Self-Help Hotline

One of the things about video games as a hobby is that it is seen as a waste of time, similar to sitting and watching television or movies. In the minds of detractors, it is a sedentary activity that, while fun, has little in the way of self improvement. Hotline Miami has become a notable exception for me. And that scares me a little.

If you like the concept this trailer puts forward, go buy the game. Seriously, do it now. At full price, it's $10, it's on sale right now, and it probably will be again for Christmas if you are feeling frugal. It has a pounding, Eighties throwback soundtrack that I listen to daily, and visuals that are the best approximation of a bad acid trip I have seen in a video game. But be careful. It changes you. 

To say that a game has changed you is a strong compliment. Art's capacity to inform and change a person is the most important thing about it. We can all think of a piece of media that changed the way we think, about something small or very rarely about our entire universe. But, as I said above, this game scared me. Because it changed me into a frightening human being. 

I have been seeing a lot of the marketing for Far Cry 3 lately, touting dark and violent subject matter. If you don't know what I'm talking about, check out this promotional video, it spells it out pretty clearly. 

Standard blockbuster action movie-esque game. The tone they seem to want is that you are a man stuck in the heart of darkness, surrounded by violent insanity, trying to fight your way out. Now, this is suitably edgy, and action packed enough to be entertaining, but it, like many of its big budget brethren, feels the need to give you a purpose for it all, a light at the end of the tunnel. It gives you a reason. And that is bullshit. It takes the teeth out of the violence if it has such lofty context, but that is how they make it palatable. It is intended to motivate you in the long term, while the explosions and killing are the short term incentive. Hotline is what happens when you take out that long term incentive, that reason. What you are left with is a serial murderer that is a joy to play as.

Hotline kept me playing and playing (I have completed the game 100% four times now since I got it day 1) because it is fast, fun, and brutal. Death is not a failure state so much as a temporary setback, like running out of ammunition in a First Person Shooter. Ran out of ammo/throat ripped out by attack dog? Hit R, keep killing. One hit, one kill leads to a lovely mixture of extreme caution and pants wetting audacity. I still remember the time I ran into a room and managed through luck and balls to beat them all to death with my bare hands. I was killed not three seconds later by a man with a knife. I hit R, and slit his throat with his own knife before I get to anybody else, just to show him. 

You get into a rhythm with this game. Run in, die, restart, run in, die, restart, etc. You make plans, strategize, finding the path around the level that works. Everything happens so fast, death is made cheap. There is no dying speech, no grandiose cries of pain. In a split second, you (or they) go from living, running pixel men to quivering meat, bleeding on the floor. And as you figure out the optimal way to get through the level, and you build up that rush of adrenaline until your reflexes are as sharp as needles, you get deeper and deeper into it. Every man and dog blurs together, every attempt is just one R key away from the next, and it just keeps going and going and going and

The music stops. Nothing is moving. You are alone in a house filled with bodies. Some are full of holes, other slashed, some even cut into pieces. And it's all your fault. You were the aggressor. You were the antagonist here, not them. There was no reason, just your own enjoyment. And the worst part is, the more you do it, the better you get.

When I started to play this game, It would take me quite a few attempts to beat a level. I was cautious, treating every kill like I was jumping a huge pit. Carefully line up my jump, get a good running start, deep breath, and GO. As I played, it got easier and easier. I got faster, more precise, more deadly. I would see a room of three men armed with shotguns, and no longer see a hazard. I saw targets. I got good at killing. This is the first and only time that a game has actually made me feel like I am getting better at killing. Not fighting, not shooting, not combat. At straight, unadulterated, violent murder. And I love it. It's my game of the year for sure. No other game has made me feel so good and so scared at the same time. You should play it too. I'm sure you'll enjoy it. 

All images used are from Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

The Dark Souls of my Childhood

I haven't posted in some time, and one of the chief reasons is this.

preparetodie.com

Oh man, so much this. This game raised the bar for me for the rest decade. Everything else I have played feels like creative meanderings or vapid wish fulfillment. It's honestly surprising to me how much weight this game has to me now, the cannonball to other game's pebbles. And the reason for this is actually very personal.

