The Tragedy of the Xenomorph

Almost all my favourite movies were released before I existed: Bladerunner, Aliens, Star Wars, Terminator, Predator, and many others. I watch these movies at least once a year and Aliens hit a real chord with me after I played Rebellion's Aliens versus Predator on my 10th birthday and was told that the titular races were based on movies. I rented every damn one of them and watched them all in one day. I loved everything about them and own every game featuring either xenomorphs or pulse rifles. Gearbox Software has made some of my favourite games: Half-Life's expansions Opposing Forces and Blue Shift, Halo: Combat Evolved's PC port, Borderlands and Borderlands 2 and more and when I heard they were doing an Aliens game I had an erection to make the Hulk feel inadequate to She Hulk. I'm not going to focus on Aliens: Colonial Marines because it's been thoroughly pistol whipped as it is, at this point it'd feel like a hate crime.

Who ever heard... of the sad alien?

My contention is with the way licensed Aliens games are handled. Every one of them does one thing really well, and drops the ball with almost everything else. The universe that these special creatures inhabit is so rich with characters, themes, technologies and worlds that making a game from them should be the easiest thing ever. Class based cooperative games, survival horror, competitive multiplayer, turn based strategy... shit even a point and click adventure could work. In spite of this no developer seems to know what makes these movies great. I constantly live in hope that someone is going to hit the jackpot with these unique critters, I just hope it happens before I fucking die. What do the previous games do, and how can we merge them?

Aliens versus Predator (Rebellion, 1999)
One word: atmosphere. At the tender age of ten I was shitting my pants playing this game. You're alone, it's dark, the enemy moves lightning quick, your pulse rifle can jam, you're attacked from nowhere. Even replaying it recently I had to take frequent breaks. It had an authentic feel in the environments and missions as well. The guy giving you instructions on the screens, the sounds of the doors opening, the alarms and the aliens themselves all felt very familiar. That being said, the game has its issues. Aliens have trouble navigating the terrain smoothly and can end up vibrating on some terrain and they move very erratically making them very hard to hit. Not only that but the marine can run almost as fast as the aliens. At the end of each level there's an average run speed statistic. I was clocking in 12 metres per second.  That's 43 kilometres per hour. It was like Usain Bolt joined the USCM.

I really hope this image isn't offensive.

Aliens versus Predator 2 (Monolith, 2001)
Okay so now the run speed was pulled back a bit to represent a normal human wearing equipment and that was great. The sounds were also much improved and the story was delivered in a more cohesive way. The missions felt more connected and all the races met up at some point in the game and the aliens' movement was a little less erratic but still had issues. It retained some of the pant-shitting fear as well but the atmosphere wasn't as good. Everything about it felt a little cartoon-like, like it took more from the comics than the movies. Brighter colours, well-lit environments and human enemies took the tone of the game in a different direction. It was almost as if the influence was more Alien: Resurrection than Alien or Aliens.

Aliens vs. Predator (Rebellion, 2010)
It took another nine years for another Aliens game to get made but we finally saw the xenomorph in all it's high polygon glory and we finally sorted out its movement troubles. Aliens transitioned smoothly from different surfaces, ran very convincingly and lurked in shadows and utilised hit and run tactics. The sounds were all greatly improved from the pulse rifle to the screeching. The fidelity was really the winner in this iteration but everything else was tainted by the movies. No, not the Aliens movie the Aliens vs Predator movies. The visual diarrhea set in Antarctica in present day, the feculent films that didn't even feature a damn pulse rifle and had aliens coming from Mayan pyramids or something I don't fucking know. I passed out from vomiting so I can't be sure of all the awful things those movies did.

The film equivalent of cancer.

 Aliens: Colonial Marines (Gearbox, Nerve, Timegate, Demiurge, 2013)
Aw yeah, we get to revisit the Sulaco, Hadley's Hope and the planet LV-426 itself. We finally had the environments from the movies with some really nice character models. The weapon sounds were also top notch, at least as good as 2010's Aliens vs. Predator and they felt great. The pulse rifle sounded great to shoot, Hick's shotgun had a satisfying punch and the smartgun was as powerful as one would expect. We also saw the motion tracker become its own independent tool instead of being just a part of the HUD.  The lighting was also very thematic and really captured the look of the Aliens sets. Flickering lights and flashes of lightning briefly illuminate the oncoming horde beautifully. The downside is the narrative, characters, pacing, and almost everything else. I try not to be negative so let's just leave it at that.

So what we need is a game that has the atmosphere of Aliens versus Predator 1999, the pacing of Aliens versus Predator 2, the animation and visuals of Aliens vs. Predator 2010 and the environments of Aliens: Colonial Marines. What sort of game can we make from this? How about this:

Timeline: running concurrent to Aliens but on another planet
Plot: You play as a security guard posted on some backwater planet being terraformed by Weyland Yutani. The start of the game has you doing guard stuff. You wake up, clock in, wander around the facility and respond to some normal menial tasks like some worker not locking up properly. You get into the mindset of a guy who is working a shitty job on a shitty planet purely for a paycheck to send back to the folks. Then you're alerted that an anomaly was detected near the planet. No one was notified of any ship or anything so you fill out a form and send it back to earth which is going to take two weeks (ha! Remember in Aliens when Lydecker is faced with a similar problem of communicating with the company because it takes so long to get a response and it's always "Don't ask"?). Then weird shit starts to happen.

