Embracing Entitlement, Part 2: Why I am happy with Games.
In Part One I detailed how happy I currently am with gaming. I've begun to outline that within the structure of this series of Embracing Entitlement blog entries, I'll be talking about broader issues to do with gaming - things like the disconnect I feel in the way that the gaming industry is approached by developers and publishers, games writers - or journalists, and gamers themselves. I'll also be examining a few of the issues and conflicts these different approaches lead to. This narrative will spill from my own experience and viewpoint as a plain and simple gamer of thirty-ish years.
If I was solely embracing my entitlement, I suppose I should launch directly into the sort of opinionated whining that gamers are often accused of, often with some justification. Before I navel-gaze at some of the negative things around being a gamer, I want to create a context against which my observations can be stacked. The first part of this objective I'm going to address here by looking at the games that are making me happy at the moment, I'll apologise now for this essentially taking the form of a list of games on my 360 that are bringing me the same kind of happiness that I experienced in the broad offerings of the PS2 era. I've been fortunate enough to receive some great responses from my gaming peers about how happy they are with games and gaming, too, and I'll be trying to condense all their excellent feedback in part 3 of these blog entries. These could feasibly stretch to two more entries given the richness and detail of the observations I've had sent to me. More on that soon!
Why at this time when my console of choice is reaching an age where it struggles with the latest games and would in previous console lifecycles have already been superseded by a successor, am I so happy with my lot, when others have gone back to PC gaming, or are suffering a kind of fatigue with the current generation of technology?
Burnout Paradise: (BoP!) is the primary reason that anybody at all appears on my Xbox Live Friends List. At the end of January in 2008, after I'd played the BoP demo, I happily skipped out to the shops and spent something like £43 on the game because I didn't want to drive any further to save a few pounds. As a fan of all the previous Burnouts, I was acutely aware of the differences between this game and those, but flat spins, barrel rolls and the ingenious design of the multiplayer challenges made me forgiving of the things that others saw as weaknesses. I, too, would have paid money for the inclusion of a proper reworking of Burnout 2 and Revenge's crash junctions, and of course I fully embraced my entitlement when I decided to post in forums and comment sections about why Burnout Crash isn't really a Burnout game.
All that aside, Paradise remains a glorious jewel in the crown of my 360 gaming and the primary reason for this is that it is a social game in the best sense. It simply allows players to play together and perform co-op challenges like all jumping over the top of one another. The game has a rich seam of single player content, but beyond using it to unlock the cars the game has to offer, it certainly wasn't the thing that made Paradise great for me. I've gone on to meet and properly befriend some of the people I met in Paradise City, and the bunch of people I regularly play with from the Eurogamer forums still come together in January for an annual celebratory online reunion that always bleeds into extended Burnout Fridays through February. Other games have attempted to create online persistent driving worlds, but Test Drive Unlimited 2 spectacularly failed to deliver on the enticing promise it dangled before us, after some poorly-disguised differences of direction between the developer and the publisher. Need For Speed: Most Wanted focused too much on the competitive angle of the community multiplayer, and the licensed cars offered no real advantage over the fantasy offerings of BoP. I have yet to sample the full game of Forza Horizon, but this reflects positively on the swathe of other games I've yet to play. Burnout Paradise is one of the spanners in the works of my decision over which next-generation console to get, because it constantly reminds me of how proper social and sociable gaming will incline me to follow my friends to another platform when what I should be focused on is the games.
As I mentioned in part 1 of Embracing Entitlement, I recently completed Bayonetta, and although I'm getting older, and much worse at combo-based games and much more cynical about the way that sexualising everything is used as a marketing gimmick, this game recognises and seems to transcend all the cliché that surrounds it. The purity of the gameplay sits comfortably within the kind of narrative bonkers story that fueled so many of the great games I played on my PS2, and the PS before it. There are so many games I'm having to leave out of this happiness monologue, but Bayonetta represents many of them by virtue of the way it draws so heavily on established gaming principles. Fantastic controls, fantasy settings, smooth gameplay, replayability and artwork dripping with style and message, in a subverted tale of timeless conflict between Heaven, Hell and Earth. Devil May Cry, Darksiders and countless other games embrace this stylised battleground, and the humour of Bayonetta fuses effortlessly with efforts like the brilliant Shadows of the Damned. The Japanese influence meant that Bayonetta soon had me thinking about Front Mission 3 and Final Fantasy and Disgaea, again. Despite the fact that I'd rented Bayonetta, it's a game that is so good that I've also bought it to register my approval of just how great it is at what it does.
