• 19Nov 09

  More Russian: Modern Warfare 2 and Games in a Post-24 World (Spoilers)

  Much is being said about the campaign for Modern Warfare 2, and in particular, a level called No Russian. Personally, I thought the level was effective and the campaign as a whole was nothing short of spectacular. It's easily earned a place as one of my favorite shooter campaigns of all time.

  One of the criticisms I've read levelled at the campaign is that the writing is poor and the story is ludicrous. I agree completely that the story is ludicrous. I think that most video game stories are ludicrous. But so what? The important thing in a game like Modern Warfare 2 is to cram as many intense moments into its five-hour campaign as it can. I can't think of a game that sustained such an unrelenting pace, and since the story does its job of providing a vehicle to string all these things together, in my mind, it's a success. I won't argue that it's great writing for a second. But it's writing with a very specific purpose, and I think it does a great job of accomplishing that purpose.

  There may have been a time where I would have enjoyed it less, where I would have spent half my time stepping outside of the absurd action of the story and yelling at the screen, "Oh, come on! That would never happen!" Perhaps it's all that 24 I watched, but at a certain point, my outlook changed, and I realized that I was willing to sacrifice a certain amount of plausibility if, and only if, something succeeds in delivering over-the-top thrills so incredible as to make my suspension of disbelief worthwhile. Most of the time, 24 succeeded here for me. In the end, it's not the overall story of a 24 season that matters, but the moment-to-moment thrills that story allowed the season to deliver, and seriously, if you think Modern Warfare 2 is implausible, watch a season of 24. I don't know for sure, but I'd be willing to bet that 24 has been a direct influence on the Modern Warfare games.

  24 ushered in an era of television where viewers could no longer be sure, one week to next, that any character (wiith the possible exception of Jack Bauer) was safe. Audience favorites are routinely killed suddenly and unflinchingly. The Modern Warfare games certainly followed in the series' footsteps here. The death of a player character in the first Modern Warfare, like the death of lovable Edgar on 24, was shocking. Perhaps in Modern Warfare 2 they go a tad overboard with this and it starts to lose its impact a bit, but I still found most of the twists and character deaths surprising and impactful.

  And then there's No Russian, in which, as an undercover CIA agent embedded in a terrorist cell, you must stand by, or even participate, while your fellow terrorists slaughter hundreds of civilians at an airport. Many of the arguments I've read about this level are rooted in the illusion of choice. There you are, holding a gun, but you must stand idly by as this massacre takes place. You are unable to turn the gun on the terrorists and attempt to stop this atrocity, which is something that any moral person would surely at least consider doing in that situation. Anthony Burch, in this Rev Rant at Destructoid, argues that as the player, your feelings of revulsion about what's happening totally pull you out of the moment. (At least that was what I took away from his argument, but I'm paraphrasing, and I encourage you to watch it for yourself.) And maybe that's true. He contrasts this, though, with the player's relationship with Alyx in Half-Life 2. In Half-Life 2, he says, you like Alyx. Because the game reinforces your positive feelings about the character, Gordon's choice to not just use the gravity gun to fling her into the nearest bunch of headcrabs and run jibes with your own feelings, creating a seamless relationship between you and the character you're playing. But to me, that's an arbitrary distinction. Another player may totally loathe Alyx and actually wish to kill her. In both Modern Warfare 2 and Half-Life 2, you have no choice. Choice is a complete illusion.

  Some may feel that games are more enjoyable when we always feel a positive connection with the character we're playing and the actions of that character. I'm fine with that not being the case, with sometimes being cast in an unsavory role. If Modern Warfare 2 were a film, could the actor cast in the role the player plays in the No Russian level say to the director, "You know, if it were really me in this situation, I think I'd say to myself, 'To hell with this undercover thing, I'm turning my gun on these monsters!' So is it okay if I do that in this scene?" Of course not. It's essentially the same thing here. We are cast in this role. We have a part to carry out, and we must carry it out, whether we like it or not. If you're playing Metal Gear Solid, you must stop Liquid Snake. Trying to join forces with him is not an option. If you're playing Ocarina of Time, you cannot shirk your responsibility to defeat Ganon and just go live on a farm somewhere, no matter how much you might rather do that. In games, almost always, choice is an illusion.

  The other criticism I've heard about No Russian is that some feel such a horrific scene of violence is inappropriate in something that's essentially just trying to be a piece of pure entertainment, that it's exploitative to use something so terrible in the context of something that, let's face it, doesn't really deal with the consequences in a serious, meaningful way. Maybe I'm just callous, but I didn't mind. Again, perhaps it's all that 24, which doesn't shy away from crashing commuter jets, releasing chemical weapons in hotels, and detonating nukes in densely populated areas, killing anywhere from hundreds to hundreds of thousands at a time. Nor is it reluctant to try to make you feel the loss of a single human life.

  And always, not long after one of these moments transpires, Jack Bauer is back to kicking ass and walking away from unsurvivable situations unscathed, all in the name of delivering pure entertainment.

  • Posted Nov 19, 2009 9:19 pm PT
  • Category: Games
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• 10Oct 09

  On Greatness

  At this point, it seems likely that Gordon Freeman is going to win GameSpot's All Time Greatest Game Hero contest.

  This is the wrong choice. There is only one right answer to the question, "Who is the all-time greatest game hero?" That answer is Mario.

  You may think that this is a matter of opinion. I am not so sure. To quote Roger Ebert, "There is a point when a personal opinion shades off into an error of fact." Whether the original Star Wars trilogy or the Lord of the Rings trilogy is better is a question of opinion. Whether Citizen Kane or Boat Trip is better is a question of fact. You might enjoy Boat Trip more, that's fine. But if you think that Boat Trip is the better film, you're simply wrong, in the same way that you're wrong if you think a painting of dogs playing poker is a better work of art than the Mona Lisa.