Some colonists stop checking in from outlying outposts and you get sent out to see what's up. Lights are off as you approach the building and sensing something amiss you take your side arm with you (because the heavy guns are either locked up or non-existent as no one expects a 'shake and bake' colony to require weapons). You have a torch and a pistol and move through a pitch black and quiet outpost. No one is about and then you see some foreign resin on the ground. When you follow it you find a room full of it and a dead colonist on the wall, their chest burst open. A hiss behind you makes you spin around and yell as some thing lashes out at you. You race for the door, engage the lock and run for the exit but before you can escape it crashes through the ceiling and advances. You get lucky and mange to take it out and you dash back to the buggy and radio back to base. You get a garbled message telling you to get the fuck back there and shots in the background.

Now this scenario has you in the dangerous and unenviable position of facing a threat without proper training or equipment, and it's going to take two weeks for the marines to arrive. This could be sped up by having the planet closer to earth than LV-426 or something. The introduction to the game is like Half-Life's start with Freeman doing just another day. Then it transitions to survival horror where you're evading the aliens like Newt and when the marines arrive you can start to kick some arse before nuking the site from orbit. Alternatively the start of the game can serve as just the tutorial and then you take control of a marine and it plays like a tactical cooperative shooter. Have classes like a pointman who is in charge of the motion tracker, a smartgunner to yell "Let's rock", an engineer to set up turrets and open doors and a medic to patch your shit up. All these roles are shown in Aliens, all have proven mechanics in other games like Battlefield.  God damn I wanna play a good aliens game.



Shit how am I still unemployed; these ideas are solid fucking gold.

A Sense of Achievement

There is a large misconception among people who do not play games that anything that happens in a game is fake. It's not tangible and therefore holds no value or purpose and is seen as a waste of time. Perhaps even some gamers feel this way as well and treat games as just something to fill in the time but it's not at all true. Just because you can't touch something doesn't mean it's not real; I can't touch gravity but I firmly believe it's there. The brain is a complex organ and holds a lot of secrets that we are yet to unlock and it can be tricked quite easily and games can do this well. When I think back on a battle in a game, in my mind's eye, I don't remember seeing the edges of the monitor or my hands on the keyboard. I don't remember any outside stimuli; only what was happening in the game. As far as your brain is concerned, this shit matters.

Holy shit our brains are gullible.

I was firmly against the idea of achievements and trophies when they first cropped up. I saw them as little more than hamster wheels to keep people playing the same game, like bits of coloured ribbon given to soldiers, and not worthy of wasting my time and I think this is an attitude held by many PC players. Unlike consoles, nothing gets bigger when you get an achievement on the PC. On the 360 your 'gamer score' gets bigger and on the PS3 you gain levels as you get trophies. On PC the achievement gets marked off but that's about it. Sure it means that other people on Steam can go to your profile and see what achievements you earned but, come on, how many people actually do that? Most people I know who play on PCs are not social creatures when it comes to games. There's no incentive to deliberately go after achievements and I saw them as an irrelevant and superfluous addition to the gaming sphere. Then I got a console.

"Wow 'grats dude!" - said no one ever

Achievements meant a lot more on consoles than I knew and after a while I started to go a little bit more out of my way to get an achievement or two. I started to see the value of achievements apart from earning a few 'gamer score' points or another intangible trophy: it wasn't about giving you a reason to play a game a different way. It introduced a meta game where you did things differently, looked for alternated solutions and changed the nature of play. Some requirements for an achievement were ridiculously complex and I viewed these as impossibilities such as trying to play Metal Gear Solid with no kills, no alerts, as fast as possible and no reloading; I'd never be that keen on getting a silly achievement. But then you find yourself replaying a game you've played several times and you realise you're in a rut. You're doing the same thing all the time and you bring up the achievement list to see what you haven't got, something to aim for this time, make this playthrough mean something.

 If I've not already made it clear, I'm an ardent fan of Metal Gear Solid and recently got my first 100% completion, a Platinum trophy, for Metal Gear Solid 3. This was the first time I'd ever fully completed a game. Seeing that little icon pop up at the finale heralding the fact that I had bested everything this game had to offer made me swell with pride. It got me thinking, 'I should try to get 100% on Metal Gear Solid 2', the game I was planning on playing next. To get that, you have to do a lot of tediousness like collecting every single soldier's dog tags on every difficulty and completing every virtual reality mission (of which there are about 350), something I never thought I would do. It was hard, and I mean fucking stupid difficult, but when I finished that final VR mission and the little icon popped up heralding another challenge met, I swelled up with pride. Just two more playthroughs and it's another Platinum trophy. The allure of trophies made me do something I never thought myself capable of doing.

The sense of accomplishment, or achievement if you will, is not artificial. The feeling of relief when you finally complete something that was previously seen as impossible washes over you like a cool breeze. The sheer joy of never having to do those fucking VR missions ever again made me cry tears of joy. Those salty tears were real. All the emotions and sensations I felt by playing these games and conquering these challenges were created in my mind. To most people having these little trophies and achievement points are meaningless and a waste of time. To gamers it represents a lot of good times, nightmares, and a degree of skill and dedication. They don't have monetary value and you can't polish them in a cabinet but doesn't stop these virtual trophies being as important as the physical ones. You don't get participation trophies in games; you earn that shit motherfucker.

Achievement unlocked: being a little bitchª

there's no way I'm fully completing Peacewalker...



