Tag Archives: oh for fuck’s sake

The Song Remains The Same

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It’s taken me a while but I finally tore myself away from WoW to start playing Eternal Sonata (Bandai/Namco, Xbox 360) today. I have been looking forward to this. It’s a JRPG set in the dreams of Frédéric Chopin as he lies dying of tuberculosis in Paris in 1849. And that is the kind of idea for an RPG that gets me really excited.

I mean that in all honesty. When I play a game I want to see things I’ve never seen before. Admittedly my usual taste in music is for stuff that sounds like a 70s analog synthesizer being fed through a wood-chipper covered in beeswax, while someone uses a sledgehammer to beat out the baseline on the Forth Bridge and someone else fires off the James Soane Collection of Badboy Kickdrums in the background. But Chopin’s dying dreams filtered through a Japanese sensibility, and interactive, from the same house that brought us Katamari and Xenosaga? Oooooo in approving and anticipatory tones.

Things begin quite promisingly. The first (game-engine-based) cutscene is beautifully animated and intriguing. The next one is also beautifully animated, is too long, and has voiceover that clanks more than Marley’s chains. The third one is about the same. But there’s a sense of atmosphere building, themes and mood, and a couple of (clanky) musical metaphors that bode well.

And finally the game itself begins, and I find myself escorting a young girl called Polka along a sun-dappled woodland path. It is very pretty. What’s that curious object sparkling over there? Why, it’s a save-point—how quaint! I am feeling quietly excited about the potential of the coming experience.

Suddenly Polka collides with something that looks like the mutant offspring of a leek and a pumpkin, and can’t proceed until she’s battered it to death with her umbrella, to the swelling sounds of a musical score that is almost completely unlike Chopin.

Then there are more leek-pumpkins. And a chest that someone’s left in a clearing, perhaps in tribute to the thousands of old-school RPGs with chests containing health-ups left in unlikely locations. And then more leek-pumpkins.

Ah well.

What if they gave an award and nobody came?

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The BAFTA nominations for the 2007 Video Games Awards came out on 25th September (I know I’m behind the times, my father died the next day, sue me). And frankly, what in the holy name of living crap is going on?

The list’s here. Go and have a look at it. Anything strike you as odd?

First of all, many of the nominated titles haven’t actually been released yet. This is, believe it or not, in accordance with the awards’ terms and conditions: as long as you reckon you’ll get your game out sometime in 2007 then you can put it up for an award and BAFTA’s videogame-related members can shortlist it. So that’s fine, then.

Except for two things. Firstly, it’s not always possible to tell the quality of a game from pre-release code, even if we believe that the producers of the nominated games have given BAFTA’s voting members enough access to pre-release copies of the game for them to sufficiently judge the likely quality of the final product. Secondly, only four companies seem to have taken advantage of this generosity on BAFTA’s part: Sega (Sega Rally Revo, released two days after the nominations list), Eidos (Kane & Lynch: Dead Men), Sony (Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune and Eye of Judgment), and EA, with a clear 50% of the not-out-yet titles (Orange Box, Skate, Crysis, and The Simpsons Game). Prominently named on BAFTA’s game-award site: the former Executive Chairman of Eidos and the former head of EA UK.

Back to the list. Secondly, have a look at the PS3 titles that have received nominations. Quite a large number, you’ll agree. Except that in three cases (Orange Box, Skate, Sega Rally Revo) these aren’t PS3 exclusives, they’re multi-format titles that for some reason are only listed in the PS3 version. All three, you’ll also note, make use of the previously discussed laxity on games that haven’t been released yet. And interestingly, two of them (Orange Box and Skate) have had their PS3 release delayed until weeks or even months after the Xbox 360 and PC versions come out. Both of them are EA titles.

The other question the shortlist begs is: what’s missing? And the answer is… well, put it like this: what if you announced a games award, and a company declined to submit pre-release versions of its games to your panellists? Ah, okay, but what if that company was Microsoft Games Studio, whose at-the-time unreleased titles included Halo 3, Project Gotham Racing 4 and Mass Effect? You’d be screwed, wouldn’t you?

Notice the complete absence of Halo 3, Project Gotham Racing 4 and Mass Effect from the BAFTA shortlist of the best games of 2007.

I am not a Microsoft apologist, much less a fanboy, but…. BAFTA, you’re dead in the water. Your awards have declared themselves irrelevant. If you give out a set of videogame awards for 2007 and do not mention Halo 3 among your nominees, you are writing the words ‘HOPELESSLY OUT OF TOUCH AND LOVING IT’ on your forehead. Admittedly they may be difficult to read, since they’ll have to be squeezed around the words ‘GIVING EVERY APPEARANCE OF BEING INSTITUTIONALLY BIASED’ which are there already.

Shape up or give up, BAFTA. Please.

Bioshocking

Posted by under narrative

So I played the demo of Bioshock a few days ago and I was all like, “huh,” enough to put my money down on a pre-order but not, you know, entirely convinced. Game play, atmosphere, setting and backstory, fantastic, but there was one thing that really jarred. And then I read an internest discussion that said yeah, okay, but that’s just the demo because the demo needs to get you to the meat of the game really fast and the actual retail product will be, you know, less frenetic and bumpy.

