A Reaction to Racism

Alright, so there was this article written by Willie Jefferson on the Houston Chronicle's game blog (I didn't even know they had one) about how the writer thought that Left 4 Dead 2 was racist and insensitive. I felt really strong about his article and deicided to post a comment. And since I'm lazy and didn't want to write a blog post, I've decided to post my comment here also. Here is the link to said article by Willie Jeffereson for your reading pleasure.

Now before I say anything I'm going to mention that I'm a 16 year old Canadian Highschool student with little understanding of the Confederation as it stands so I will try to avoid it in my post.

That being said, I want to just make a comment on your disgust with the thought of playing a confederate officer and your statement on how setting a game in New Orleans is insensitive. First off, I think you're being somewhat closed minded towards video games. Its almost as if you're disgusted that a game is putting you in these certain settings or situations because it IS a video game. How come movies are able to deal with topics like racism and video games can't? I think this is the main problem that the game industry seems to be having in terms of being able to forward the medium. If we're all afraid to put an African American Zombie into a game, then how in the world will this medium ever be respected as an art form? I think its silly and ignorant to instantly think that a game isn't allowed to depict such imagery.

I understand why you would be reminded of Katrina by the Left 4 Dead 2 trailer. But honestly, do you REALLY think that was the intention, ostensibly the trailer seemed like a zombie game set in New Orleans. And even if themes regarding the tragedy that was Katrina were even explored in the Left 4 Dead 2(Which I doubt will be the case), don't you think the people at Valve are the right people for the job? I couldn't think of any other developer in the world that would treat the subject with the utmost respect and integrity. The people at valve have proven to be a great , intelligent group of people who make games. You seem to have a problem with these ideas being explored at all but if its handled with respect and care, why is it wrong that a video games moves into this kind of territory? The distraught you're filled with while playing a Confederate in Call of Juarez is proof that video games have the ability to really illicit emotions through gameplay.

I just think you're being too touchy and that you're reaching for ideas a little. I mean, why all of sudden is a game set in New Orleans so offensive to you. Why this? Why not talk about the Stereotypes and Archetypes that black, and even female, characters fall under in video games. Have you ever played any of the games in the Gears of War series? Augustus Cole is depicted as a football loving, loud mouthed African American. Or the African American character in House of the Dead:Overkill. Honestly, you can't get any more token than that. To me these characters are far more offensive than RE5 or L4D2 will ever be.

A lot of your criticisms are not unwarranted at all, a lot of them just seem...misplaced. The things that are bothering you are just a product of the current state the industry is in. We haven't dealt with difficult subjects in games yet and we all jump at the sight of anything that seems controversial, anything that isn't what we'd expect from our same-old Halo shooter. We're too afraid to go into new territory because of the potential backlash that we're likely to get if we do.

Frankly, I want us to be able to depict serious images and have serious stories in our games. We'll never get anywhere at this rate if we continue this way. I understand your feelings, but honestly if things are dealt with respect and are done right, then I don't think there should be a problem. But that's just my opinion.

Summer Long Back Blog Part 2: Spikey Haired Addition

Last week I mentioned that I probably would be changing up the list this time around and well, I did. I added Final Fantasy 7 and decided to play it this week. Only about 12 hours were spent on the game so this will probably be a short blog.

Final Fantasy 7 is...well, its Final Fantasy 7. That's almost all I can say. Its really hard to make any comments on a game that is so widely talked about and as old as FF7; nearly everything I have to say has already been said. That's really part of the problem I have with Final Fantasy 7. Its been talked about so much to the point where the game almost feels uninteresting to me. It doesn't excite me anymore, I'm bored of it. Every character and story point has been discussed so much that its reached this point where I, first off, know everything there is to know about the game, and I'm already so utterly sick of hearing about these characters that I don't want to see them.

That being said, I'm still finding the persistence in me to keep going. I'm even starting to enjoy the characters a lot more than I originally thought I was going to. The characters have a certain charm to them, a certain aesthetic appeal to them. Squaresoft really had a good vision of what an aesthetically pleasing character is supposed to be. Each character in the game has a certain feature that is memorable: Barret has a Gatling gun in place of his missing hand, Cloud has his iconic spikey hair and Buster Sword, Red XIII is...a talking lion thing. These characters are what people consistently reference when they talk about FF7 because of their amazing designs. I admit the graphics are extremely dated but the idea still stands as it is.

