Bioshock Infinite

I want to take this time to talk to those who care, about my favorite thing in Bioshock Infinite. Is it the fast paced, adrenaline-inducing combat? No of course not, you idiot. Is it the brilliant story that successfully ties together all questions at the end? Alright, seriously, sit down, nobody cares about writing. No, my answer, obviously, is the tutorial…. ok, maybe it wasn’t that obvious. That’s basically because the tutorial is normally the worst and most annoying part of any game. So then why would you choose that to be your favorite moment in Bioshock? Oh my god, be quiet for two seconds and I’ll tell you. Ok, fine, I’ll admit that reminiscing on the tutorial does feel like a wasted opportunity when I could have chosen the war scene where I’m leading an army of rebels through the industry district as my favorite moment, but the thing is, is that Bioshock did it right. The tutorial is the game’s way of teaching the player the basics of control and how they can use their abilities to their advantage. Sometimes the game teaches you by making you run an obstacle course while an npc on an intercom tells you what to do, sometimes the game will show you a picture of a console with a diagram of what the buttons do and says “We really expect you to remember all of this in one go.”, and the very worst of the rest is the tutorial that stops you in the middle of gameplay just to tell you something. So, that means I’m prepping to stab a dude in the back, but as soon as I’m two feet away from him, the game breaks the pace by stopping me mid-impale and then teaches me how to stab a dude in the back. I kind of wish the more mature games would assume that the people who buy them would already know how to play, especially when they already beat the game and are replaying it from the start, or teach them how to perform the more unusual and uncommon controls, or at least make the tutorial optional. Though, that doesn’t mean there aren’t games that drop someone in the wilderness without telling them a single thing about how to avoid getting eaten by wolves. What Bioshock Infinite did was clever, and you wouldn’t have even figured out that it was a tutorial at first glance. A few minutes after you start playing the game you find yourself at a carnival, filled with shooting galleries where you can shoot the ducks with two different guns and a magic missile, vending machines you can possess, and some world-building bits on the side, and if you do the sideshows well, you will be rewarded with money, which you’re most likely going to spend preparing for the upcoming genocide. Not only does the game secretly teach you but it also rewards you, and if you have a busy schedule you can even skip past the entire carnival and go straight to the massacre. It wasn’t until I was at the carnival exit, stealing money from the vending machines, when I realized “Hold up a minute. Did the game just teach me how to play the game?” I was pleasantly surprised and it gives thought that other games can learn from this; that they can teach people how to play without them even knowing they’re being taught, instead of forcing them to run obstacles or shoving handbooks into their faces. So yes, the carnival was my highlighted moment of Bioshock Infinite, and you’re free to send all the hate-filled e-mails as you please.

Reus

I like independent developers, people who can prove they can make a living without having to turn to some big named company are those I can respect, as long as they’re not bragging about it. The problem with not licking the toes of big named companies is that it’s kind of like moving out of your parents’ house; once you no longer rely on someone who is more financed than you are then you basically have to fend for yourself. That’s why most indie games are shorter and graphically inferior to games that are supported with hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertisement.

What I find appealing about indie games is the creator’s desire to break new grounds in the videogame industry, like a grave-digger trying to find a place to bury a corpse in a crowded cemetery. Indie developers try endlessly to experiment with what they can do with videogames, and a successful project could actually change the public’s views and definitions of virtual gaming and could raise our standards of what we expect from technology in the future. That’s more than what multi-million dollar companies are willing to do today. At first, experimentation was key, but when their projects became more and more successful then developers would live off of their ideas (or the ideas of others) by reselling them every year with different paint-jobs and delivery, that is, until they got fired and their work stolen from them and lived off of by the guy who fired them. That’s why we have so many Call of Duty, God of War, and Mario of something clones and sequels.

            The independent game I’ve been playing this week has been Reus and, like a lot of people, I don’t know how to say that. Is it Ray-oos, or Ree-us, or is pronounced like Zeus? Then it would sound like Roose and that’s kind of weird. Anyway, the point of Rie-is is that you can control four giants, each with the awesome powers to create mountains and oceans and move at an annoyingly slow pace, have them tread across a 2-dimensional earth and make it healthy enough for humans to survive on.

I generally enjoy god games, especially when you can watch your people develop their own civilization. It’s like watching ants enter into a tiny industrial revolution. It’s particularly more fun to summon a giant shovel to land on their cities at a devastating impact whenever you get bored, which might be the real reason why god flooded the lot of us while we were un-stimulatingly eating bark off of trees for nourishment.

