I wrote an article for Internet Supersite Ramp.ie about how great games are/could be as a storytelling medium, if only jerk developers would get their jerk heads out of their jerk… well, their jerk publishers’ bottom lines, I suspect. You can read it here: http://ramp.ie/index.php/games/games-dont-show-dont-tell/
I’m impressed that I got several hundred words in before mentioning Dark Souls, a game I have described in my notes as “everything up to the n+1th coming of Gaming Christ”. It’s not even that it’s my favourite game, it’s just… everything it does, it does well. Particularly the intangibles, things like how it feels to play the game, how it feels to be in its world. It’s not an easy game, but nor is it unfairly hard–you just can’t play it lazily, you have to focus on what you’re doing. Because of that, every bit of progress you make feels like something you’ve really accomplished. It’s an intensely rewarding game to play, even 60-odd hours in.
My friends, I did something last night that I haven’t done in ages. Yes, that is correct: I am talking about schooling noobs.
Now, as anyone will tell you, full-on schoolination can only take place in a deathmatch. I mean, that’s understood. Team games are like, you can hand out leaflets to noobs for correspondence courses or whatever, but if you’re going to really give the personal touch and school the motherfucker, it has to be a free for all.
I haven’t played a proper deathmatch in ages, but was I rusty? Was I fuck. There was this one guy, I swear to god, I schooled the bastard to hard he came out with a PhD. I mean, I’m the god damn Gordon Ramsay of schoolin’ a noob here. Crossbow. Rocket. Crowbar. Done. Wait, where’s your arse gone? Oh that’s right, I schooled it right off your body.
I done messed up Burt Bacharach and all.
In other night-wasting developments, I watched the pilot episode of Fringe. The main character is a feisty female FBI agent, the kind of feisty you needed to be back in the 50s when you had to prove yourself to a load of smug men who gave you dismissive nicknames like honey and sweetheart and sugardonkey and so on, which for some reason people also do in this show even though it’s not the 50s anymore. I would speculate that it’s a feeble attempt to get us to root for her, because she’s terribly, terribly uninteresting in every other respect.
So Fringe: not so good. On the other hand it does feature that guy from The Wire and some dudes with transparent skin, and both of those are some pretty cool things. So who knows, it just might pick up.
Lost is back on tonight, which is good times for all concerned, and with any luck I’ll be seeing Iron Man on Wednesday. Nordiebuddies will be around come week’s end and there’s a bank holiday to look forward to. And to occupy every other waking hour, there is Grand Theft Auto IV.
I don’t know if it’ll slow down the blogging – after all, eight hours in work don’t fill themselves – but there’s a significant chance it will take over the output. I’ll try to avoid it, sure, I’ll try to be interesting, but I can’t guarantee it. I don’t know… somewhere in the code of a GTA game there’s a sequence of numbers that sinks into your brain, takes over your neural pathways and leaves you unable to talk or think about anything else until you’ve slogged your way through*.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. The release of the last GTA game heralded a month-long era of universal brotherhood, where you could approach practically any stranger on the street and, with a simple enquiry (“So, what mission are you on?”), form a lifelong bond. It was rather beautiful.
This is me out for the moment, then. I’m off home to freeze myself until I can come back into town and buy the game. Gentlemen: see you on the other side.
*The affliction seems to have some tie to the Y chromosome, which is fortunate since it leaves roughly half the population functioning well enough to keep things ticking over.
Via reddit, I see that “a national newspaper” in the UK is soliciting some True Life Stories:
A national newspaper wants your story and will pay hundreds of pounds to the right person.
Write a few lines about how computer games turned you to crime and if it’s something we like, we’ll call you straight back.
Hundreds of pounds. That’s pretty enticing. I reckon I’m familiar enough with games (and the standard of coverage they get) to give this a good welly… sure, I might feel a bit dirty, but hundreds of pounds will buy me a lot of soap.
I was browsing the excellent Bad Science Blog and I came across this post about Phun, a “2D physics sandbox”. The idea will be familiar to anyone who’s played Crayon Physics – you draw shapes, which then become solid and interact according to the Laws Of The Universe. Phun is much, much more powerful though… watch the video and you’ll see the kind of stuff you can do. And then download it. That part’s important.
If you’re like me, and in all honesty you should be, then you know that co-op gaming is the way of the future. Enter Co-Optimus, a snappily-named site devoted to this marvellous pursuit, with reviews, news and a handy list of games that support proper old-styley buddy cop teamups.
Which leads me to, frankly, the main reason for this post: N+, the Xbox Live Arcade version of the excellent freeware platformer N, has a teamup mode. This includes dedicated multiplayer levels. How cool is that?
I’ve been playing a lot of CoD 4 multiplayer lately. Basic rundown is as follows:
- Normal: Mildly entertaining. Two stars, occasionally scratches a third.
- Hardcore: Gibbering heaps of fun. Five stars. Occasionally slips down to four and a half.
The combat in Call of Duty games has never grabbed me – too half-arsed for a tactical shooter, not drawn out enough for a conventional deathmatch – but this new option makes for some of the most exciting gameplay ever committed to… servuloid? Whatever.
To paraphrase a friend of mine, the basic reason hardcore combat is so much more fun is because now bullets kill people. No longer can you take five to the face only to heal yourself with a quick hop into cover and some manly grimacing. As a result, smart play is not just encouraged but enforced, and face-to-face engagements have been boiled down to microsecond twitch-offs.
This is a big deal because in a tactical shooter, combat shouldn’t completely take over – straightforward killin’ is fun to a point, but when it’s the only focus of a match you might as well be playing whack-a-mole. Under the new system actual one-on-one engagements are pretty much incidental, rarely distracting from the sack-shrivelling back-and-forth intensity of the wider game.
A lot has been written about the unlockables and such like (if every minor achievement in my life was commemorated with a rockin’ guitar riff, I’d be a whole lot more productive) but even without all that the game easily vaults into the highest ranks of online shootery. It’s been a long while since one this good has come along, and it’ll be a long while before it’s beaten.
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