games

Girls gone wild

Just like every other game from Rockstar Studios, a tsumani of controversy surrounds the release of Grand Theft Auto 4 like a… well… like a tsunami. Everyone is getting in on the act, from British MP Keith Vaz, to the anti-drink-driving groups. And I suppose they’ve all got points. Vaz, clearly making street violence a major part of his campaign, highlights the stabbing in GTA queue in Croydon. The anti-drink-driving group point out that, regardless of how much fun it might be in the game, drink-driving in real life is not a game. But now feminist groups are suggesting that the game’s “violence and misogyny displayed towards women¹” only serves to normalize sexualized violence and fuel the sexual discrimination towards women within the patriarchal media.

Horseshit.

Most of the problem comes from this video created by IGN to highlight some of the game’s sleazier moments as well as giving a sample of the violence that can be directed towards women in the game. But, as commenters have pointed out, this is like creating a video of the player killing only black people in the game and suggesting that the game is racist based on this. This is what’s so wonderful about Grand Theft Auto - the options are there for you to create a character that’s exactly as moralistic as you want him to be. Well, in as much as it fits the story being told. I haven’t played it yet (it’s waiting for me when I finish my exams), but I know it was entirely possible to play through the previous games without killing any women or visiting any strip-clubs.²

Now, let’s take a look at something else that came out recently. In the movie, Teeth, a young girl discovers she is gifted with vagina dentata and uses this to mutilate the genitals of some pretty mean guys. Now, I can see why this might be a fun movie, but at the same time, I’m wondering why there isn’t more of an outcry from male groups complaining about the film’s deep-set misandry. Because I can guarantee if someone made a film where a man went around destroying women’s gees with his cock, we’d never hear the end of it.

Isn’t “mysogyny towards women” a bit of a tautology? Like ATM Machine or PIN number. [↩]
It’s also worth pointing out that, like Cooper Allen in the Mass Effect furore, the author of the Feministing article has never played the game and is entirely basing her condemnation on a video [↩]

Hit ‘em where it hurts

A new week, a new controversy surrounding Mass Effect’s “sex scene”. Having never played the game, pundits are only too happy to spout off as if Mass Effect is some kind of interstellar rape simulator. It isn’t. In this particular clip we have a pundit asking “What happened to Atari and pinball and Pac-Man?” Clearly, this is the kind of informed expert we need debating such an explosive issue.

More interesting, however, is the first woman that appears - Cooper Lawrence - who talks about the terrible ways that Mass Effect both degrades women and corrupts young children, and then proceeds to laughingly admit she has never played the game.

Well, the door swings both ways.

Now, gamers have completely jacked her book’s rating on Amazon, giving it an average rating of 1 star out of 5. One user, Joshua King, wrote this comment with his one-star rating:

As she has made public, you no longer need to actually have any information on a topic in order to form an opinion of it, so here I am today, doing just that about the book in question. Judging by the cover alone, I am going to say this is yet another failed attempt at making a self-righteous analysis of a niche’ of people whom she knows next to nothing about. Whether I am correct or not clearly holds no value if you pursue the logic she follows.

Update:
In an interview with the New York Times, Cooper Lawrence responds to the backlash

“I recognize that I misspoke,” she said. “I really regret saying that, and now that I’ve seen the game and seen the sex scenes it’s kind of a joke.

“Before the show I had asked somebody about what they had heard, and they had said it’s like pornography,” she added. “But it’s not like pornography. I’ve seen episodes of ‘Lost’ that are more sexually explicit.”

Jenna Haze - Porn star, RPG nerd

GameDaily recent went to the Adult Video News Convention and asked a bunch of porn stars about their gaming habits. Some of the interviews are just plain embarrassing, but there are one or two that… wow. My favourite response is from Jenna Haze:

GD: Do you find nerds attractive?
Jenna: [Looks offended] Do I like nerds? I am a nerd. I have shelves full of books at home about vampires and werewolves. And I always have my PSP with me. Right now I’m playing Jeanne D’Arc, which is just awesome. Also, I’ve got a PS3 and I’m dying for the new Final Fantasy to come out. See? I told you I was a total nerd.
GD: I think I am in love.
Jenna: That’s understandable.