Once I had a village settled on a small patch of forest I was given a job to send resources to the village in order for them to further advance their society. Once I completed the mission I could see the tiny tent homes evolve into stone hovels. This is promising so far, I’m eager for my next task! So I waited… for a long while… with very little happening… then the game said “Um, you do know you can speed things up by building more villages, right?” so I did just that, but only because I wanted to, and not because the game told me.

            Five minutes in and my planet was booming with several different tribes. I was given more missions to keep myself occupied, but they kept coming at a disquieting pace. Several tribes were wanting me to help them build farms and temples, forcing me to switch my giants back and fourth (who, by the way, fail to understand the concept of getting a rush on) desperately trying to keep everyone’s  love and respect for me, completely unlike how I am in real life. I have to be careful though, because the more you give to the tribes the greedier they’ll become and the more likely they’ll attack other villages, which is a lot like watching your own children claw at each other for the final bowl of cheerios, but at some point the game goes “In order for this tribe to advance further they must first win a war against the Snuffle-Rabbit clan.” Um, excuse me game, I worked very hard to give my planet the peaceful equivalence of Candy Land, how on Ra’s green earth am I going to have enough time to rally up an army and how do I know if they’ll attack the right village or if they’ll even win? And so I failed the task, and the village showed their understanding that I can only do so much by throwing spears at my giants, and they were instantly plagued with a toxic disease, which was purely coincidental.

            You can be awarded special abilities to give to your giants, allowing them to improve the efficiency and quantity of resources, but you can only gain abilities by accomplishing missions, and they get more difficult each time. Just then, I thought of a little cheat I could use to exploit the game. First: raise a village, complete the first, easy missions, gain the award and then destroy the village with an earthquake, a new village will settle and restart the first, easy missions; repeat this procedure until your giants max their potential. I felt pretty clever, in a manipulating, genocidal sort of way. The plan worked, for a while, but by the fourth time I did this I would no longer gain awards from the earlier missions. So I guess the developing team was smart enough to keep people, like me, from cheating their game. Jerks.

So what can I say about Reese’s Pieces? Well, it can easily switch dramatically between tedious and stressful at times, but the visuals are nice, the music is calm and therapeutic, and, again, it’s very satisfying to watch the little ant colonies build tiny clay huts. This might not be the game for you if you like your games to be adrenaline-fueled, thriller rides, but if you want to take a break from shooting nazis and decapitating demons, then why not? Give this game a try.

Remake Mistake

Hey, did anyone see The Great Gatsby movie? No, not the one from 1926, or 1949, or 1974, or even the one from 2000, I’m talking about the one that came out about a week ago. And if you did see it, then please try to retain yourself from spoiling the ending for me.

I think the problem with the entertainment industry is that they keep reviving old ideas or even more recent ones. I do want to say that it’s because of a lack of creativity or a need for money, but that’s not very specific, so I broken it down into three categories.

One: Is the writers’ strike over yet? I’m not sure what’s going on at the writers’ department. Maybe the intern kept forgetting to make the pot of coffee each morning and the team could not be asked to come up with an original concept. So they decided to reach into a dusty bin labeled “old, famous titles” took out the first show reel they grabbed, redecorated it with makeup, shiny lights, and Leonardo DiCaprio, and called it a day. Almost like they’re afraid of creating something new at the risk of losing their jobs and being burned at the stake, so they take the safe and easy approach of reusing an old idea that was made famous by someone who WASN’T afraid of creating something new at the risk of etc etc etc.

 Two: The writer is a massive nerd. Like I said, I’m not a fan of fan fiction (hehehe seewhatIdid?) because it shows how much of foamy-mouthed spastics people can be and we can see what happens when foamy-mouthed spastics grow up to be film writers. It almost seems like the writer is too in love with the franchise, trying to redesign their favorite stories into a film in the way their convulsive minds envision it. I mean, it’s exceptional for books since using your imagination is the sole purpose of reading, even if you’re redesigning an old existing idea into a new medium, that’s fine too, but when you’re making a film based on an existing film with the same medium, well, it just doesn't seem necessary. Someone already proved that they could turn a book title into a film, and when you make a film based on a book when there’s already a film that’s based on the same book, then all you’re trying to prove to everyone is how much prettier you can make it.

