Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker is evolution in action.
Every Metal Gear Solid game improves upon the formula of the previous
title while at the same time utilizing a feature that does not work as
well as it should. It was first-person gunfights in MGS2, camouflage
in Snake Eater, and expanding your arsenal in MGS4 (along with
changing or dropping rules from act to act). Peace Walker is the first
Metal Gear to improve upon all the features of its predecessors as
well as introducing new features like cooperative play and
mission-based progression that actually work. [Thought I guess
Portable Ops was good practice.]
While MGS4 was clearly a game about Kojima's mid-life crisis, Peace
Walker is much calmer and more focused, a necessary environment for an
integral chapter in the story of Big Boss' becoming the enemy of the
world. In Big Boss' conversations with his comrades - about nuclear
war, El Che, Stanley Kubrick, Alan Turing - it becomes obvious that
Kojima has an intense love of history and technology, how they have
affected his life and how maybe he can affect them. It's been said
that Snake and Big Boss are the obvious representatives for Kojima in
the world of his games, but I believe it's Master Miller - a man who
defines and is defined by his industry, whose identity is formed by
East and West - who speaks for him.
I have a hard time believing that Peace Walker will be anyone's
favorite Metal Gear Solid game - often it's the ridiculous mistakes in
form that appeals to lovers of the series - but I believe that Peace
Walker is Kojima Studios most-polished work, as both a video game and
a work of historical fiction.
Mass Effect 2 is the game everyone should be making.
It's been said that interactivity in video games is an illusion. You
can either make your character do something that doesn't make sense
and break the story, or you can make them do whatever makes the most
sense and be nothing but an accomplice to the story that was supposed
to happen anyway.
The solution to this is, quite simply, making each choice believable,
and Mass Effect 2 proves that the way to do that is by utilizing the
skills of competent artists: good writers and good actors.
A good game is a world, and that world must be constructed with loving
detail. Every event in Mass Effect is well-written, well-voiced, many
are even well-photographed, and all of them matter. Bioware is a lot
like Pixar in a way. They're not pioneers so much as they're just
really good at their job. Why doesn't everyone work so hard?
Bayonetta is the new standard for "over the top".
It was one thing to discover that she has guns in the heels of her
shoes, but once you see her make a giant spider out of her own hair,
you know that nothing else is like Bayonetta and nothing else will be
for a long time. Bayonetta tells a story that doesn't make any sense,
but all of the events transpire at such a monumental scale - the force
of your finishing blow on each boss is measured in gigatons - that you
can't help but want to step up to each new challenge and see how much
bigger your obstacles become.
Bayonetta is also the only game I've played twice this year, and I'm
thinking of playing it a third time.
Kirby's Epic Yarn is pure.
The Game Over as a concept is dead. No one wants to play a game that
doesn't want to be played.
You cannot die in Epic Yarn, but, on a personal level, you can
certainly lose. For every bit of damage Kirby and Prince Fluff
receive, they only lose the beads which they collect throughout the
level - an interesting cannibalizing of Sonic's rings. People who
aren't very good at video games will just be happy to have gone
through the level and seen all of the cute and yarny things that Kirby
can do, and pros can stroke their egos knowing that they kept all of
their beads and can use them to go and decorate Kirby's apartment in
Quilty Square.
Kirby exemplifies the extreme playability expected of a Nintendo game,
every level a perfect blend of cakewalks and hurdles, door prizes and
trophies.
Heavy Rain is a good
apology for Indigo Prophecy.
I was pretty harsh on Heavy Rain when it came out. I said that it was
pushing the industry further in the wrong direction, that its sense of
importance suggested in promotional material was entirely unwarranted,
that it was written by a talentless, racist lunatic. While I don't
think these assertions are incorrect, Heavy Rain is absolutely worthy
of at least one play by everyone.
Even with an insipid script and a schizophrenically cast array of
voice actors - stuff that even games that aren't trying to be movies
usually get right - Heavy Rain enthralls by throwing its heroes into
progressively more dire situations, and it can really get the blood
pumping when you're the one who has to start making the tough
decisions. It's at these points that Heavy Rain - often referred to
derisively as a playable movie - actually highlights the great
possibilities available to video games, at least if they can just
learn how to imbue their scenarios with weight.
Heavy Rain often doesn't know which side of the line to be on. For a
game whose most prided feature is being able to change the course of
the story, there are many times where it feels like you're simply
along for the ride, just watching a scene from a mediocre movie. Those
feelings usually go away, though, when you're asked to do something
just terrible.
The people I want to thank most at Quantic Dream are the artists who
built all of Heavy Rain's environments. The Mars household, Madison's
loft and the ethereal virtual surroundings of the ARI are incredibly
realistic and some of the most beautiful locales in video games.
I'd also like to the thank Normand Corbeil for composing the stunning
score that acted as Heavy Rain's emotional cornerstone.
Vanquish is looking for love in all the wrong places.
When people were talking about being disappointed with Vanquish's
story I thought that they were nuts until I played it myself. It's not
that it's impeccably stupid, it's just... not interesting. Considering
these guys are responsible for Godhand and Bayonetta and the director
is responsible for Resident Evil 4, its surprising how unengaged I
usually am by what's going on. Protagonist Sam Gideon isn't an
impetuous douchebag like Gene, cool in a doofy kind of way like Leon,
or just fucking ridiculous like Bayonetta. He's just a really basic
gruff guy who smokes. If you can't get me to like a guy who
rocket-slides around on his knees while shooting a machine gun in slow
motion and drill kicks holes through giant robots, you really screwed
up somewhere.