New game from Ron Gilbert

So after teasing us for a couple of days, Ron Gilbert (one of the creators of Monkey Island) has finally announced his new game - an episodic RPG-adventure called “DeathSpank: Episode One: Orphans of Justice.” Ordinarily, I hate anything with more than one colon in the title, but because this is Ron Gilbert, we’ll forgive him.

But, you might be asking “what in jaysus is an ‘RPG-Adventure’ when it’s at home?” Well, Ron Gilbert gives a description of what to expect:

I proceeded to crank out what can only be called the perfect melding of a Monkey Island style adventure game with the wicked RPG game play of Diablo

That’s me sold. Where do I sign up?

Portal

Christ, it’s hard to talk about Portal.

Let’s start with the easy stuff: it appears on Half-Life 2’s “Orange Box” package, which includes Half-Life 2, Episode 1, Episode 2 and Team Fortress 2. Compared to these huge, important games, Portal appears to almost be an afterthought. A goofy experiment to pad out the whole package and make it seem more appealing (as if Half Life 2 needs to be made more appealing).

The whole idea of the Portal is deceptively simple. You’ve got a gun that shoots two portals. You go in one portal, you come out the other. Now, armed with your portal gun and a healthy dose of lateral thinking, you have to make your way to the end of the level. And although it looks like a first person shooter, even including such cliched FPS conventions as crates and gun turrets, this is no first person shooter. It’s a puzzle game. It’s fucking Sudoku. Sudoku crossed with that movie, “Cube“. Some fiendish puzzles that do have a logical answer.

And that’s what makes talking about portal so hard: that’s about all you can say about Portal without ruining it. The things you want to say - the things that made the game so incredible - those things are best left as surprises. I’ve read reviews full of SPOILARZ, revealing everything about the game and these reviews still didn’t make the game sound half as interesting as it actually is.

So, rather than waste a bunch of bandwidth on a self-sabotaging review, here’s the important things about the game, in bullet-point form

A near-perfect difficulty curve. You’re gradually introduced to every concept in the game.
Amazing story, beautifully written. Hard to believe that a short, 3-hour puzzle game can have a story as good as, say, BioShock, but it’s true. And so funny, too.
Great replayability. Once you’re done, you’re challenged to play through the levels again using as few portals or taking as few steps as possible.
Fascinating developer commentary. I know that all the games on the Orange Box have this ‘developer commentary’ option, but Portal’s was truly revealing.
Hilarious, beautiful song for the credits - the only time I’ve willingly sat through a game’s credits (except when it was worth gamer points). Frustratingly prolific Jonathan Coulton (he of Code Monkey fame) wrote the song that plays over the final credits. There are videos of the song on YouTube, but I’m not going to link to them because the song is full of SPOILARZ. But he wrote about his involvement with the game on his site, and that’s worth reading too.
Worth the price of the Orange Box by itself

Why the Games Media Awards are fucked

Games Website – News - Winner: Eurogamer.net
Games Website – Reviews & Features - Winner: Eurogamer.net
Writer in Specialist Digital Media - Winner: Tom Bramwell (Eurogamer.net)

I will quite happily read any old junk about videogames, but even I draw the line at Eurogamer, which regularly features some of the worst writing I’ve ever seen. Inflated, self-important rubbish whose reviews generally follows the formula of:

two paragraphs giving the history of the genre this game is in
first mention of the game
dissection of the graphics, sound, level design - I thought this went away with Zzap64.
pithy closing remark
highly exaggerated score

I’m actually appalled that they won anything for the writing. But “news”? Should a website that actually shuts down for the weekend be counted as a news source? Instant ‘fail’ in my book.

Games Podcast - Winner: Gamespot

Dreary American tosh with know-nothing presenters whose voices all sound the same.