Chase-cutting: bollocks. The demo is, okay, not identical to the comparable sequence in the full game. There are some differences. They do not matter.

Here’s what has my hackles up like a hyena’s (and here be spoilers but only for the first ten minutes of the game): the intro to Bioshock is like the entire first season of Lost condensed to fifty seconds, only what’s down the hatch is much, much better: it’s a whole city. You arrive, you beat up the first couple of baddies with a wrench, and then you find a vending machine. Press (A) and a fat glowing syringe about the size of a tube of toothpaste drops out. This is kind of unexpected.

Before you can press another button, your character grabs it and injects the whole thing into his arm.

For fuck’s sake.

I admit I’m only an hour or so into the game and as yet I know nothing about the silent narrator whose actions I’m controlling, except that he has some funky tattoos and probably some backstory to go with them. There may well be an explanation coming at some point in the future. And of course the contents of the syringe and getting them into your avatar’s bloodstream are crucial to what follows. But still, what a great huge fucking narrative discongruity. I spent the next ten minutes—first in the demo and then again in the full game—thrown out of the fantastic sense of immersion that the game had created, and with a feeling of distinct antipathy towards my avatar. I’m not sure I want to play the kind of guy who injects himself with mystery chemicals just because they’re there, know what I mean?

Apart from that the game is fantastic and I want to get a 5:1 audio system just to properly experience the sound-design. But Bioshock is the best-reviewed game of the last five years (on Metacritic it ties at 97% with Halo, Metroid Prime, Perfect Dark, GTA III, NFL 2K1 and, uh, Tony Hawks Pro Skater 2 and 3, and is beaten only by Soul Calibur and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time—an impressive list.) Are our expectations of game-narrative really so jaded that we can accept glaring pieces of story-telling and character-building idiocy like this in the first ten minutes and still say that it’s one of the best games ever written?

I will report back when I’ve finished the game, for the sake of clarity and completeness. And I don’t want this to stop you from buying and playing what is one of the finest FPS games in years. But at the same time I wasn’t going to let it pass without comment because let’s be honest, if the same thing happened in the first ten minutes of a new TV show you’d groan and change the channel.

A Whiner Is You

Posted by under Uncategorized

Just to assure you I’m still alive…

Apparently there are only three countries in the world that haven’t officially adopted the metric system: Liberia; Myanmar; and the United States of America. How richly ironic is it that the USA’s way of measuring things is what they call the English system, and the rest of the world calls the Imperial system? (And they can’t even get that right: there are 20 fluid ounces in a pint, not 16. Please, these things are called ‘standards’ for a reason.)

In other news: Space Giraffe is a huge disappointment, and I will deliver some thoughts on Bioshock as soon as Play.com bothers to get my copy to me. In the meanwhile, please stop talking about Psychonauts like it was the second coming of Infocom. It really wasn’t that good. Before telling me I’m wrong, please grasp that there is an important difference between ‘fun’ and ‘funny’: they may overlap but they are not the same thing. Psychonauts may have been funny—in parts—but my lord it was an awful grind to play.

Original Sin

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The Origins Awards nominees were announced today. Needless to say there’s nothing about it on the Origins Awards website—the Origins convention is affiliated with GAMA, the Game Manufacturers Association, whose website was at one time encouraging people to register for the Origins show that had taken place eighteen months earlier. As it is, the website for the academy that deals with the Origins Awards is still advertising that the “33rd Annual Awards Submissions are right around the corner! Sumbit (sic) your games now through the online form!” The deadline for submissions was 31st January.

(It’s not that GAMA’s eye is not on the ball. It’s that despite the efforts over many years of many people I respect, some still with the organisation and some not, GAMA still doesn’t realise there is a ball. Unjust? Perhaps. But when the homepage of your trade body has less Google-fu than the Wikipedia entry for Vasco da Gama, the message is loud and clear.)

I’m not going to go into the troubles or otherwise with the Origins Awards because I administer a different award in the same field, and I am not the kind of guy who bashes the competition gratuitously. (I will say, however, that part of the reason for setting up the DJA was frustration with the Origins Awards.)

But anyway, the nominations are up! Fifty-one nominees in ten categories, covering board games, card games, miniature games and RPGs (the OAs are and always have been relentlessly product-based). And not one single name of a designer anywhere on the press release. No designers, writers, artists, or other actual creatives acknowledged. Which is, frankly, disgraceful.

GAMA is admittedly an organisation for manufacturers and says so in its name. But the OAs are administered by the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design, supposedly independent of GAMA though its Chair is appointed directly by GAMA’s president. It has one purpose: “the Academy’s principal mission is the administration the Origins Awards (sic)“—that’s from its homepage. And who are these faceless academicians? They “are published game designers, writers, artists, and other game creators.”

Well, it’s good to see them supporting their home team.

Body text

Posted by under sex

According to a trusted friend, apparently Websense is blocking its users from seeing this website.

Under the category ‘sex’.

I am frankly nonplussed.

I mean, I don’t think I’ve referred to any particular game as an “abortion” recently.