The last thing I want to comment on is the Materia System. I hate it. Since the game is so dated I wont go into full detail as to how the system works. You can probably check it out somewhere or I'm assuming you know how it works already...also I'm a lazy writer. The Materia System holds many similarities to Final Fantasy 8's Junction system, in that it allows you to apply any skill you choose to any character that you want. Sure, certain character's stats cater a certain set of skills but it still feels like it doesn't really make that much of a difference. I find it very easy to turn every character into a magic user and spam magic attacks. I tend finish fights with this method just as efficiently as putting characters into their proper roles would. Cloud doesn't need to be a front line melee fighter, I get the same affect from using magic with him, sometimes even a better affect. It begins to lose its challenge and it feels cheap after wards. I prefer Final Fantasy 9's combat system where it applies certain roles to characters, that way I actually am making some differences in my character choices. In FF7 my characters are just stock characters, I can make them what ever I want because their roles in the party are completely flexible. I REALLY don't like that.

Okay I guess that's it for now, like I mentioned its a short one, not much to say in regards of the game. I've found myself buying too many games as it is. I'm having a hard time catching up with my back log...I should stop doing that, maybe just a bit.

Summer Long Back Blog-Part 1 + Game Documentaries

Not my actual backlog but I wanted to put the image up just to say, holy fuck.

Finally part 1 of my summer long journey to finish of my back log of games has come to its beginning and a roaring one I might add. I finished Rogue Galaxy. It took a surprisingly short time. Its still about 40 hours long but I managed to clock in those 40 hours in 5 days.

Rogue Galaxy was okay. Its what you would expect from a jrpg, its really nothing new. If you've ever played any of the Dark Cloud games you kind of know what your getting into. The combat is simple hack n' slash with a few RPG elements. Combat is incredibly easy to learn and mastering it is hardly an achievement of any value. A lot of that could come from the fact that I ended up grinding my characters to the point where they were stronger then most foes that I encountered later on in the game. It didn't hurt that I managed to create a weapon that ended up being the strongest weapon in the game, I kind of made the experience less challenging for myself.

That reminds me though, the weapon creation system is great. To fill you in, at one point early in the game you meet a toad named toady (how creative!) and he offers his services to you. What does he do? If you make him eat two different weapons he'll mix them together by the means of indigestion, well not really indigestion but he spits a new weapon out after chewing the two together. Whatever, its hard to explain, all you need to know is, chew and spit and voila new weapon. This mechanic was preposterously addictive. Back in my World of Warcraft days I was a serious loot whore. I loved making new weapons and things of that nature in Rogue Galaxy. I ended up accidentally making one of the strongest weapons in the game, I figured this out after I checked a gamefaq on it.

The story is kind of "Meh", I mean its kind of what you would expect from a jrpg. The only really interesting thing is the story's similarities to Star Wars. You start off as a rag tag kid whose an orphan on a planet that's essentially a desert. You have a robot friend who has a pseudo-British accent and is very formal and all that. At one point in the story the words "I am your father" and "That's not possible!" are said in the game in a way that just sparks off memories of Star Wars. The one big gripe about the story I have is the ending and a big plot hole.

First off, the plot hole. During your adventures you meet an archaeologist in the game named Burton. You end up bumping into Burton a fair amount of times during your journey. During a sequence in the story he finds a tablet, its regarding a planet (Called Eden) that the group of protagonists are trying to reach to find an amazing treasure. On the tablet is a message about the planet. Burton reads the message and seems terrified. He says something around the lines of "Eden isn't actually a planet" and "I have to warn the group about this danger". What bothered me about this moment is that by the end of the game the developers completely ignore the scene I just mentioned. They never tell the player what the tablet said. Burton is even found on the planet Eden and he doesn't say a damn thing about what the "Danger" is. Its almost like something else was supposed to happen at this point in the story and the developers scrapped it. There was never any danger. The game ended after I explored through Eden and did what I had to. No danger or secret, that one scene is completely left ambiguous and unanswered.

I've played some bad boss battles in my time but ,my god, is the last boss of this game terrible. The battle is divided into about 10 different sequences. Now this part is fine with me, I likr long boss battles, but I also like checkpoints and saves. All of the fights are in succession of each other with no saves or stops or checkpoints. If you fail one of the fights its straight back to the start. What's worse is that the last fight is super frustrating and difficult. The last boss battle turns the gameplay into a completely different direction as well. It takes away most of the RPG elements the gameplay had and turned into a reflex based action game. Also the ending of the story is essentially a big "Fuck you" to the player. One of the characters in your party (named Kisala) goes off and leaves the group to become the queen of the planet Eden, the game ends the group of main characters going separate ways except the final 3 characters, your character, a character named Zegram, and the ship captain who is the man who adopted Kisala, go off to take back Kisala. The game ends with a screen of text saying that the party's mission to take Kisala back was "Their last mission as pirates". It ends with that piece of text. Literally that's it, no closure at all. An ending open for fanfic. Such bullshit.