Three: The George Lucas effect. I hate myself for coming back to this and I know that a lot of you are going to hate me too, but fans, the ones that make fan fictions, are foamy-mouthed spastics who will buy anything if it has their favorite franchise stapled onto it. Film executives understand this and of course will want to manipulate it for some extra dosh. This includes remakes, reboots, redoes, revivals and, of course, sequels, prequels and fecal. Even if they’re bad, people will still pay to see them and then buy the products. Although I don’t blame the executives as much as I blame the fans for influencing the executives into making half-hearted films based on popular things. If there were no fan bases in the world then writers will have to try harder to create something fresh, something to make fictional characters more relatable to the audience. But, like I said before, people are suspicious and uncomfortable when they are introduced to something they aren't familiar with.

I’m not saying that the new Great Gatsby movie is bad, I’m just saying that it’s an old story that mostly everyone read in school. Nobody went to this movie to see what happens, but instead what it looks like, and that’s kind of a step backwards and an insult. It says Hollywood thinks that their audiences all have the attention spans of humming birds and that we need special effects or a naked woman to appear on screen every 5 minutes just to keep us interested.

I talked about the subject to some people who said “Who cares about original content? As long as you’re making money then why bother?” So that’s it then? We've passed the era of art and inspiration and moved on to an era of consumers and commercialism? Because the way I see, I think that society should give more credit to someone who made something new rather than one who merely made a copy, especially in a day and age when trying to come up with new things is becoming more and more difficult. So here’s another question I want to ask you: Would you rather die rich, a wealth that was gained through taking the ideas of others, or would you die poor but content knowing that you successfully created a message that reached a generation?

Papers, Please

You know those moments in a game, movie, or a show where the main characters give their passports to a cold-hearted border control worker behind a desk who cruelly denies their permission to pass through for some obscure reason? That's basically the guy you play as in 'Papers, Please', a new independant game still in it's premature, beta phase. The art design is really nothing more than simple 10-bit graphics, designed to make the game look retro, old-yet-cool. Which is something I don't really understand. There was nothing special about visuals in games during the 1980's and early 90's, they were just old. And new games with old graphics can only really appeal to nostalgic-eyed people who grew up with it. I suppose to remind them of the simple days before their very late first stages of puberty. But besides that, the story is surprisingly solid enough to keep hold of my shamefully short attention span and the game-play is a nice turn away from the the seemingly endless row of point, shoot and kill games I've been playing recently. The objective of the game is to inspect the papers the people in line hand you and you have to decide whether or not they are illegible to pass right through. But you can't just let everyone through or else there will be penalties. You need to do a good job to get a decent pay check in order to pay for the rent, food, heat and medicine required to keep your family of four healthy; it's sort of like the Oregon trail if it were directed as a Russian comedy. But the thing about your family is that you never see them, a lot like my relationship with my family, no, seriously, the only reason you know that they exist is because by the end of each level you're given a list of your family members and a status determining whether they are healthy, hungry, sick or cold. They don't even communicate with you, they're not worried about the safety of your job or concerned about how the ministry treats foreigners. For all we know, they could just be robots that fuel on bread and cough syrup. There isn't a lot of feelings for them. The inspections are easy enough at first, only needing to check for gender, issuing city, expiration date and picture, but in further levels you have to deal with foreigner papers, verification codes, names, stamps, tickets, worker forms, i.d.'s finger-prints, strip-searches, and listen for verbal information. There were too many times when I had to check every print on every piece of paper that was thrown into a scattered mess on my desk, searching for any typo or any sign of forgery, and when I was fully convinced that the traveler was acceptable for passage the game snapped at me because the gender on the passport was incorrect. A lot of people might not be interested in a game that requires you to do paperwork. Which makes sense, people don't relax after work by going home and doing more work, so let's focus on the story. Almost every character that comes up to your desk might give a back-story about their lives and a little bit of information about the issues between different countries. Sometimes a person will come up to your desk with a passport, the passport had a typo and the character will give a sob story about how they will be killed if they go back to their country or that they will never see their children. In this situation you can either be loyal to your job and deny the person or you can show a kindness of heart and accept them. I decided to let them pass and as a sign of gratitude they rewarded me for my charity before the game yelled at me. But these are smaller stories next to the big one. One time I was inspecting a man's passport and before I could tell them that his picture looked different, I was interrupted by the screams of sirens and the panic of people. I looked up to notice that someone climbed over the wall and threw a bomb at a security guard before he was shot to death. The ministry discovered which country the man was from and I was issued to strip-search anyone from that country. I strip-searched one man and I noticed that he had something strapped to his leg. I was about to call for security when he claimed that he was only a doctor carrying medicine and tried to bribe me for passage, but I decided to call for security anyways. By the end of the day I discovered that the son became sick and that I didn't have enough money to pay for medicine. Then it hit me: If I just let that man bribe me then I could have paid for the medicine, the game would have only given me a warning, but then again he could actually have been a terrorist threatening my own country. That's an interesting question: would you sacrifice the safety of your country in or order to protect your family or vice-versa? 'Papers, Please' is one of those games that makes you think or bring up topics in conversations and that might be worth getting. You can get it for free from the website. It's still in its beta so the ending will creep up on you very quickly, but I'm interested to see where the story is going from here.

