power and opulence; to be a witness to the unfolding madness and chaos as Ryan and Fontaine battled for control of an ultimately failed societal experiment. I think it's a great idea to take the role of one of Fontaine's lackeys, going about his dirty work trying to throw every wrench possible into Ryan's works. At some point, maybe your character would start to see things differently and a conflict would arise. I haven't put much thought into it beyond that, but I'd call it a pretty good starting point. Anyways, my whole point is that being a Big Daddy for the entire game might not have been the wisest of design choices. The game plays just like the original, which I'm fine with, but it forces me to ask why I can't take (and dole out) the same amount of punishment every other random Big Daddy is able to. I'm willing to forgive this disconnect and call it what it is: a purely cosmetic change. Granted, story-wise it's a genuine difference. But as far as the gameplay is concerned, you walk with a metal clang in your step and grunt when you fall.

Something else that really bothers me is gathering Adam with the Little Sisters. I haven't gone back and checked, but I'm pretty sure Adam can be harvested from any corpse. As long as they're spliced up, they should do fine, right? And if that's the case, then why can't I get it from, oh, I don't know, the hundreds of people I'll have killed before I'm through? Instead, the game only gives me Adam from specific corpses that are labeled as "Adam corpses". I can guess the reason, which is mechanical contrivance. But it makes absolutely no sense to me, and gives me more cause for alarm. A secondary (and far less stupid) bafflement is the sort of mist that acts as an ethereal bread crumb when trying to find the next Adam corpse. What the hell is up with that? I don't remember there being any supernatural means for Adam extraction up to this point. In fact, if you remember when you get your first plasmid in the original game, a Little Sister walks up to you thinking you're dead. When she gets close enough, she realizes you're still alive and says something like "he's not an angel yet." So, she was fooled by seeing you lying on the ground, which means she wasn't being led by some weird fog trail that comes out of nowhere. No, it's another gameplay mechanic that has no weight or meaning to it, and I wish it wasn't there.

One thing I'm glad is available is the ability to change the difficulty setting at any time. I started the game on hard, but after a couple of hours I realized I wasn't having that much fun. There are certain games I'll only play on the hardest difficulty possible, and they mainly consist of FPS or shooters. If you want to count Bioshock as a "shooter", then go right ahead, but the reason I play it is wholly different than why I play most other FPS. I'm not exploring Rapture looking for the hardest twitch challenge I can get, and I don't want my time to be filled with frustration and repetition from dying. What I do want is to feel immersed in the environment and delve deeper into the story behind the fall of Rapture. If I need to scratch the shooting-dudes-in-the-face itch, I'll pop in Call of Duty or any number of other games. But I made this realization after I had my first Little Sister protection encounter. Up to that point, I was pretty much getting devastated by every single splicer I had fought, but I was soldiering on. But when I had to fight like five of them at once, and then five more after that, it clicked in my head that this isn't why I'm playing. Bioshock isn't the most technically proficient FPS out there (I never claimed it to be), and the harder difficulty really highlights this fact. It actually seems quite a bit harder than the previous game's hard difficulty. So, yea, I'm playing on easy now, and I couldn't be happier. I never thought I'd say that about a game, but when the story is more important than the challenge, it makes a lot of sense. One could even say it's a testament to the game that the story is good enough to put the combat on a lower tier, and I really think that's the case here. Either way, for me, easy is the way to go.

My last gripe isn't really a gripe, and it pertains to both games in the series. The issue of morality and harvesting/saving the Little Sisters was never that big of a deal to me. Honestly, it's such a binary decision that morality doesn't really factor into it. The moral choices have already been made in Rapture, and all you can do is look at the outcome. Of course, no one would want to kill a child, but I think the way it's presented is superficial when compared to the rest of the game, and limited agency to such a degree defeats the point. If the developers really wanted the question of harvesting or saving to be a moral one, there should be no tangible benefit to either decision, and no pretense of there being one. The way it's currently set up, it just boils down to a numbers game. Most people will approach the situation by wondering which decision will yield more Adam instead of pondering a mercy killing versus attempted salvation. Giving such a choice a deliberate numerical value takes away from the emotional impact that should occur within the player. But, like I said, I find that emotional impact elsewhere in the game, so it's a minor fault that I'm more than willing to move past. The rest of the world and the people in it are so detailed and thought-provoking that I don't really need this specific mechanic to carry all the weight. I'm just sayin'.