For the most part the game was fun but a lot of the content at the end really ruined it for me but that's one game off the list nonetheless. I was thinking of changing up the list, I want to add more games to it. 20 hours of game seems to be an easy feat for me so I'm thinking I might be able to to more jrpgs. I'm thinking of doing Final Fantasy 7 but that's up in the air for now. I'll give an update on that later.

Jason Rohrer and his wife

On a totally unrelated topic I watched a German/French documentary today called "Into the night..." its a documentary series where two people in a related field have a conversation together for the span of a day. This time around they had well known indie game designer Jason Rohrer and game designer Chris Crawford who has become well known for his criticisms of the game industry.

This episode of "Into the night..." has an extremely pessimistic atmosphere to it. It wasn't a surprise to me after I read up on Chris Crawford a little more after I watched the documentary. They discussed a lot of interesting topics that you would assume to hear from indie game designers but what really had me thinking were their criticisms on current game design. I wont go into all of them but I do want to talk about one point Chris Crawford made specifically.

During a dinner with Jason he mentioned that he hated the "Techie" approach to game design. This is regarding how game designers like to, as Crawford referred to it as, "Fucking around with computers and when they discover something somewhat interesting they try to build a game around it". I'm paraphrasing but you get the point. Adam Sessler did a Soapbox a while back where he discussed the idea that video games, apart from being a technical media, that they are also a creative medium mentioning people who learn to code and think they can be game designers.

I know these people. I know these "Game Designers". This concept of the techie approach to games becomes all too apparent to me the more I grow old. People seem to think that if they are good at coding they can make games when that's far from it. Sure, coding is an essential part of creating a video game but you are also creating. You're not just fucking with numbers, you're creating a piece of work that can illicit emotion and share ideas. You're making a piece of art. When someone wants to be a film maker do they just learn how to work a camera and get straight to work? Fuck no. They go off and learn about other forms of art. Video games are a creative medium as I feel this techie approach is really a product of the mainstream perception of video games: Tits guns! Lawl Halo! I definitely disagree with a fair amount of the points these two games devs made in this documentary I can whole heartedly agree that the medium has some growing up to do.

Michael Douglas is Falling Down

I watched Joel Schumacher's "Falling Down" today and figured I'd do some kind of review for it.I've never ventured into the realm of movie reviews so please forgive me if this isn't what you normally would expect from one.

To give a quick synopsis of the movie it essentially goes like this, Michael Douglas is angry, Michael Douglas smash. Done deal. That's essentially the majority of what actually happens in the movie, the main character, Bill, is frustrated with life and he finally snaps and begins to take it out on the people of L.A. At the same time it's his daughter's birthday and he wants to make it to her in time to give her a present and at the same time he decides to leave a mess of destruction behind him.

While Bill is on his rampage. the movie does a good job of making him seem almost justified for his actions, well at the first half of the movie at least but I'll be getting to that a little later. There were times in the movie where I was almost rooting for him when he was off on his spree. He never seemed like he was trying to legitimately hurt innocent people he just wanted to fight stupid shit. My favorite example of this is when Bill went into L.A's local "Whammy Burger" and asked for breakfast, but they wont serve him because breakfast ended at 11:00 o' clock. It was 11:03. Quickly enough a gun is pulled out and food is then served.

Moments like this are what made me really feel good watching this movie. Self liberation, at first, seemed to be his motivating factor. There's something about the things he did that felt...right. Throughout the movie you even begin to root for Bill. Sure, he may be doing down right terrible shit, but hes taking a stand. Hes taking a stand in a world where its hard to do so. He's telling the world to fuck off because he needs to see his daughter on her birthday. In a world where we're put down by all the dumb rules that make no use in life but to annoy us and make our lives harder, seeing something like what Bill does in this movie go down is pretty great. Its like the whole "Stick it to the man" thing. Not exactly the same but on the same level.