Non-Commercial Website or Blog - Winner: UK: Resistance

My love for UK:R died when I realised they’ve got close ties to Microsoft. Not that I have anything against Microsoft, I just thought it made all the anti-Sony jokes a little iffy.

PlayStation Magazine - Winner: Official PlayStation Magazine (Future)
Xbox Magazine - Winner: Official Xbox 360 Magazine (Future)
Nintendo Magazine - Winner: Official Nintendo Magazine (Future)

Were the judges even trying? I mean, really?

Overall Games Magazine - Winner: GamesTM

This is really, really disappointing. GamesTM is just no fun.

Best Writer on a Specialist Magazine Winner: Kieron Gillen (PC Gamer, Future)

STOP ENCOURAGING HIM.

Full list of ‘winners’ on Gamesindustry.biz.

Review: BioShock

Okay, let’s cut right through the hyperbole, the 10/10 scores, all that bullshit. BioShock is not that great. In fact, it’s hard not to be disappointed by BioShock. It is at once the most incredible and most frustrating game in recent memory.

BioShock starts off beautifully. After an amazing, cinematic opening, you are led into a series of scripted events that suggests a lot of care has gone into crafting a stunning experience for the player. This is reinforced by the way the story tacitly unfolds around you. When games have a story as strong as this, the designers sometimes feel a tendency to shove it down the player’s throat, as if to say “We paid our writers a lot of money and, by Christ, we’re going to get value for that money.” BioShock is different. By picking up crew ‘diaries’, you’re given glimpses into the back-story of Rapture, but you’re left to piece them all together yourself, if you want to.

And even if you don’t, there’s still plenty of things to shoot at - your first introduction to a splicer gives you a great taste of your vulnerability down here, and had me twitching at the controller in an equal mixture of excitement and terror.

After the first hour, however, things start to get a little lazy. The environments, which were so dazzling and atmospheric at first quickly become cramped and uninspired. The possibilities of a huge, sprawling underwater city become reduced down to a series of similar-looking halls and offices and you realise that the open sandbox has been replaced by a very linear shooter.

By the second hour, you begin to wonder if Wind Waker hasn’t been usurped as the most offensive abuser of fetch-quests to pad out a game’s length. Once you have settled into the rhythm of BioShock, the rest of the game is spent collecting random items strewn around labyrinthine levels. Often you are told to travel far away to collect something, and once that’s done, you are told to travel back to your starting position to collect something else.

It’s frustrating, lazy game design, and completely mars the experience. Because once you notice this, you begin to notice that there aren’t actually that many enemies in Rapture. There are, all told, five or six character models, repeated ad infinitum. You begin to notice that your vulnerability has disappeared and you are suddenly armed with an arsenal of massively destructive weapons and psychic abilities. There is nothing you can’t kill, and barring any major fuck-ups, nothing that can kill you. Even the Big Daddy, the iconic, melancholy giant of the game, is easy prey when you’re loaded up with a grenade launcher and shots of electricity.

There are still moments of genius to be found in BioShock. The meeting with the artist is genuinely entertaining and unnerving in a way that I wish more games would emulate. But there are very few of these standout moments in the game, and the majority is spent in unremarkable encounters with unremarkable enemies in unremarkable locations.

There’s no question that BioShock is a good game, but given a longer gestation period, it could have been a lot better. Even without the padding, it could have been a lot better. Give me a 10 hour game of solid quality over a 10 hour game with 8 hours of padding any day of the week.

Addendum
Other things I didn’t mention that also disappointed me about BioShock:

The ‘moral choice’ of saving/harvesting the little sisters - once again, games reduce morality into a completely binary decision.
The weapons/plasmid upgrade scheme - pointless and irrelevant. A double-whammy.
Glitchy physics - throughout the game, I don’t think I saw one corpse that wasn’t twitching in some way.

Havok acquired by Intel

Gamedaily has the news that Intel has acquired Havok, Dublin’s videogame pride and joy (and my old employer).