  I am not saying that Mario is the greatest game hero of all time because I'm a slavish fan of all things Mario. I am not. I've barely played Super Mario 64, for instance, and didn't care for Sunshine much at all.

  But from a historical perspective, I don't see how any other answer can stand up.

  Mario has been there from almost the earliest days of video games. He was Jumpman, for crying out loud, in 1981's seminal Donkey Kong. Since then, the number of excellent, important, and innovative games in which he has starred outstrips the number featuring any other hero by a tremendous margin. I'm not going to start listing them. I think they are already very well-known to most people who will read this blog.

  This is not to take anything away from Gordon Freeman. I'm a huge fan of the Half-Life games. But Mario he is not. You can certainly have enjoyed the Half-Life games more than all of the Mario games put together. But the Half-Life games, while certainly important and influential, have not had the same degree of impact on gaming's history as games starring Mario. No other hero's games have.

  ---

  As long as I'm on the topic of greatness, let me also address a recent argument, made on ABC News, that Metroid Prime is the Citizen Kane of games.

  Here is an actual sentence from the text version of that argument, which achieves a kind of zen-like beauty in its perfect absurdity:

  "In the same way that Citizen Kane harnessed every technical component in film to express its post-mortem reassembly of an irrepressible and heartbroken man, Metroid Prime uses all of its technology to recreate the experience of a woman abandoned on an alien world inhabited by the ghosts of its prelapsarian inhabitants."

  To see the ABC News piece, complete with a reaction that sums up my own feelings pretty well, check out this Rev Rant at Destructoid. (Warning: contains adult language.) For a skillful textual destruction of the Metroid Prime = Citizen Kane argument, I highly recommend this piece by Anthony Burch.

  I'm all for games being viewed with more legitimacy by the mainstream press. Making absurd claims like this one, though, is not the way to go about it. In fact, as someone who wants games to be taken more seriously, I find arguments like this embarrassing. When people go on ABC News of all places and make patently ridiculous arguments like this one, it makes me want to scream, "Dude, YOU'RE NOT HELPING!"

  Let games be great on their own terms. Don't try to compare a game about a space bounty hunter who goes around shooting things to one of the richest, most influential and complex films of all time. Please, just don't.

  • Posted Oct 10, 2009 3:35 pm PT
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• 4Sep 09

  Fave games of the decade 1: Wakka wakka

  It may seem a tad early to start talking about the best games of the decade, but I went in to Starbucks today and they're already serving the damn pumpkin spice latte, which is the official sign for me that this decade is on its way out.

  Over the next few months, my plan is to write a new entry about my favorite games of the decade, whenever the heck I feel like it. To kick things off, I'm going to write about my favorite downloadable game.

  I'm old enough to remember the heyday of arcades. In the early 1980s, games were all about proving yourself, about seeing how you stack up against the competition, people like JIM and AAA and the fabled ASS. And no one separated the wheat from the chaff quite like Pac-Man.

  I'm painting in pretty broad strokes here, but it seemed to me that over time, gaming in general became less about testing your skills and measuring yourself against the competition, and more about experiences that nearly everyone could enjoy and complete, if they put in the time and effort. Oh, you beat A Link to the Past? Well, I beat it better than you did! Oh yeah? Prove it. It's certainly true that the competitive spirit flourished in arcades as fighting games rose to prominence, but I always found this genre intimidating and inaccessible. I preferred the simplicity and anonymity of games like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong. (Interestingly, my appreciation for fighting games has developed quite a bit in recent years, and Street Fighter IV is one of my favorite games of this year. But I digress.)

  Throughout the latter part of this decade, though, as online services became more sophisticated and leaderboards more commonplace, there has been a renaissance of straightforward, challenging games where the focus is on scoring more points than everyone else. There have been a slew of excellent titles that fit this bill; the Geometry Wars games would probably be the first choice for most people, and my favorite from this year's offerings is the captivating Shatter. My personal pick for best in category for the 2000s, though, would be Pac-Man: Championship Edition.

  Pac-Man: CE takes everything that made Pac-Man one of the most compulsively playable games of all time, and makes it better. It's faster, moving at a speed that just feels right, and it makes the original feel stiff in comparison. The clock is always ticking, creating a new sense of pressure to cram as many points as possible into each moment. The field of play is constantly evolving. The trance-like music is a perfect accompaniment to the zen-like sense of focus one feels when fully engrossed in the action. (Oh, how I love that sense of focus.) And the visuals are stunning; everything is infused with a neon glow that somehow makes the game more reflective of my memories of playing the original in dimly-lit, cacophonous arcades than the original itself.

  

  Of course, it helped immensely that I had a few terrific players to test my skills against. Aaron Thomas, Carrie Gouskos and I engaged in a friendly but very hard-fought battle on the leaderboards, giving me more incentive than I might have otherwise felt to really get good at the game, making victory all the sweeter and defeat all the more crushing. Few experiences I've had with games can match the exhilaration I felt when pulling ahead in the final few seconds, or the sinking feeling when a single slip-up several minutes into a game turned a shot at triumph into a wasted opportunity.

  I'm at a respectable 579 on the global leaderboards, and I don't think I have it in me to ever go back and try for better. I lived and breathed this game for a little while. I gave it everything I had. It tested me, and it punished me, and there were times when I hated it, but even when I hated it, I loved it. I can't go back, but I'll never forget the experience.

  The high score battle is back, hopefully to stay. There could have been no one better to lead its triumphant return than the Man who helped kick it off in the first place.

  • Posted Sep 4, 2009 11:11 pm PT
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