I found it really interesting that every character besides the 3 leading roles were almost symbolic of this idea of the stupid bullshit we deal with in life. You have a homeless man with a selfish philosophy on life, who feels entitled to everything because he is homeless. You have a wife of a cop who is obsessed wit herself and is forcing her husband into retirement. Almost every extra character that is shown in this movie is just there to help add emphasis to this idea and ultimately lead the main character into madness even further. These characters almost justify every action of the main character. These characters are so unlikable that I could imagine myself taking some kind of action against them had they existed in real life.

Now around the second half of the film Bill starts to take an even deeper dive into insanity. At first his actions were reckless and wrong but they still had some control to them, they had some lawfulness. By the end of the movie he begins to terrorize his ex-wife to a point where it looks like its going to result in her death. This felt kind of odd for me. I liked this character but then his actions started to rub me the wrong way. After a while you start to understand him a little more and understand the tragedy that is his life. Because of his anger problems he had prior to his divorce with his wife he ended up pushing away his wife and kids. Getting fired from his job adds to the misery of this character, he ends up feeling cheated and alone. Bill has lost everything. The two things he cared about the most in life were taken away from him and ended up left with nothing but the same old stupid bullshit. He brought most of his misfortune on himself, but no one helped him in anyway, or cared. Its really sad in a way.

There was one scene that almost had me in tears, it was when Bill started watching old home videos of his family before the divorce. Everyone was happy and all that bullshit but then it cut to a video where he got in an argument with his wife. It really showed that darker side of Bill. Which in turn stopped the tears from coming. I felt conflicted again, the dark side pushed me away from the very likable parts of Bill.

Another scene that was really interesting was the final showdown between Bill and, to be retired cop, Martin Prendergast. These two characters are extremely similar in that they both have the same situation in terms of having to deal with people who treat them like shit. Martin goes through shit that is just as bad as Bill's but deals with it in a diferent way. He even has a line that essentially sums it up when he says that even though he has been treated like crap it doesn't give him the right to terrorize people. I really loved how these two really contrasted from eachother but held so much similarity in the end.

Yeah...Falling Down is a pretty cool film. I recommend it.

The Summer Long Back Blog

At the start of 2009 I promised myself that during the summer I would finally go back to a bunch of games in my back log. At the same time I also decided that I wanted to help improve my writing and work ethic, as you can see from the time stamps on my posts I'm really inconsistent when it comes to updating. After a lot of thinking I came up with an idea for a new feature I could write for this blog: The Summer Long Back Blog (See what I did there).

So here's how its going to go down, I have a list of the games I want to finish by the end of my summer vacation, which is the 31st of August. Every week I will update on my progress with the game I'm currently on, I'll be talking about my impressions of the game and things of that nature. I'll be writing an update every Sunday, today not including since I just started my first game 2 days ago (The game I'm currently playing is Rogue Galaxy).

Here is the list of the games I'm aiming to finish, all of these are in the order that I'm going to play them in:

1. Rogue Galaxy
2. Shadow of the Colossus
3. Metal Gear Solid 3
4. Yakuza
5. Kingdom Hearts
   
6. Kingdom Hearts 2
7. Final Fantasy 10

Hefty list I know, but I'll work at it. I'm not really planning on finishing all of them I just want to get to at least 3.

Alright so that's the quick update I'm going to go now I've got gaming to get to.

The will to game and how I lack it also, Prototype

I don't know what it is about me but I have a hard time actually starting up a game. I don't get it. There's a part of me that is just too lazy to bother popping in a game disc. I don't know, sometimes I think I have a hard time because I don't feel like investing the time into a game. Its starting to become a hassle for me. I mean, I still like games but the barrier of entry for the ones I do want to play are long.

I think it might be all the long JRPGS I have on my plate that seem to be the problem. I just hate the feeling of starting one and loading up the menu screen and starting a new game because every time I do I can't stop thinking of the other fucking Atlus game I got sitting on my counter and how I need to finish that one also. Because of this I've been trying to go the route of playing games that I can easily pick up with a quick start up. Which is why I Picked up Prototype.

Alright segue time! Prototype. It's pretty good. But it also frustrates me so much. This game is essentially an amalgamation of Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction and Crackdown, which I'm sure you've heard before. At first this sounds like a good mix, the bad assness of the two games mixed in a pot to form a super bad ass...pot...or something. But then I come to remember the horrible memories I've repressed from my experience with Hulk: Ultimate Destruction: The game was frustrating as all hell. And surprise surprise, its the same deal with Prototype.