At a time when EA appeared to be allowing their studios to make games aimed at what I think of as 'gamers' and were receiving some positive press for the diversity of their catalogue and the quality of the products that they produced, came Dead Space. Dead Space is essentially Resident Evil in Space, and it has single-handedly done a better job of retaining my interest in the Survival Horror genre than any number of current generation Resident Evils or Alone in the Darks. Mutating the idea of an undead menace into the brilliantly unsettling necromorphs, Dead Space used the darkness in contrast to the light, and quiet in contrast to loud sound to produce something memorable, paced and teasingly psychological. Sure, it has an incongruous turret section, but if things like Extermination on the PS2 can reach back to Capcom's glorious heritage of things like Dino Crisis 2 and chuck in the odd rail-shooter section, then the brilliance of the rest of the game means I'll forgive it in Dead Space, too.
Evoking Event Horizon, Alien and Survival Horror vibes with some of the most keenly used sound direction in pretty much anything I've played this generation, Dead Space stands as a testament to the bridging of old and new things in gaming. More recently, Dead Space 3 appears to be homogenising the gaming experience to something more action oriented, and that latest iteration also panders to EA's efforts to squeeze out second hand sales with an online pass for the co-op sections and reproducing the microtransaction model used in SSX and Mass Effect 3. These kind of things have made me delay any purchase of Dead Space 3 until it is something like £8.99 in a Games On Demand Sale, or I can grab it for a song in a shop, perhaps by trading in some of my other games to help me pay for it. I'd really like to buy it as an original copy to reward the developers for their efforts.
Few games can mount a reasonable offense against the fortress in my heart occupied by the original UFO: Enemy Unknown. It is one of the games my current PC can actually handle running and it retains its ability to shock, surprise and punish players at every turn during gameplay. There are no secrets to the plot or research trees or any of the other mechanics, now that I've played it roughly n times, but on the ground, it can still mess me up with one enemy I hadn't accounted for, or a crazy morale test failure or something else that creeps out of the frankly brilliant fusion of gameplay mechanics it has going for it. Big shoes to fill. On a console apparently awash with shooters and driving games or whatever other accusations are thrown at it, here is a bona-fide turn-based tactics game, with a re-imagined strategic interface, a true sense of place and purpose, and an altered if still fascinating level of detail in the combat calculations that go on behind the scenes.
For all the modern games chasing some narrative to make us care about our lead characters, few games approach the sort of investment that XCOM: Enemy Unknown manages to attain just by letting you change the names of your troops. While it is easy to bemoan a lack of strategy games on consoles in general, XCOM goes some way to redressing this balance on a field contested more frequently by XBLA game titles like Risk Factions, Panzer General and Greed Corp, or the Miasma games on the XBL Indie Games channel. Pleasingly, I haven't even played R.U.S.E. yet beyond the demo, so I know that there is at least one more strategy title that I have to exhaust before I move on to any next generation machines, even before I consider titles like the Supreme Commanders and Command and Conquers, or am tempted to revisit the judiciously tasty Halo Wars, different kettle of fish that they are.
SSX: When I bought my PS2 at launch, the very first SSX, dripping in EA BIG bravado it was something of a revelation for me. I'd read things about it online and in printed press that said it was good, but I was a bit apprehensive about it because sports games generally haven't ever been my thing. I needn't have worried because it was a brilliant game, and although the legacy of sequels has had various issues with differing emphasis on trickery, open mountains and originality, the quality of the base product has almost always shone through. This latest iteration got my entitlement glands going when it was launched, as it shipped with an online pass, and my knee-jerk reaction to that kind of stuff is to get annoyed. However, not having an online pass doesn't lock you out of any game content in SSX, and even though it commits a further cardinal sin by having microtransactions in it, SSX remains a great game. You don't have to love snowboarding to love it, you don't even have to love sports, it's a sometimes finger-twisting game of dexterity, trick planning and route-finding skill. The latest iteration is a collection of ideas from the whole series - with calm freeriding, high-octane trick or racing events, and the frankly odd Deadly Descents themselves, but switching the controls back to Classic gave a distinctly nostalgic direct link back to my first weekend with the PS2. Embracing my entitlement fully, I bought SSX for £8.99 in a Games on Demand sale - a price that unusually included the online pass, and prompted me to spend a further 320 Microsoft points on a double-pack DLC for Mount Eddie, and the old SSX characters. I'm not ultimately averse to spending money on games, and things for games.