ª http://quinseyblog.blogspot.com.au/2011/12/participation-trophy-generation.html

SEX in VIDYA GAMES

That's right we're going for a page view grabbing topic today. I didn't think I'd weigh in on this mired subject but I saw a video from the recently reappeared Anita Sarkeesian on TED. I was late hearing about this shitfest (for lack of a better word) and by the time I did I had already lost interest. To paraphrase, Anita made a Kickstarter project to make a bunch of videos on how women are depicted in games, with an emphasis on the poorly done examples. Some people took offense to this and started slandering her and, as with any internet shitstorm, violence and threats swiftly ensued. Internet warriors one and all started throwing her name around and got her more publicity by doing so than she could have ever hoped and then other people, appalled by how she was treated, donated out of sympathy and support. It's the Streisand Effect if ever I saw it. The kicker is that to my knowledge she never actually made the video series.

I've just found your next franchise Activision: Romance Brawl

Sex in games, as in television, seems to be on the rise. Mass Effect caused a hullabaloo and when the more conservative fellows in the States heard there was titillating tentacle tickling they started on the warpath hoisting 'protect the children' banners. None of them had actually played the game or read anything else about it but that's not how witch hunts work. Bioware upped the amount of romantic encounters in Mass Effect 2 and by 3 you had homosexual options (well, guy on guy options. You've been able to shag Asari since 1 as femShep). After three games in this vein what started to bug me was it all seemed superfluous. What does adding a romance option or sex in a game actually bring to the experience? I cared more about losing Garrus, an alien whom I had no romantic feelings for, than my secretary (who totally wanted to feed my fish ifyaknowutimsaying) so employing it as a narrative technique  to make you care for someone isn't needed. It's not being avant garde seeing as sex is becoming more frequent in most mediums. It seems like something that is thrown in because you're trying to be edgy but failing.

Playing Borderlands 2 you come across some audio recordings in a nasty wildlife camp where prisoners were kept and experimented on. One of the recordings had a female voice comforting her wife. It was a name drop to let us know that she was a lesbian. Why was it necessary? Gearbox didn't have to include 'wife' or 'husband' they could have used 'baby' or any other title used as a term of endearment for a significant other. That way the player is informed that the voice is talking about a loved one without inviting an awkward segue. About ten seconds later you find another recording with a male voice telling us how much he hopes his husband will be okay. Right, so every prisoner here seems to be homosexual and we needed to be informed of this. Except we don't because we haven't met these people, and knowing their sexual orientation just doesn't make us care more for their plight. If later we're told that the antagonist of the game was targeting homosexuals on purpose it would have made more narrative sense but, no. Perhaps I'm reading too much into it and sometimes not all things need to have a deeper meaning but someone made a conscious decision to include that detail.

A game that initially did sex right was the first Witcher game. Geralt, the protagonist, is the result of mutant genetic enhancements to make him a superior monster slayer and as a result, he's sterile. Part of the witcher's mindset is neutrality and to never take sides. They slay monsters for a fee and that's the extent of their philosophy. During the course of the game there are several opportunities for Geralt to get nekkid with the inhabitants of Temeria. Now the important distinction The Witcher makes is we never see the action. The screen turns blurry and red and a card appears with artwork of the lady sans clothes in a provocative pose. Why is this different? Cards are collected by Geralt which essentially reduces these romantic encounters to a tawdry meaningless affair. The witcher is sterile, starting a family is an impossibility and even if they could their profession would prohibit this endeavor. Throughout the game Geralt speaks with a monotone accent reflecting his emotionless demeanor. These women are nothing to him, and the card collecting reflects that. Witcher 2, however, shows the scenes in explicit detail which was an egregious decision: video game characters having sex is as embarrassing as it should be. It's like two plastic dolls bumping up against each other.

I hear at the right angle you can see the 'Made in China' stamp on Triss' left butt cheek

 
I hate sexism in all its forms. Feminists are just as bad as masculinists because once you take too strong a side you stop hearing the arguments from the other side and once you only listen to your own camp your view is skewed. When it comes to the internet I hate all things that break anonymity. Forum posts or comments like 'As a girl, I find it a bit silly' or 'My gf bought me this' vex me. I see no reason to include your gender, religion, political views or your sexual orientation in any online discussion. It smacks of attention seeking and it shouldn't be necessary. Anonymity helps level the playing field, everyone's opinion is equal. If you preface your opinion with whether or not you're male, female, liberal or gay it affects how people view your comment. No one should want that. My view on the internet seems to be old and dying, like a Jedi in the desert. Shit's changed and the current internet zeitgeist is to tell the world everything about yourself. Y'know what that's brought us? Kids are bullied in and out of school, girls are harassed and insulted, the LGBT crowd are segregated into their own groups (look up Gaymers, no joke), and because this is the internet it's not restricted. It's not like you can skip school to avoid the shitheads or call in sick to work to not see that arsehole colleague; this shit sticks and is eternal.

Obi Wan's face after I told him you can raise a family in Skyrim

damn i hate people

The Good, the Bad, the Ambivalent

Games have come a long way since I was a wee lad. Their budgets are bigger, their audience is bigger, the maps are bigger, and their ideas are bigger. With time great trends have emerged, as have shit trends and trends that have a chance to be good. The good are the things in games that are either fantastic or on the verge of being fantastic. The bad are the annoying shitty things that we either haven't perfected yet or need to be dropped already. The ambivalent are the things that are understandable but still, like, totally gay.

Still unsure if Ezio is a flagrant homosexual or just Italian.