“This is a great fit for Havok products, customers and employees,” added Havok CEO David O’Meara. “Intel’s scale of technology investment and customer reach enable Havok with opportunities to grow more quickly into new market segments with new products than we could have done organically. We believe the winning combination is Havok’s technology and customer know-how with Intel’s scale. I am excited to be part of this next phase of Havok’s growth.”

Could this mean we’ll be seeing a Havok-based physics card in the future? Hoo boy!

Wearing my pessimist hat, one thing that stood out for me was this sentence from Intel:

“Havok will operate its business as usual, which will allow them to continue developing products that are offered across all platforms in the industry.”

… which reminds me of how EA told everyone they would still be licensing RenderWare to other companies after they bought Criterion, and we all saw what happened there. But there are huge differences between the two situations, so I doubt Havok will suffer the same fate.

Anyway, it’s still fantastic news - congratulations guys!

Rewards

Play through Ico for the first time and Yorda, your companion, speaks in a incomprehensible language of shapes and symbols. Play through it a second time and Yorda speaks in English. This is both an incentive to replay the game and a reward, especially if you were captivated by the game on the first time through (and I challenge anyone not to be completely captivated by this game.)

Waiting for my Xbox 360 to arrive, I’m playing through some of my old PlayStation 2 games. Right now, I’m playing Shadow of the Colossus for the second time, this time on the ‘hard’ difficulty setting which is unlocked after completing the game.

Now, just like Ico, I loved Shadow of the Colossus. Absolutely loved it. It was by far the most epic game I’ve ever played on any console (Oblivion being a close second), and it was filled to the brim with haunting, memorable moments.

But on ‘hard’, there’s nothing essentially different about the game. Okay, your energy bar drops a bit more when you get hurt and recharges just that little bit slower. And the same goes for your ‘hold’ meter - you can’t hold onto things or climb things for as long as before. But apart from these two changes, there’s absolutely nothing different about the game.

What does this mean? Well, it means you won’t be able to just jump on a Colossus, start pounding away in and take it down in one quick go. You’ll have to jump off, catch your breath and start over again.

That, to me, isn’t any more difficult, it just requires more patience. It is an artificial difficulty. In fact, I’m actually doing better this time - completing the game in a quicker time than my first play-through on ‘normal’.

Where’s the reward in that?

Why I will not be buying Guitar Hero 3

Fuck. This doesn’t even look like fun any more.

Announcements from the Leipzig Game Convention

Now that E3 has died on its arse, the other conventions are becoming more important to the industry players. This month, the annual Game Convention is taking place in Leipzig, Germany. So far, there have been press conferences from Nintendo and Sony. Quick summaries of the conferences so far (paraphrased):

Nintendo

“We have nothing new coming. We’re selling so many Wiis and DSes and non-games like Wii Play and Brain Training and Big Brain Academy and Face Training that we don’t have to make games for our core demographic any more. And even if we did have new games to bring out, we hate the European market, so screw you guys anyway. We’re off to play with our money.”

Sony

“Okay, so the PlayStation 3 is a pain in the ass to develop for, and our games library is less than stellar. But y’know what? The PlayStation 3 is a much better media center than the fucking Xbox 360. To hammer this home, we’re launching Play TV, which turns your PlayStation 3 into a fucking freeview box with fucking digital video recorder capabilities! And what’s more, we love you Europeans so much, we’ll be launching it in Europe first! SUCK IT, MICROSOFT!”

The Play TV thing is really a fantastic sell for the PlayStation 3, and goes a long way to justifying that enormous price-tag. Kotaku have a video of it in action. You can watch and record live TV on your PlayStation 3. As well as this, you can record the latest episode of Heroes on your PlayStation 3 at home and if you’re out and about anywhere with a Wireless signal, you can use your PSP to connect to your PlayStation 3 at home and watch that episode of Heroes.

For comparison, the Xbox 360 still can’t fast forward MP3s.

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