Loadout

I think I like Loadout. It’s one of those delights you don’t expect from a game where you play as an action-movie stereotype from the 80’s. The point of the game is not only to turn Rambo into a messy puddle of blood, pus, skin and childhood memories, well, that’s a pretty important and hilarious part of the game, but another equally important part is your complete freedom to customize the performance of your personal arsenal to your very choosing. You can choose between different gun types ranging from bullet rifles to rocket launchers, beam rifles and so on. Then you can switch between different types of barrels, ammo clips, sights, stocks, triggers and bullets to alter the range, accuracy, damage, capacity, fire rate of your gun and including additional abilities. For instance, I built a plasma shotgun that releases bursts of fireballs per shot, incinerating anything within range. But your weapons don’t always have to cause harm; you can even design a gun to create a stream of healing energies or steroids to aid your teammates in battle. You can even test and experiment your custom weapons on fixed obstacle courses filled with robots. But the effect your weapon has on the obstacle course may not be the same when in a multiplayer match, where the things you have to kill are actually shooting back. For instance, I built a rocket launcher that shot three remote detonated land mines per shot, each mine designed to electrocute anyone in range before exploding and sending off dozens of miniature bombs in several frantic directions, it proved to be very useful on the course, but when I went to war with it I discovered that it lacked in real situations when you’re against real people who are smart enough to dodge and steer clear of any land mines. So that means that no matter how you build your weapon it can only be useful for very specific situations, because with any weapon part that adds a positive attribute it will also add a negative effect. Such as the bigger the ammo clip is the less damage the gun will do, or the faster your gun can fire will decrease its accuracy. Another thing I discovered was that I had limited parts to attach to my weapons, so I guess I can’t create twenty different guns with sniper rifle barrels. It is possible to restock your inventory by buying more weapon parts, but the only way to gain money is by playing Spin-The-Buzzsaw after every multiplayer match and there’s a big chance you’ll win anything other than money. Of course you can use real world money to buy the parts, but if I was that desperate to get rid of money I would just burn it. There are several matches you can play and I have to say, that the creators of this game did a good job of recreating the cliché gameplay types other multiplayer shooters use. In capture the flag you can do the usual “grab their flag and bring it to your base” if you’re boring or you gain more points by killing enemies with their own flag before capturing it for your team, and for death matches, everyone who gets killed drops a strange, glowing vial and the only way you can gain points for your team is by capturing the vials dropped by the bad guys and confirming the kills, you can even capture the vials dropped by your friends to deny the enemy team of their kills. Loadout is still very much in the Beta phase, there are few gameplay types to play with, some of the levels haven’t even been textured yet and it feels like they can add more to the weapon customizing mechanic, such as paint jobs and such, because you know, I want to feel pretty when I’m killing an army of Arnold Schwarzeneggers. Loadout’s still fun even if it is unfinished and I can only wonder what they’ll do with it once it officially releases.