I grew up in a rural neighborhood. Contact with other kids was sometimes sparse, but what I lost in social contact was made up for by geography. I had a lot of room to play in, and a lot of time was spent outside ranging about, with friends or not. Collecting a menagerie of sticks to thwack at offending shrubbery with, adventure was abundant. As I outgrew this vague outdoor play, my videogame consumption filled in the free time gap, and my favorite games for the longest time were the Zelda games.

The parallels are pretty obvious. Miyamoto himself has cited a childhood traversing the woods near his home as the inspiration for Zelda's free ranging design. I played any I could get my hands on. My first ever game was Link's Awakening, Elementary School was Link to the Past, Middle School was Wind Waker, and High School was Twilight Princess. I was weaned on Zelda. It is only natural that my taste for Zelda matured to one for Souls.

Now, all of this may seem obvious. Tastes change as we mature, this is known. But the more I played it, the more it started to become almost eerie.
A lot of the environments of Dark Souls are dead, abandoned edifices, slowly being claimed either by natural forces or the mysterious and deadly creatures that populate the game. Growing up where I did, I was often recruited by my parents to aid in the maintenance of the property, whether through landscaping, construction, demolition, or dealing with the variety of wild animals that could intrude at any time. I am fairly certain that, among my friends, I have the dubious distinction of having had to kill animals with my own hands, to eat or just cull, and also witness the deaths of many more. And then there is the minutiae of living in such a place, the texture and smell of rotting wood, the creaking sound of a floor that is older than your grandparents, the ivy worming its way through the walls, the clouded glass in the windows, ancient furniture pieces that are completely unrecognizable. Even outside I would find bones, animal bodies, a rusted out car chassis, or even an unmarked well. This atmosphere of decay is something I am intimately familiar, and something that Dark Souls is steeped in. Crumbling castles, ruined and rotting towns, all part and parcel. It's a very dark nostalgia, and it has some interesting parallels. But it goes even further than that.

IGN 

Just looking at the above image gives me a little chill. As part of the game, you must eventually make your way into The Abyss, an endless expanse of pure darkness in all directions, to defeat the Four Kings that reside there. It's pretty creepy on it's own (see for yourself), but I have context that makes it absolutely terrifying. When I was a small child, I nearly drowned while swimming in a friends pond. One of my abiding memories of that is looking down and only seeing inky blackness, feeling myself slowly sinking, and the cold creeping up my body. It gave me a fear of deep water that persisted for a few years after. I had to have one-on-one sessions to learn to swim, teachers in regular classes couldn't convince me to so much as put my feet in the deep end. So when I play Dark Souls, and I descend that dank, moldering spiral staircase in the bowels of the New Londo ruins, and it ends in this:

ledr.com

I freeze. It took me several minutes, during which I got up from my chair, went outside, and walked around, before I could screw up the courage to take the plunge. I only died the first time fighting the Four Kings, because I couldn't look at the screen without getting bad vertigo. I managed to beat them the second time by equipping the strongest armor I could and swinging wildly; I could only look at the screen sidelong in spurts. It's the most scared I have ever been by a video game. It took me completely by surprise, and it was at that point that I realized just how deeply this game reaches for me. It stopped reminding me of my childhood and started to evoke it so strongly it was like being haunted by myself at age 8. So many little things would trigger spells of Deja Vu, like climbing down a hole on the giant roots of a dead tree, or the way my character would swing a sword. A more perfect union of childhood and adulthood I have not been able to find.
Dark Souls is not a perfect game, I would not presume to call my own appraisal anything but subjective. However, no game has ever touched me as deeply as this one has in my entire life. I think my pick for Game of the Decade may already be decided.

The Joys of Heisting

I rarely get into multiplayer games.
As a kid growing up, I could count the number of friends I had on both hands, sometimes just one. I also lived a fair drive from most of them (about an hour round trip sometimes), so I didn't get out much. As such, I tend to gravitate to single player experiences, stuff I can play by myself. But I do have a particular love of co-operative stuff. I have always liked playing through things like Halo with a friend locally, and occasionally I will get swept up in some PC co-operative offering. The Left 4 Dead series is quite good, but doesn't have the hooks for long term play for me. Killing Floor was a brief obsession of mine, but I am not going to talk about that right now. Right now, I have only one game on my brain, and its Payday: The Heist.