An aspect of the sequel I did move past, or rather re-thought my perspective on, is the way you talk to and interact with Sinclair. Last night I played through the Atlantic Express section, and when I saw Sinclair for the first time, I was a little annoyed. I had thought that his character was supposed to be Bioshock 2's Atlus, and it felt forced. In combination with that, the only time other characters interact with you (excluding enemies) is behind an artificial impasse. There's always something blocking you from fully seeing them, and sometimes even your movement is restricted. For some reason, that really bothered me when I saw Sinclair. I felt like the developers wanted to keep the feel of the first game, but they were trying too hard. I even went to bed thinking about it, but the more I thought about it, the more I saw the presentation of all the characters differently. As I mentioned in the paragraph above, the fate of Rapture was basically sealed a long time ago, and as I'm going through the different areas, I feel like I'm seeing the ghosts or echoes of things that were. In a sense, I get the same feeling from characters like Sinclair, and even Tenenbaum. By effectively cutting you off from most visual contact, the game subtly turns living, breathing people into memories. If you think about it, their most common means of communicating with you is strikingly similar to the audio logs strewn about the environments. And when you actually get to see them, it's only for a fleeting moment from a distance. So as the game presents them, I know they're still in Rapture, but I feel like I'm alone.

The story itself is still up in the air. I like the way the communal, "we are all one" societal structure is shown as a cult-ish religion. At first, I was a little put off by the directness in Sofia Lamb's approach. She's so much the polar opposite of Andrew Ryan that it almost felt like too much. But that's the thing: she's so entrenched in her beliefs that she's consumed by them. Her every waking moment - much like Andrew Ryan's before I clubbed him in the face with a wrench - is spent propagating her point of view. So it makes sense for her to speak in platitudes now and again, and to seem like a personification of an idea. That's exactly what she is, and Rapture is, yet again, the outcome of extreme idealism.

Of particular note so far is the Journey to the Surface section of Rapture. It's a theme park built by Ryan to indoctrinate children against the desire to go to the surface. It's structured like a Pirates of the Caribbean-esque experience, with animatronic scientists, artists and families being used to further his brain-washing techniques. The sets are pretty damn great, because they all have the same basic message: everyone on the surface is trying to do their own thing, but The Man keeps getting them down. To illustrate this point, it shows people going about their business, then a gigantic hand comes down from the sky to stop them in their tracks. The amusing part is how every single display does the same exact thing. Andrew Ryan was not one for subtlety, after all. But this section of Rapture was, by far, the most interesting in my journey and I can only imagine where it's going to lead me in the coming days.

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Visiting An Old Friend.

Bioshock is one of the greatest games I've ever played. I remember the sheer awe and wonderment I felt when I found myself swimming through a sea of fire towards the lighthouse; I was at once both scared and excited, apprehensive about entering Rapture yet compelled to get there as soon as possible. Once I was under the sea, the destroyed beauty of Rapture became a source of instant bliss. Not only the architecture, but also its decaying denizens served as a giant societal and philosophical warning against unrestrained ambition. It was a microcosm of an alternate universe plagued with vanity too large to be contained in the tiny jar it was held in. And when my journey was over, it lingered in my mind for quite a long time. What moral implications were held within the trappings of the game's story? Why did Rapture crumble under its own weight? Those questions and more still swim around inside my head, and two-and-a-half years later, I'm finally able to go back to the source of all those thoughts and questions. It feels like I never left.

I've purposefully stayed away from pretty much all media related to Bioshock 2, and I'm glad I did. I don't know anything about where the story is going, except for a few early clues. The new leadership in Rapture seems to be heading in the exact opposite direction of Andrew Ryan, and that makes me extremely happy. Obviously, Ryan's brand of Objectivist Capitalism didn't quite work out, so bolting to the extreme other end of the spectrum makes a lot of sense. Since the development team isn't the same one that worked on the original game, I don't know how much cohesion the story will have when it's all said and done, but I have a generous amount of faith in them. Ken Levine might not have been helming the project this time around, but the foundations he built are strong. Very strong.