You are a fucking bad ass in this game...when you're not fighting anything. Okay, well that's not true, if you beat the shit out of a civilian or something to that degree, you're a bad ass but if anything with a gun or some kind of rocket dispensing cylinder (IE a stupid fucking rocket launcher) you're boned. I can't help but not understand why I can't stop some fuck in a tank when I can leap buildings and do elbow drops from the clouds. The game literally says "When fighting other military forces your own powers won't suffice, using military weapons will help." Uh...why? I CAN ASSUME ANY FORM I CHOOSE AND GROW TENTACLES. Its annoying. I understand that they don't want the game to be too easy but honestly, this is far more frustrating. Having all these cool abilities go to waste is stupid. There are other ways to add difficulty to the game. Just the idea that I have all these amazing powers and that they are pretty much useless makes me angry as hell.

The worse thing about this game is that it will force you to use tanks and things of that nature to move to certain areas in certain missions. Why? Because I need to escort some girl to her safe house. Seriously? I need a slow tank for this? I can leap buildings. Put the bitch in my hands and I will get her to the house in no fucking time. What, are you afraid I might drop her? I'll grow a tentacle and grab her or something, I don't fucking know.

I like this game a lot, but I also hate it. I know, its an odd conundrum I got going on here. Prototype is one of those games where I love a bulk of it but again, like Assassin's Creed, makes me angry with small annoyances. Frankly, I'm done with having patience for that shit, some people can look right past those kind of things but I'm am so done with having to hold a stress ball while I play my video game (I don't actually do that).

I hate Assassin's Creed, I hate Ubisoft

Okay, so maybe I don't hate the whole of Ubisoft but I do fucking hate the Assassin's Creed team.

"But Why?" you might ask, well a lot of this hate has arose out of the frustration I've had while playing through Assassin's Creed. This game makes me extremely angry, and here's why:

The game has a lot of opportunities to build an extremely interesting game but only scratches the surface.

I like being an Assassin. The parts of the game where you really become an assassin are where the game really shines. Trying to successfully assassinate someone while trying to avoid detections is done so well in this game. When I say trying to avoid detection I don't mean killing someone and hiding the body in the dark for no one to see it all quietly and such, I mean killing someone in broad daylight in a busy shop district and running through a series of obstacles leaving the scene of the crime. I always hated the slow pace of most stealth games; having to wait for a target to come to a safe distance from you to kill them, having to find a safe spot to hide the body. Fuck that, I want to take someone out in the thick of the madness and get out of the open streets undetected, you know, something that really gets my adrenaline running.

I feel like Assassin's Creed really does this well in the assassination missions. The real problem I have here is that these missions and the ones leading to the assassinations themselves are super repetitive. I realize saying this isn't an original critique to the game, but it's true. The first few assassinations you do are great and well designed, I wont question that. The problem is that they rehash the same mission EVERY SINGLE TIME. Nearly everything you do is the same; to the way the sequences in the missions play out, to the mission's objective themselves. You walk into a new town and talk to the dispatcher at the Bureau, he tells you that need more info on the target, you scout the area for missions and do them.

The Assassin's Creed team has this weird problem where they fall into routine, its like going to school or doing office work. You know, when you get so used to doing the same shit over and over that your work begins to look the same all across the board. Assassin's Creed feels like that to me. I've noticed the same problem with the Prince of Persia game that came out recently.

What pisses me off about this is that there seems to be so much potential in this IP; relatively interesting story with limitless potential for new worlds to explore, it has an interesting twist on the stealth genre, characters that are compelling (I fucking hate that word) enough to follow. but as it stands they're just scratching the surface of what they can be doing.

Another thing that keeps me frustrated is the game's ability to consistently keep the player annoyed. In combat people will throw you around. It doesn't really do any damage, it doesn't really effect you much at all. All it does is break up the flow of combat. It creates this overwhelming nagging feeling when in a fight. Also, why the fuck is there a need to have beggars and drunks who throw you around? It hardly makes things challenging. Its just another annoyance. This isn't creating difficulty for the player, its not challenging anyone, its just testing someone to see how tolerable they are to stupid bullshit. Its ridiculous, is this how they thought they were going to build a vibrant real world? How the fuck does this equate to a real world experience in any way?

I want to like this game a lot, something in AC compels me. I want to enjoy it but there is so much bullshit built up in this game that it really stops me from even remotely enjoying this game. I still can't understand for the life of me why people raved so much about Assassin's Creed. We shouldn't be supporting game design like this, we should encourage people to break out of these trends. And what makes it worse is that this game has a sequel, and I guarantee that no lessons we're learned, we're going to get the same old garbage and everyone is going to love it.

Fuck Ubisoft.