Boost is the speed pickup from WIPEOUT and the turbos from MOTORSTORM with the thumb-feel of OUTRUN’s timeless drifting. Punching the boost sends players hurtling across VANQUISH’s wide open spaces at a just-barely-manageable pace, with remarkable precision of control; the sole restriction being the precious but rechargeable fuel players’ consume. Players can shoot, melee and even enter cover from Boost, and much of the game’s greatest goosebump-inducing moments and finest tactical triumphs come from exactly this sort of layering of behaviors. The world of VANQUISH is exactly as claustrophobic as the player wants it to be. Through Boost, three-dimensional space is distorted and becomes an expression of the player.
VANQUISH RETROSPECTIVE by Adam Saltsman - Pastebin.com
This essay on Vanquish is, hands down, my favourite piece of games criticism this year. Scarily, it was written not by a full-time critic but by a developer. It has shaken my confident stance that you don’t need to be a developer to be a good critic, it is that good.
The framing is problematic, the whole “ALL the critics didn’t get this thing” kinda framing, but even critics and academics (and me) do this all the time without thinking so I really don’t mind at all. This might offend some critics but whatever.
But man. The analysis of every single element of Vanquish. The weapons, the boost, the slow-motion, the scoring. The connection to a design history of Mikami (I’ve always talked about Vanquish as a Japanese take on a Western genre, without appreciating that that ‘Western’ genre was largely birthed by Mikami in the first place). The whole beautiful discussion of Speed Racer (and, yeah, equally problematic generalisation of film critics) to frame it all. There is nothing about this essay I don’t love.
Vanquish is one of the games that was on my shortlist of games-I-could-potentially-write-another-book-about (Driver: San Francisco and Binary Domain are the other members of that list). Vanquish is no longer on this list. Everything has been said about that game, and said better by Saltsman. It’s almost exhaustive in its critique.
Anyway. I love this essay enough to practically write a short essay about it. Good games criticism, for me, should be of the form “I really love this game. This is why I love this game in very specific and descriptive language.” That is exactly what this does. It’s exactly the kind of essay I want to write.
Maybe I need to learn game design.
(via ungaming)