That's Ken Levine's hand on the left.

I was wondering if 2K was going to try one-upping themselves during the opening of the game, but thankfully, they didn't. For sure, there are shocks to be had, but there's nothing artificial about the events that are transpiring. There's no overblown scene showing how much bigger and better this game is going to be over its predecessor. The saga is simply continuing. And right away, I feel at home in Rapture. If anything, it looks even more dilapidated than I remember it, but that could just be due to my time away from the game. Either way, Rapture is still falling apart, but one thing has changed for me. The sense of dread isn't quite the same as it was before. Being a Big Daddy with a huge drill arm sort of takes away the feeling of helplessness the first game so expertly afflicted me with. Even so, it didn't lessen my actual enjoyment of playing. I was instantly transported back to 2007, when my mouth gaped wider with every step forward.


I don't want to talk too much about the gameplay yet, but one thing I do want to mention is a sequence where I had to walk around the ocean floor to get from one wing of Rapture to another. I wouldn't say I ever felt nervous about being out in the open, but my mind traded fear for amazement. The sequence wasn't very long, and it wasn't particularly open for exploration, but being able to walk among the seaweed and fish while taking in the far-off sights of skyscrapers without the visual restriction of glass and steel was breathtaking. It's something I had always wanted to do since the first time I turned the original game on, and it was everything I had envisioned. I'm giddy with excitement to get home and start playing, and this whole weekend is going to be filled with like emotions.

Also, I would like to kiss Ken Levine. Total man-crush.
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WAR....HUH! what is it good for? a friggin great time!

Let's get this out of the way first and foremost. Darksiders won't be the most original game you play in 2010. Originality is overated anyways. Although we as gamers very much appreciate new ideas, the truth is they don't always sell very well and we end up sticking to things we love the most like Halo or COD. Don't believe me? Clover/Platinum games in the past few years delivered two awesome, fresh, yummy bits of gaming and nobody cared. Madworld tanked, and Okami never really found a truly wide audience. We are comfortable with things that are familiar, and it's sad but true. Over the years I have found that I will seek out the open world GTA experience or twitch action stylings of a Devil May Cry simply because I loved those games and want to replicate those moments of digital bliss. I'm only a couple of hours in, and Darksiders is taking me back to the place where I discovered why I fell in love with video games to begin with.

The main character is one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse named War. Generic as can be, but awesome nonetheless. I'm hoping that developers take a cue from Vigil and start finding simpler names for video game characters like Military, Skilled Swordsman, or Plumber. (sorry I digress) War is having a bad day after starting the downfall of mankind only to discover that the 7th seal hasn't actually been broken......oops. He is condemned to demon evisceration, but talks the powers that be to letting him return to Earth and punish those responsible for bringing the end of days too early. It's a great set up and when the world finally opens up, the fun begins.

War has a massive sword bigger than a skyscraper that he thrusts and whirls about on anything or anyone that gets in his way. The combat starts simple with one button controlling it all, but playing more unlocks new moves and abilities. The deeper I get into it.....the more complex the control scheme becomes. You can get away with just mashing like crazy, but the more skilled gamer will find a treasure trove of strategies and movesets to inflict carnage with.

Most veterans will notice right away that only certain areas of the world are open to explore from the get go, but possibly getting that right gadget or power might let them go a little further next time around ala Zelda or Metroid. I love that formula so have no problems at all making that connection. So far Darksiders seems to take a lot of familiar things from other games and pay them homage. It's my understanding that there's even a "Portal" gun with blue and orange doorways later on that helps you through a level. As long as I'm still having a good time (which I am) they can still keep on cranking out the greatest hits moments!

Of particular note worth mentioning is the excellent pacing. In the short time I have played, the game has given me God of War style combat, Zelda-esque exploration, arena battles, platforming sections, and completely transformed into a shooter. You never seem to be doing the same thing for too long. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and I think Vigil's Darksiders is a love letter to those legendary games that have come before it. I can't wait to get back into War's world. For a game about Hell on Earth, so far it's video game heaven.



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