VIOLENCE AND VIDEOGAMES, a lot of people might have already heard about this, that violent videogames are capable of corrupting the minds of the youth. That’s kind of an odd thing to say, that everyone under the age of forty are just naturally deranged and that merely featuring a pint of blood violently exiting the body of a living creature in a game could send anyone to go on a baseball bat rampage on the nearest orphanage for injured kittens. Actually the same thing was also said about television shows, movies, books, theater, dancing and zoetrope’s. But videogames are different from those that they’re an interactive medium. Unlike movies and books, where you only watch Arnold Schwarzenegger run over a policeman with a car in The Terminator, or read about whatever was going on in Clockwork Orange, most videogames require you to shoot, maim, ignite, impale, blow up, and torment either a number of baddies or one big baddy in order to progress to another room with more baddies to shoot, maim, ignite, etc. This kind of thing makes videogames an incredibly easy target for people to blame any sort of violence on. Some people who aren’t in any way familiar with interactive gaming don’t really understand anything about it except that a majority of titles feature violence and that young people have access to play them. This wasn’t really a big deal until the punchy-bloody-slaughter contest known as Mortal Kombat came out in 1992 and parents were worried that if their children started to play this arcade legend that they would go to school the next day and start separating the upper halves and lower halves of fellow students with their bare hands or blow up the principal’s head with a precise strike of lightning. It was that same year when the gaming industry started to staple content ratings to the back of game boxes to inform buyers to know which age group any game is appropriate for, ‘E’ for everyone, including children, ‘T’ for anyone but children, and ‘M’ exclusive for adults over the age of seventeen only, but even though each game has it’s own rating it still doesn’t stop children from playing it and it doesn’t stop parents from buying it for little Jimmy because he’s just so darn “mature”. Like how a city makes laws and consequences for crimes, but that won’t keep people from committing such crimes. So even though there is awareness for which game would be appropriate to purchase for a little Tina, kids are still enjoying games with bloody chainsaw dismembering and adults are still panicking over this. You might be saying, “Well who cares if a bunch of old sods are complaining about the excessive number of shotgun decapitations there are in Gore-Fest 2012? What threat can they oppose?” Well, the fact that “old sods” are complaining is a pretty big threat because political leaders are known for taking advantage of the public’s fear of anything they don’t understand. Some people don’t understand videogames and in response they fear them, so politicians rise up to ease their minds by telling them that, yes, videogames are something to be feared and that they could mentally damage your children. Politicians do this sort of thing just to have the public listen to them speak, have the product banned from the face of the earth, and feel important for one glorious year, and instead of sitting down and actually observing the videogames that game enthusiasts play, the public would just listen to the officials preach about how games are evil and that anyone who plays them is a genocide waiting to happen. There’s a big dent in that logic, I want you to do something for me, dear reader. I want you to imagine playing a videogame with console in hand and the game you happen to be playing features you smashing the heads of super mutants with a nine-iron, splattering blood all over the inside of the screen, and then say to yourself “Wow, this game is so fun that it has truly inspired me to go out in public and reenact this very moment!” It sounds very strange doesn’t it? I don’t believe that murders are cause by inspiration, but instead by passion. A tragedy in someone’s life that caused personal feelings of hatred towards someone specific, or random, or society as a whole and instead of expressing such pain, some people use violence and abuse to take care of their problems. If there are people who are still confused as to why developers feel as if they need blood and gore in there games then let me explain. Sometimes it is fun to play a game where you run around blasting at crazed space pirates and throwing them one by one by one into a pit of exposed wiring, it can be satisfying to really gun down hordes of robots dressed up as pirates and there is a sense of glee when one’s foul-mouthed confidence turns into girlish scream as he is thrown into an industrial fan. When you do that in real life, it’s a completely different story, from a completely different bookstore on the other side of the world. In games the people you kill are merely robots programmed to fight and get killed purely for the entertainment of the player. Mindless, emotionless things built just for someone to cave their skulls in with a colorful umbrella. Another reason for violence in videogames is because it sets the tone, when the story in game introduces violence it also introduces the consequence and gives a reason why you have to use violence as a means of defense and survival against those that threaten you. There’s not going to be much at stake if the only threat the bad guy has to offer is to steal all the pies from the innocent and you have to get them back with the power of love. That is proven to not be a successful recipe in dramatic story telling. The third reason is because not only is shooting zombies by truckload fun, it’s actually quite relaxing, something to put all your stress, anger and negative energy into after a day of losing money at the dog races. It’s like a stress ball that doesn’t really feel pain but still shouts pre-recorded yells of agony. Another thing is that the gaming industry does not secretly train people to become psycho deranged killers nor does it encourage people to kill innocent civilians (although, to be honest, people who play games might still run over robots dressed up as civilians for giggles, but remember, even if they do it virtually doesn’t mean they’re going to act on it in real life). Also that using a gun and a sword is very different from controlling an avatar or a pair of arms with a console or a keyboard. I’m not sure why we as a society have to blame videogames for any act of violence, not only videogames, but even gun manufacturers and the news are being framed for violence. Why can’t we blame the person who, you know, actually committed the crime? Try to blame him for his own actions because there shouldn’t be an excuse to why a man decided to take his anger and a baseball bat to an orphanage of kittens. It’s only common sense.