Man, I love this game. Something about it just pushes all of my buttons, more than Killing Floor or Left 4 Dead, and I think it's because it draws from both. From Killing Floor, it gets the classes and level progression, and from Left 4 Dead, it gets the objective based gameplay, though it makes it a level or two more complex.
In Left 4 Dead, there are rarely any tasks beyond getting from Point A to Point B. It occasionally breaks this up with bits defending from waves of enemies, or running around collecting needed items like gas. It's simple but effective. Payday adds in additional wrinkles, such as in the First World Bank level, where you need to monitor an automatic drill that jams periodically while also going to the other side of the level to erase security footage, while also keeping control of various civilians around the level. Also, the police are almost always trying to stop you in some way, either through brute force assaults or sending in special units through the vents while you think you have down time. Adding in just one more thing to worry about besides the enemies adds an extra level of tension. Thankfully, it never has more than three or four things to worry about, so it never becomes too overwhelming.
These overall objectives add an important element that many other multiplayer games on the market lack: a tension arc.

http://www.musik-therapie.at/PederHill/Structure&Plot.htm

I have never really liked a multiplayer game that just involves killing things for this reason; each individual match lacks this important element. While the diagram above is the tension arc for a three act plot structure, in a good work of linear media (game, movie, book, etc.), a great many smaller pieces are also made up of tension arcs, even to the smallest things like shooting a gun (rising tension as you start to fire, increasing tension as you expend the clip on the target, and the denouement of reloading). This game uses these arcs extremely well. Police Assaults are a constant flood of law enforcement, and every time they come at you it gets harder and harder, but they almost always do end, after a while. Each objective takes time to complete, whether through direct interaction, such as herding a VIP you need to transport, or through only periodic interaction, such as with the aforementioned drill. Either way, there is an arc to the objective, from the low tension at the outset, or near the climax, when you have only 20 seconds left on the drill, but two teammates are down and bleeding, you are down to your pistol and two SWAT with riot shields are creeping towards you. It's really exciting what context can do to make a game more interesting.
I could go on about how authentic it feels to those modern heist movies, with the clown masks and brief audio vignettes before each level, or how they randomize just enough to make it interesting and unique each time (guard and civilian position, makeup and length of police assaults, even adding or subtracting objectives), or how you can complete some missions almost entirely by stealth and coordination, and only near the very end have to resort to violence. But to me, a lot of that is just icing on the cake. Now if you will excuse me, I have cash to grab.

Images from Photobucket, except where noted.

On The Importance of "Let's Plays"

I am a Let's Play addict.
There. I said it. Maybe now I can stop reading them.

Nope. Guess not.
So why do I love Lets Plays so damn much? I think I can break it down into 3 reasons, after reading and watching enough Lets Plays to make and omnibus and adapt it into a cinematic trilogy, and they are as follows.

1. Faster and Cheaper to Appreciate
One great benefit of reading or watching a lets play of a game is that you can take in all of the narrative struggles of game characters, as well as get an idea of the mechanics and difficulty of a game without having to play it yourself. The Lets Player in question will often truncate their gameplay experience, so you can make your way through the entire run of a 200 hour rpg in a day or so worth of reading. This allows for a lot more game appreciation for your time. Additionally, you don't have to pay for the game yourself, which is nice.

2. Fun Commentary
Some Lets Plays offer more than just letting us play vicariously through the Lets Player. Sometimes the Lets Play is worth it for some comedic value, or some informative purpose. For instance, a lets play of a classic RPG where the player breaks it mechanically for all to see like Ivan Drago, or a group of friends commenting on just how terrible a bad game gets. These Lets Plays let us imagine that we are playing with them in some respect, watching over their shoulder and commenting as they play. These sorts of Lets Plays often involve multiple people, or the player will stream the process live, letting the viewers of the stream also commentate.
The thing about this point is that we are still substituting a normal gaming experience for an inferior, but cheaper product. But there is one more reason, and the real reason I love Lets Plays so damn much.