The Good

1. Animations are getting almost indistinguishable from the real thing. With motion capture technology advancing and powerful graphical engines we're beginning to see some really lifelike performances from our virtual pals. The facial expressions in Halo 4 had some of the subtlest movements I've seen since LA Noire, and from what I've seen in the Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes trailer Kojima is ratcheting up in-game dynamic animations even higher. It's not just character animations in third person that are improving either. Reloading a weapon in a first person shooter shows you all the mechanical parts moving in great detail adding just that much more to the immersion. Feet tilt when standing on an uneven surface, animations change when moving uphill or down - all the things I'd question when playing games in years past have been rectified.

2. Some people dislike sandbox games and I can understand why. It's difficult to imagine a sandbox style game with the same kind of immersive gravitas like Half-Life but we're starting to head that way and I'm excited. Sandbox gameplay offers infinite possibility for those little 'moments'. Those times where you manage to do something so insane, so inspired that you can't believe you just pulled it off within a game. Any game that promotes the possibility of creating these moments has my highly sought after tick of approval. Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes has announced that it will have a sandbox style narrative and I nearly passed out from all my blood surging towards my throbbing boner.

3. Cooperative games. I'm a huge fan of cooperative games which probably grew from a desire to play with siblings when we only had one computer and couldn't. It was surreal to see another player character in the game world and now it's becoming common. The laid back shooty fun of Borderlands, the chaotic teamkilling in Magicka, episodic content like Halo 4's Spartan Ops and dozens more are setting the tone that adding cooperative play to your game is a good thing. Actually creating a compelling cooperative experience is still in its infancy, as fun as it is to shoot stuff with a buddy I'm yearning for more refined cooperative games like Portal 2 and Metal Gear Solid: Peacewalker. It's becoming a trend and I believe only great things are going to come of it.

4. Sound fidelity has been on the rise for a while but now recordings of the genuine article are becoming the norm. Rifle shots, helicopters approaching from a distance, wind rustling through a dense canopy lend a lot to a scene and are all captured from the real world. I found my self taking a break and listening when playing Far Cry 2 because the weather had suddenly changed and created a unique and interesting moment. The work that went into Battlefield 3's audio helped set the benchmark for player's expectations of sound effects. It's not just gun shots and wind, it's the foley as well. When you're running around and you hear the clink of chainmail, the crunch of snow or the rustle of cloth I get all tingly.

5. Being able to look down and see your legs. This doesn't seem like much, it's been around since Halo 2, but this was a concept I had when I was playing Quake. When I heard that you could literally see your legs in Halo 2 I was elated. Seeing your legs as you climb a hill or lower yourself down a ladder really hits home that it's you. Playing Arma 2 and being able to look around while moving independently was one of the greatest innovations to never make it mainstream but I hope it does. It really is a great time to be alive.

LOOK AT THEM! It's off the fucking chain!

The Bad

1. Regenerating health is a mechanic that has overstayed its welcome. It's great from a designer's perspective because you no longer need to plan where to put health packs and that sort of thing because the player's health comes back by itself. Apart from the utter suspension of disbelief required when you're basically Wolverine soaking up mortars, it spoils those aforementioned 'moments'. Playing Half-Life and finding yourself with no suit power and only 35 health and knowing you're a long way off a health kit you have to change your style of play. Having a health bar introduces a random mechanic that influences your play style, health becomes a resource and each encounter you spend some. When your health magically comes back as you sit behind a rock and contemplate what you're doing for dinner every fight becomes the same because each encounter your resources are reset. I'm not saying health bars are perfect and I would like to see another approach I'm more in favour of bars than troll¹ physics.

2. Respawning enemies. I don't like hating on Call of Duty because at this point it's like pistol whipping a blind kid but it's the biggest offender. If I have exhausted thousands of rounds of ammunition and killed more people than Stalin did in the gulags and there are still more coming it's not suspension of disbelief it's just frustration. The intent, as I see it, is to keep you on the offensive and force you to push forward under fire otherwise you'll be stuck in a sandy shit hole come the equinox. What makes a questionable mechanic more egregious is when the enemy respawns it's done so mechanically you can actually time with precision how long it takes for them to appear at the exact spot you capped them last. It's lazy and I dun' like it.

3. Iron sights or aiming down the sight. You're probably sensing a theme here that a certain hugely popular franchise is an offender of all the listed shitty mechanics and I swear to Shiva that it was not my intention when I started this. Maybe it's my subconscious revolting. Having 'Aim Down Sight' or ADS, as it shall henceforth be referred to, is just adding another button the player has to press in order to shoot someone. I mean, why? It's not optional either, if you don't peek down the top of the gun you'll be lucky to hit a lake if you're standing on the bottom. We could just assume the player is always aiming, and just do away with it or just save it for a weapon that has a scope. It's totally lame and I dun' like it.

4. QTfuckingEs. Quicktime Events. This mechanic is so broken, so unfun that I don't know how I didn't lead with this. When a developer hinges your fate on a single button press during a cutscene so that the (usually really long and unskippable) cutscene constantly replays until you get it right I tend to take a break from the game that spans, how do you say, indefinitely. QTEs are the antidote to a good time. I liken them to 3D movies: they're there because they are. They serve no practical purpose, add nothing to the story or gameplay and serve only to place some sudden element of danger to an event that could have been handled automatically. Ask yourself this, have you ever known anyone who genuinely thinks they're fun?