On the surface Vanquish satisfies all the needs of an action game in
terms of challenge and control (even though your melee attack
bafflingly deprives you of the ability to go into bullet time when you
most need it), but there are very few kinds of enemies to fight, and
thusly very few reasons to alter your strategy. You fight the same
giant transforming robot something like 18 times. While I'm
rocket-dashing from cover to cover and exploding Russian battle-droids
with my giant shotgun, I actually spend most of my time compulsively
obsessing over whether or not I should bring a certain kind of weapon
with me because, "Even though it's useless now, maybe it will be
better when I upgrade it!"
I also found it really frustrating that cut scenes throughout the game
suggest that Sam's really concerned about the welfare of his
allies on the battlefield, and the game even keeps track of how many
are KIA per mission, and yet we're never actually given a reason to
care about them. Some have names for some reason, but most don't. It's
like, what are you doing, game? If you want me to care about these
guys, make them likable or some shit.
It sounds like I'm really hard on it, but I guess it's no more of a
shallow mess than many other games. I guess I just expected more from
the makers of AAA titles.
Medal of Honor (2010) is a war game for those who don't play war games.
Its controls mimic precisely those of any of the recent Call of Duty
games, and like those games it also has you playing the roles of
several soldiers throughout its campaign, but Medal of Honor also has
a pervading sense of weight that becomes more and more apparent when
you realize there are guys on the other side of the world doing
this shit right now. The stoic Navy SEALS, the grizzled Delta
Forces and the gung-ho Army Rangers are all members of a family with
such strong ties of camaraderie, and the Man in Charge could never
understand why they would compromise a mission for one or two of their
own.
These kind of themes aren't alien to war stories, but they come to
light so subtly it's kind of surprising how affecting the game can be
when the shit hits the fan. There were a few moments in the game when
I believed that, just maybe, a video game could have more to say about
the situation of the modern soldier than something like The Hurt
Locker... That is, till we're treated to one of those big Walls of
Text about how all soldiers everywhere are heroes for keeping America
safe from our enemies. It feels a little disingenuous to outright
idealize values like brotherhood and keeping one's home country safe
when I just spent the last few hours killing very realistically
animated representations of human beings - even if they were all
Taliban. And then Linkin Park plays during the credits.
It sucks to me that Medal of Honor had a real opportunity to offer a
deeper, more human interpretation of current events and in the end,
save for some pretty interesting moments, it was pretty lukewarm. Its
funny, because that didn't stop the game from receiving backlash
in the media. The Medal of Honor situation is pretty sad to me on the
whole, considering that first-person war games could only exist as
they do today because of the first installment 10 years ago. It's like
the relationship between Guitar Hero and Rock Band, or kinda like how
The Mummy ripped off the original Indiana Jones trilogy, and then
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ripped off The Mummy. Ideas are funny.
Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey is a sickness.
Strange Journey's fascinating scenario of an expedition to the South
Pole to investigate an expanding pool of nothingness that threatens to
swallow the world is designed to make you feel like something is
always wrong. The game takes place from the first-person perspective
of your hero, so you can only see in front of you. No creature is
visible until you are both occupying the same space. And even when you
return from your dungeon-crawling back to your base, all of your
allies are represented by static, unmoving images that are so small
as to seem very far away from you. The game constantly reinforces the
idea that you are alone in a land that doesn't welcome you.
As the game goes on, all of your safety measures are neutralized. Your
technologies fail, new forces appear to antagonize you, and your
closest comrades trade their humanity to embrace the insanity around
them. There's a mounting, apocalyptic sensation coinciding with the
realization that none of the methods you choose to resolve this
conflict is going to be a happy one.
The main problem with Strange Journey's story is that it's attached to
a game in which entire dungeons are filled with trapdoors and warp
tiles that you won't know about until you walk on them.
I only realized just now that Strange Journey was probably
always going to be a dungeon-crawler with trapdoors, warp tiles
and randomly-appearing items, and that the story about humanity's
self-destruction was just an add-on so they knew how to design the
cover. It's kind of brilliant to have a dungeons designed to highlight
all of man's follies - war, excess, consumption - and then have the
player spend hours fighting, fusing demons and grinding for the sake
of another fucking JRPG. Strange Journey could have been a psychedelic
survival horror, but it had to be another god damn number orgy.
Once you've played this game long enough, all of the things that made
the tone of the story so compelling become just frustrating. All of
your allies are small and they don't move. For some cockamamie reason
activating auto-battle makes all damage invisible. Playing this game
feels like playing another, more immersive game on the other side of
a window with those gloves specialists use to handle radioactive
materials. I don't remember the last time that I wished so anxiously
that the next dungeon would be the last. And I never found out how it
ended because the only advice I could find for overcoming the final
boss was "level up".
Now, all of the clever Shin Megami Tensei mechanics are there.
Contracting and fusing demons, balancing your party's strengths and
weaknesses while exploiting those of your enemy, and there are some
boss fights that require an expert understanding of these principles
in order to overcome them. If that sounds good to you, please, play
2009's Devil Survivor instead. Its characters emote, there are
no trapdoors to fall into, and your decisions actually affect the
story in ways outside of changing the color of your name to reflect
your alignment.
The Best Video Game Music of 2010
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