3. The Narrative of the Player OR The Constructed Narrative
Here are a few links to Lets Plays that fit this criteria which I wholeheartedly recommend. Some are just incredibly hilarious, others are dramatic, and some are both. These Lets Plays are the reason I have the Lets Play Archive in my bookmarks bar ahead of Facebook. Not all of these have constructed narratives, and may amount to little more than commentary, but they do tap into one of the important reasons I love games so much, and make them such a unique medium: The capability of radically different experiences while playing the same game. I have already gushed about Fire Emblem in this blog last post (which you should read for context, it's not that long), but this is why I also like to read and play along with Fire Emblem Lets Plays. Its a lot of fun to see how the other person is doing in the game, like how their roster differs from yours, things they found that you missed, and how they approached situations differently. Its a fascinating exercise. But what is much more compelling is when a Lets Player creates an entirely different narrative by adapting the events that happen in the game to a narrative that they construct, sometimes entirely on the fly, or by creating artificial challenges for themselves. These Lets Plays become more like written stories about the game, rather than a direct transcription. It's really compelling, and I love to marvel at their progress, or their audacity.
So that's why I read these things. I have considered starting my own, but I can't think of a good game to do it in. If you have any suggestions, comment or send me an email.

Image from lparchive.org

All Hail the RNG!! or Coaching Gamblers

I have been playing a fair bit of Fire Emblem lately, and I started to wonder about it's distinct appeal. I really can't think of other games that I play in the same way as it. I do like other tactics games, like the Final Fantasy Tactics games and the Disgaea series, but I always return to Intelligent System's second party series.  And I think I may have pinpointed why. If you know how Fire Emblem works, skip the next few paragraphs until you see " So, knowing all of that mechanical crap, ". It'll be considerably shorter, but more convenient.

Some explanation of the basic mechanics of Fire Emblem: The game is about a fantasy band of heroes lead by a central character, who is often a lord of some description. You command them in a series of grid based tactical missions against other armies. They come in a large variety of classes, often with the potential to upgrade into another, better class as the characters gain experience and level up. There are distinct statistics to keep track of, a rock paper scissors relationship of weapon types, and magic on top of that. This is a fairly easy concept to understand for someone fairly game literate, and is far less complicated than other iterations of the genre. But it has three fairly important elements that make it distinct and compelling.

First, instead of a stable of customizable troops, each recruit is a distinct character. While the game rarely takes the time to define the characters in the main plot, there is always some flavor for every character, either through optional scenes or Support Relationships. Support Relationships, or Supports, are conversations that characters can have with each other. Usually there are only 3 for each pair, and the characters gain bonuses for remaining near characters they have a Support with.

Second, the benefits of leveling up are somewhat random. How this is achieved is through what is known as an individual growth rate. A character has a growth rate for each statistic, which determines the percentage chance that a particular stat will increase by 1 at every level. Growths are rarely higher than 60% for an important skill, say Strength for a career Axeman, but there are definitely stats that a character is more or less likely to gain. But, there is always the chance that the aforementioned Axeman may not get an increase to Strength in 5 levels.

Third, Statistics in Fire Emblem are small, easy to understand numbers, as you can see in the screenshot of Rolf above. The equations for determining what a statistic does are also very easy and predictable. For instance, if an attack hits an enemy, then the damage is the strength of the weapon and your character's strength statistic, minus their defense. There are a few other potential modifiers, such as the weapon triangle (that rock paper scissors thing) and Supports, but they don't add a whole lot of complexity. The highest a character's strength can usually get is somewhere in the mid to high 20's, so its pretty easy to calculate everything.

So, knowing all of that mechanical crap, why does that make Fire Emblem so compelling? Because it makes every level a tense experience. Since your stats are fairly small numbers, every level matters a lot for a character's overall effectiveness, and their role on the battlefield. The random chance of getting stats you need means that the Cavalier you have been trying to nurture for half of the game is rendered entirely useless by the Random Number Generator, or RNG.

Oh Godammit!

On the other hand, every character could potentially be extremely lucky, and become a godly machine of death.

Keep in mind that Mist here is a healer.

This element adds a lot of replayability to the game, making each playthrough result in a different final team out of your gang of plucky heroes. The various combinations create a different net of potential Supports, allowing for a different character driven story to supplement the main plot. And there is always the chance of a once in a lifetime roll of the dice, resulting in terrifying creatures of majestic death dealing prowess.

Every number glowing green is a stat that is maximized. Just... wow.

This potential for a crazed endgame party of monstrous power is what keeps me coming back to this game, coaching these little fantasy characters through their adventures over and over, rolling the dice to see if they finally come up Death God. Because I want to see my healer beat the crap out of the final boss too.

Header image courtesy of Photobucket, others from Fedule's Fire Emblem : Path of Radiance Lets Play