5. Online only features that oughtn't be online only. Spartan Ops in Halo 4 requires you to be connected to Xbox Live which is ad supported but also a paid for subscription service. No connection, no Spartan Ops. This is probably because you can rank up your multiplayer character and they don't want you doing shady things but there could have been a workaround. The cooperative side of Far Cry 3 also requires you to be online. Some games don't even offer LAN anymore. Diablo 3 stands out in my mind for the worst game I've ever had the misfortune to be convinced to buy. Because it's online only you can be banned from playing the game you've bought should you breach the EULA and this really pisses me off. This is the internet being used for evil and it shouldn't sit well with anyone. Maybe I'm just old fashioned but the absence of any local play capability is one of the most saddening trends happening and no one seems to be making much of a fuss.


The Ambivalent

1. Downloadable content or DLC is a force that can be used for good but oft used for evil. Supporting your game post release with fresh content is a downright saintly idea and the highly attractive people over at CD Projekt Red are like bastions of purity in this regard. The problem is that DLC is a tempting way for developers to simply cut stuff out of the game and charge you more for it like day one DLC. Another shitty side effect is just poor quality DLC like map packs or weapons or skins. An example of the good kind of paid DLC are the expansions to Borderlands and its sequel. $10 or so nets you another 4-6 hours of gameplay that you can come back to whenever you want. An example of bad DLC are the missions for Mass Effect 2. You're paying $15-20 each and they last about an hour and once you've finished it that's it until another playthrough. At the moment, DLC is getting better but it stands upon a precipice.

Manuals are now on the Critically Endangered list.

2. The endangered species known as 'manuals'. There are a couple of reasons why the manual is joining the dodo: manuals are becoming digital, the game explains what you need to know as you play, conservation group's worries about trees, it only contains warranty information and so on. If you want to get what you used to pay for you have to fork out for the Collector's Edition for another $20 or so. I understand the decision to cut the manual but it's not one I can forgive. The manual used to give you something to read as you impatiently watched the game install or if the excitement was too much it was something to read while on the toilet squeezing out excitement plops. When a high profile game like Halo 4 neglects to have a manual you know it's nearly game over. I'll miss you manual. Requieste de pace, mon ami².

3. The fires from the rage sparked by oppressive Digital Rights Management have mostly subsided and we stride forth from the Dark Age of PC games. From around 2006 to 2010 just about every game on PC was abysmal. They were poorly optimised, included harsh DRM with activation limits and all in all made us all sad. Now it seems publishers have received the message that they were only pissing off the people who were trying to do the right thing and forced them to go down the very path they were trying to crush and have started to either abandon DRM or just put their game on Steam. Although I loathed it at first my Steam account is now worth almost $3000 and even though it has become our friend I'm still wary. We're all investing a lot of money in the games we purchase on the service but Steam is still a form of DRM and has every right to simply cut you off. DRM is a tetchy issue and it's in the ambivalent pile because it can be good, but it has a dark and bloody past to shrug off.

Steam. Wut're you doin'? Steam? Stahp.

I'm sure every generation thinks things were better when they were kids than the kids of the next generation. We have sites like Good Old Games acting as custodians of the games of yore but it's going to be difficult to maintain the games of today in the future. So many are reliant on servers and activation systems and online multiplayer that it seems impossible to fathom gathering around the old LED monitor and playing through some online only cooperative missions with a buddy in years to come. The idea of having an open world sandbox like Just Cause 2 with the cooperative mechanics of Peacewalker and Portal 2 with the narrative delivery of Half-Life is a future I'm sure we're all looking forward to. The gardens of games are definitely getting nicer and there are new playground sets being built every day but I hope we don't spend so long gawking at them that we don't notice the walls being erected around it all.


¹Get it? Because in Dungeons and Dragons trolls regenerate health! Hah!
²That's right I used two languages in the one sentence. Come at me.



i hope no blind kid reads this and gets offended

Zombies. Zombies everywhere.

Zombies. They're pretty much their own genre at this point. If a game features zombies then it's fairly safe to say zombies are the main focus with familiar themes and tropes. If a game doesn't have zombies, they'll be added as downloadable content. There have been some truly phenomenal zombie games, some of which have shaped other games: Left 4 Dead's objective based cooperative gameplay has inspired games like Payday: The Heist. DayZ has spawned WarZ and likely many more on their way. Zombies aren't for everyone, as my brother will attest, but I often find myself craving some cooperative survival goodness. I just wish that zombies would stay in zombie games and not infect other genres. Fair warning, what I'm about to say might ruin several games you currently like as you sit blissfully unawares. Zombies are in so many games at the moment it's driving me crazy; they're just not called 'zombies'.

Braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaains

Halo: Combat Evolved was released in 2001 after being ripped away from Steve Job's cold, clammy hands (by some accounts Jobs was not pleased) and placed with Microsoft who then prompted a large change of direction and appending ': Combat Evolved' to the title. From the earlier trailers Halo looked like it was a large, sandbox-y third person shooter pitting you against fanatical aliens on an artificial world. What we got was half of that and the rest was a zombie hunt. The Flood. Perhaps the worst betrayal I ever experienced as a young teenager was having my dreams and expectations dashed by being plunged into a zombie shooter when I wanted a sci-fi shooter. The Flood are boring to fight. They look generic, they're tedious and repetitive. They're zombies under a different name, and that makes all the difference.

See, when you buy a game with a zombie on the box you're expecting a game about zombies. When I buy a regular Pepsi and it tastes like choc-banana instead of cola I'm going to be mad as hell. Under different circumstances I love choc-banana but when I have my taste buds all set up for that sweet fizzy cola goodness and Pepsi takes a choc-banana flavoured shit in my mouth I'm going to be wondering why you didn't put the right label on the can.

Nary a zombie nor Flood in sight

Halo is not the only offender, but it's one of the first bait and switches I can remember. Another guilty party is Mass Effect. The first game blew my mind because I went into it completely blind having not seen or read anything about it. I got the game free one day and fired it up and I was left wanting more. The one bothersome aspect of the game was meeting the Husks, ex-humans who have been put on spikes and had their gooey organic insides replaced with machine stuff. How do they attack? By shambling towards you in great numbers. 'Oh,' I thought with the look of someone who has just trodden in dog shit, 'they're zombies.' Husks saw a return in both of the sequels but in Mass Effect 3 they expanded the Husk treatment to other races and some of them have guns and other methods of attack. I don't care if they're zombies with guns, magic, or any other form of hurt; they're still flipping zombies in my space game about space stuff.

Guild Wars 2? You betcha. This time they're called Risen and they're just as bland, boring and frustrating as the Flood and Husks. As with Halo you're pitted against these faux zombies towards the latter half of the game and that's almost all you face until you stop. Most Risen move super quick meaning if you're a ranged class they're all up in your grill before you can finish saying 'Aw, fark not zombies again.' Even more annoying is that entire zones are covered with these shits, even the ones with large water sections which I thought would dissuade the zombie bastards from chasing you (like every zombie movie) but instead they out-swim fucking sharks. The Risen were a large part of me putting Guild Wars 2 down. I was having a ball exploring vistas, gawking at the visuals, working my way through areas and choosing my little Asuran's story arc. Then I hit a mission with Risen and was overcome with a sense of dread and anxiety as I hoped to Christ they were just a little blip. But they weren't. They were the whole damn game and they killed it for me.

Blaaargh stop having fuuuun....

I dislike zombies in non-zombie games because it smacks of laziness. For developers including zombies is great: you can reuse assets ad nauseum, they explain infinite enemies story-wise, the AI is mostly simple pathfinding, etc. A game about zombies has to do more than just have an enemy that runs at you until you're sick of it. Left 4 Dead introduced four player cooperative play with objectives and unique zombie classes and multiplayer modes. DayZ introduced the idea of real survival in an open persistent game world. Dead Island had a mix of the open world and cooperative play of Left 4 Dead and DayZ but with weapon crafting and roleplaying elements. Hiding in a barn hoping a zombie doesn't notice you, fleeing a bloody horde and making a last desperate stand are unique experiences in zombie games.

The problem is this: when developers include zombies in their game without any of the things that make zombies fun (post-apocalyptic setting, scavenging, fear, team work, and so on) it's like putting jalapenos on cereal. You've taken something that's great with other savoury things and put it on something sweet and made both taste like shit. Zombie games aren't really about zombies they're about survival, fear, tension and working with others to get out of a shit situation. Zombies are a driving force that make you feel empowered. You're special because you aren't a zombie yet and you have an opportunity to escape and live again. A game that includes zombies without the unique 'zombie context' have completely missed the point about why people enjoy them. Now, a game that replaces zombies with raptors would still work great. If you really want to have a zombie-esque enemy why not include raptors? They both instill the same survival instinct only the way you are found and eaten changes slightly. Could that become a thing? Every game having raptors in it? The closest we have to zombie raptors is Aliens, but I'd really like literal raptors chasing me. Make it so.

This is a non-zombie game with zombies.

Images taken from:
http://www.zug.com/live/86306/The-Insane-Cereal-Experiment-Part-3.html
http://en.wikipedia.org
Assorted game wikis

I mention 'zombies' 46 times

Backlogs and Childhood Lament

It seems that now the 90s are over a decade ago the once popular game series' are starting to get rebooted. It's as if some latent energy causes any game that has been dormant for 10 years to awaken something in the mind of whoever still holds the copyrights to it. We've got Syndicate¹, Aliens vs Predator¹, XCOM¹, Rise of the Triads, Mechwarrior, Hitman and even mention of Doom 4 and Descent 4 floating lazily in the 'we're considering it' pile. These games of yore harbor fond memories of my childhood (yes I had Diablo 1 which was rated MA15+ when I was about 6 but I turned out fine) but the reboots seem to be mostly borrowing the name and changing everything else. Why did I like these games to begin with?

This speaks more about my childhood than I care to admit.

The problem is that nostalgia is a tricky beast. As a child what you perceive as awesome is quite circumstantial. You loved a particular game because that was your only game until next year when either Christmas or your birthday cropped up. As a mother would say to their daughter on the eve of an arranged marriage, 'You will learn to love him.' Instead of booting up a game from a vast backlog you'd replay a game you had completed numerous times before. You really got to know a game inside and out because of this whereas these days a game is lucky enough to be played at all let alone completed even once. Sites like Backloggery lead me to believe I'm not alone in this and recent events aggravate me even more.

Releases this year were a bit slim and apart from Mass Effect 3 early on in the year the next release I nabbed was Guild Wars 2. Now this is an MMO and conceivably holds hundreds of hours of gameplay but I was done with it after about three solid weeks of playing it. The reason, apart from several game related issues I might speak of later, was that Borderlands 2 was just around the corner and I was super pumped. After about two or three weeks solid of Borderlands 2 it was off to Halo 4. While playing Halo 4 I kept seeing news of new DLC for Borderlands 2 and updates to Guild Wars 2. Three game releases about a month apart and I was jumping ship to whichever game was being released next all the while new content for previous games was piling up behind me.

The way I consume games as an adult is vastly different to when I was a nipper and if I had to choose I'd prefer to go back to one game a year. Another thing I noticed is that it's always easier to replay a really old game that you had once played in its day than an old game a friend recommends. I can go back and play all the old Dungeons & Dragons games from Black Isle² and declare them better than any recent RPG yet I can't be arsed to play Metroid or Commander Keen.

This screenshot is enough to give me a throbbing erection.

So now about a decade later we're seeing a resurgence of all the games we saw when we were kids. Only not really because the games are mostly just piggybacking off the name because the publishers are too scared to announce a new series which leaves me perplexed. The fans of the original aren't going to be pleased by the non-pure sequel and the people who never played the original wouldn't care what the name is or if the play style is different. There's really no point making a reboot or sequel if you're not going to keep to what the original was because at best your game will be treated indifferently by half your audience and at worst you've pissed off your sole audience.

Let's take Syndicate as a prime example. The original was an isometric strategy game with weapons and armament research done between missions and territories from a world map were selected for successive missions. The reboot is a first person shooter with the only semblance of research is done on the cooperative side. Everyone who had played the original scorned the new iteration as an attempt to appeal to the young, attention deficit Call of Duty-playing crowd (I'm not saying that all people who play Call of Duty are young or attention deficit. Ok, well, a little bit.) who probably never played the original. The kicker is that I didn't mind the new Syndicate. I would have forgiven all the little things that make it so unlike the original if they had just mentioned it was 'inspired by' the original instead of a direct sequel. Apart from the nausea inducing bloom, narrow field of view, lens flare, mouse smoothing and motion blur³ it was a pretty cool game to play cooperatively. It was gritty, visceral and I really dug the idea of militant corporations but because it shared the name and not the gameplay of a game made about 13 years ago it constantly irked me.

'A faithful sequel and a worthy addition to the series.' - No one, ever

Becoming an adult with disposable income but with the mind of a child is what leads to having backlogs. It also causes you to age faster as well and you start to complain about new releases and how they're not the same as when you were a kid. The thing to remember is that people are living their childhood all the time and nothing is going to change the memories and experiences you had as a kid. It's not like reboots and sequels are destroying what came before, those games will always be there (thanks to pirates and sites like GoG). All you can really do is ignore the dodgy releases and for shit's sake stop buying games during Steam and GoG sales. Try to finish a game and wait two months between purchases and you might come to enjoy a game you would have previously only spent an hour on.

Look at these smug bastards with their clean-cut look and amazing prices. Cunts.

¹Can we not use the exact same name as the original? It really screws up search engines when both the newly released game and the one from 12 years ago have the same name. Make the name a plural or add a subtitle like 'Revelations', 'Rebooted', 'Rehashed', 'Redone', 'Remastered', 'Recreated', etc

²Side note here: how great is Good Old Games? I had heard of them from several news sites but hadn't checked them out until, ironically, I couldn't find a pirated copy of Temple of Elemental Evil as I'd lost my disc and couldn't see it for sale anywhere. After finding it on GoG for a pittance I promptly bought all the AD&D games and every game from my childhood. You want $5 for a game that pulls my childhood heartstrings and includes the soundtrack, artbook, avatars, making of movies and everything with no DRM? Take my money! Who says piracy costs a sale?

³All these traits were common in games released during a time I refer to as the Dark Age of PC gaming which occurred from 2006-2009. What a shitty bunch of years for the Master Race where the first thing you would do is tamper with .ini files and third party tools to make it run properly.



I'm a centenarian in a twenty-something body

Teh Halos

A small warning that minor spoilers are ahead but if you want a truly untainted review I suggest simply seeing it's relative score elsewhere and forgoing any reading whatsoever.

I refer to my 360 as a $400 Halo box. There is no other way to describe it because the rest of the exclusives on it just aren't for me and if it's not an exclusive I have a PC. Halo 4 has been the first Halo game I've bought on release and when I went to pick it up the Limited Edition was dangled in front of me. I had intended to get it to begin with but when I saw it was unavailable I did what anyone would do: convince myself the Limited Edition wasn't worth the extra dosh anyway. When faced with the opportunity to hypocritically go back on my own mind I took it. I mean I had the cash so why not?

No, this scene is fairly accurate. He falls from space, again.

Limited and Collector's Editions of games are pretty much all I buy now as my purchasing whims are becoming less frequent as to avoid the many dodgy reboots and sequels (and because a church mouse has more cash) and it's the only way to really harken back to what you used to get in a new standard release. I hear the regular release didn't even come with a manual as the warranty information was printed on the back of the cover. Classy. The innards are all themed, which I liked, and to my surprise it came with the season pass for multiplayer maps which is bittersweet. I've always believed multiplayer maps are firmly in the domain of the community and the absence of any way for said community to make maps is an egregious decision by many companies. Actually paying for map packs is something I've never done and never will. Not directly, anyway. When you take into account that the base game here is $69 and the pass is about $30 it's only another $25 or so for the rest of the gear so I wasn't too upset.

I treat new game releases with a bit of ceremony, the last release was the Loot Chest Edition of Borderlands 2 and some mates and I had a LAN that spanned a weekend. I treated Halo 4's release with similar reverence: Pepsi Next and off-brand deli style corn chips (this is important information for later). The order of operations for new releases is singleplayer first, then dip my toe into the multiplayer before shelving it for when I feel like playing it again.

Halo 4's story hinges heavily on the notion that you've read some of the books and considering the audience I'm not sure that was a savvy decision. 343 Industries may have dug themselves into a bit of a hole by adhering to lore laid down in books because it can lead to a slippery slope. There's a reason why many movies let authors work around them instead of the other way around as it kind of sets the tone of who's boss. But I digress.

"I can't keep you out of my head, Sugartits." - Anonymous

Chiefykins is rudely awoken by his AI girlfriend almost 5 years after the events of Halo 3 and told shit's about to go down. Cortana back in head, gun back in hand, Chief back in business. I felt a real similarity to Mass Effect 2 once you hit the new artificial world and listen to a recording by Halsey. I wasn't sure if it was the atmosphere, the music, the voice actress for the introduction of the recording but there was definitely some deja vu. It could have also been the similar feeling of recent resurrection and getting back into the widowing business. You're quickly reintroduced to the newest iteration of the Warthog, which now sounds more like a dirt bike. You cruise around some bends enjoying some air time for a bit before your joy ride is foiled by a 1 metre high wall. This brings me to my biggest gripe: the outdoor driving sections are very sparse.

They actually thought of a way to make one of the few outdoor sections an escort mission. Clever bastards.

You have access to a banshee a couple of times (the only flying vehicle apart for the Pelican (yes the Pelican is finally freakin' available to pilot (but not in multiplayer))) but each time you're locked into a very small area, usually with walls and a ceiling. The majority of the game you're slogging it in corridors or small arena like areas but at least these settings have several alternate paths to surprise the enemy. I've spent more time with the first Halo than any others and the best thing about it was that each level was like a sandbox with very little scripting to break the way you chose to play the mission. Weapons and vehicles remained where you left them and there were many large outdoor areas. 4 is almost the opposite and ammunition disappears with the weapons once you've turned your back. It's almost as if 343i couldn't fathom anyone wanting to regress through a level and promptly sent anything behind you to the abyss.

The new enemies, Prometheans, drew a bit of my ire. For one can we all stop using 'Promethean' for any and all alien races? Ridley Scott's film Prometheus has Prometheans, Mass Effect has Prometheans, now Halo does as well - just stop it. We get it, the titular Titan gave humans fire and you're drawing a parallel to us using advanced foreign technology to the same advancement seen by ancient humans using fire. It's a neat analogy, I know, but when everyone's using the same gimmick it loses it's punch. The second annoyance was the look of the new targets. When I first took a gander at the new menace it reminded me of the Cephs from Crysis 2 with the detachable angular armour. There are really only three varieties of these lads (antdogs, giant ticks and mosquitoes) but the AI is really quite good and I mean frustratingly good. Little shits float around the big'uns deflecting grenades, shielding damaged enemies, reviving them if dead and taking pot shots at you when they get bored. For all my gripes I still prefer them over the motherfucking Flood.

They're not identical, but someone's mother was cheating.

The music in Halo 4 is really nice; different, but nice. The problem is that now the volumes are off with no way to alter them. Guns are so loud that I never actually noticed the music at all and it wasn't until I grabbed the soundtrack that I was able to hear the tracks. There isn't really a main theme like Marty O'Donnell's work on the previous Halo games but some of the tracks are well worth the listen to. If I had to pick a theme from the soundtrack that I would use to represent the game it'd be Awakening, a track apparently used early on judging by its position in the album. A similar version is used at the end of the game but with more heroic overtones which I thought was really neato. Treat your ears below.

To top it off the entire multiplayer experience is unified by the UNSC Infinity, humanity's largest and longest throbbing space erection which I think is quite a neat idea. You get two main packages (hah!) here: the episodic cooperative Spartan Ops and War Games (marketing speak for matchmaking). I love cooperative games and it seems 343i have taken a bold move by releasing weekly installments of Spartan Ops, akin to a TV series complete with little cutscenes and side story. Each episode has 5 chapters (read: missions) and they plan the first season to have 10 episodes which means 50 cooperative missions, just to start with. I'm fairly sure that the first 5 episodes are actually on the disc and each week they unlock it. I'm fine with this because it's at no extra charge and they're trying to create a TV feel. If 343i can pull this off then hats off to them.

War Games is the regular multiplayer content with some game modes not quite ready by launch causing a few people to be upset. I only played a small amount of Halo: Reach and I was terrible. I was fighting the controls as much as the enemy and nobody I knew played it which meant I was attempting it solo. Solo multiplayer, especially on a foreign platform, is like masturbating with a waffle iron: simply not for me. For a pleasing change I had company for my first foray into 4's multiplayer and I genuinely enjoyed myself. After a rough start and switching control schemes (Bumper Jumper 4 lyfe, dawg) I started to take the enemy team out to Danger Town with Mr and Mrs Pain and serve up some violent quiche. Obviously I've not been on Xbox Live long enough to learn real smack talk. Still it did leave me with the desire to actually get better at it and learn the maps which is a first for any multiplayer game let alone one on a console.

Oh I am so going to seduce your parent/guardian with the intent of coitus tonight, you blackguard.

It's not an easy task to inherit a legacy like Halo but I feel that 343i really did a stellar job at making it theirs. I had my reservations about the whole deal after the Halo Anniversary release which was mostly outsourced to Saber Interactive. The campaign was a bit reliant on the novels but was able to introduce a credible threat without raising the danger level so high that by the end of the new trilogy el Chieferino will be eating entire planets and sodomising deities. The cooperative side is fresh and interesting and introduces a new way of delivering content. The multiplayer, which isn't usually my bag, had me wanting to keep playing. The whole deal feels familiar but yet also different, like off-brand soft drink. Not exactly bad, just different.

Halo 4, essentially.

shit that was a bit long...