Oh, Triss. I spent the entire narrative of The Witcher 2 fighting your corner and sticking up for the things you'd done and said, because it seemed like you shared Geralts neutral but irritable values and that of all Geralts love interests you seemed to be the one he reserved genuine affection for, the philandering bastard. By the end of the story, I wasn't really any the wiser whether I'd made the right choice. I know that the game would've allowed me to pick things differently, and that I could as swiftly as betrayed you as saved you, but every turn I took seemed to be mired in the cynical political treachery that shaped the world in which I was trying to continuously establish balance between men, magic and monsters. This is what made The Witcher 2 great, and while I'm sure that I could've bought a PC for the optimal graphical experience and fewer loading times between geographical areas, I have nothing but great respect for CDProjekt and their epic transfer of this game to the 360. In an age where I can expect a leaflet of controller configuration options and a guide to how to get onto Xbox Live to accompany most of the games I spend my carefully accrued money on, you brought a game box which contained a map, and a booklet with game stuff in it, and a proper set of instructions. It has come to something when the standard cost-cutting of other publishers has made me feel something akin to gratitude for these things.
I've had a great deal of choice in the RPGs presented to me in this generation, and I've spent a lot of time with Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3 and New Vegas, all of which seem to be refining the formula towards something that might one day be blindingly amazing, while they each skirt around that by individually being great. I can't play more than one RPG at a time though, and although RPG has come to mean something different in this console generation, I am immensely looking forward to playing Dragon Age, Dragons Dogma, Kingdoms of Amalur and whatever other hacky-slashy-magicky things that I can. I've never played Demons or Dark Souls, but I'm reminded of them from time to time by my gamer friends, and only the fear of my own skill not matching up to Dark Souls, having wobbled in the face of the complex systems of The Witcher 2, has so far deflected me from jumping in.
Gran Turismo made me change my mind about being the kind of gamer who does not liking driving games. I'd toyed with Ridge Racers and bundled haplessly through F-Zero. Some of my greatest fun on the ZX Spectrum was had with Chase HQ, but it had never really twigged with me as a Genre until I bought and played the first Gran Turismo game. It was also responsible for some of my earliest internet interactions as I signed up at the unofficial granturismo.com forums (now long defunct, I wonder what happened to those guys?) a place visited by game enthusiasts, and real race drivers, mechanics and other car nuts - a diverse community occupied by people whose shared love of the sport and the games somehow never spilled over into to internet arguments.
Forza 4 takes the great things about Gran Turismo, and lovingly reproduces them for people who don't have a Sony console. I mean no negative feelings with this comment, it's a technical joy with stunning cars, wonderful physics, tracks lovingly crafted down to every bump, kerb, chicane and empty, empty spectator stand. Allowing up to 16 players to race online in their hand-painted, individually tuned cars or letting you get engrossed in an panel of events broad enough to last most people a few years, Forza scratches the itch that I didn't know was there until Gran Turismo bubbled under my skin.
Of course for out and out online brilliance, nothing really compares to Blur, a game that ushered in the death of Bizarre Creations and highlighted the fragility of the Arcade Racer genre. Marred by a prestige system shoehorned in from Call of Duty, launched to zero advertising aplomb by the publisher and causing an argument with retailers about pricing points, Blur remains an unsung hero of this cycle when it comes to online shenanigins.
I didn't join the ranks of Xbox 360 owners until September 2007, with the advent of Bioshock. A reasonable amount of time had passed to allow my gaming peers to help me make the difficult decision facing those gamers who aren't rich enough to own all of the current generation of consoles: Should I get a 360 or a PS3? Dead Rising was one of the things I had highlighted to me as a unique reason to get a 360, and as 'Zombie Games' the Dead Rising series stand peerless, drawing on influences from a lot of things, but mostly from the Mall scenes in Dawn of the Dead, including the irreverent black humour and views of what it means to be human in a world populated by a monstrous opposition that underpin all of Romero's wonderful films in the sequence.
Dead Rising tasks you with surviving this kind of apocalypse, and it does it by throwing thousands of zombies at you, in addition to the occasional psychopathic humans with whom you must contend..Allowing you the freedom of an enclosed open world, the single save slot and brutally short amounts of time allowed to complete story missions do not see you failing the whole game if you can't keep up. Indeed the game encourages you to die and be reborn with the experiences and skills you've acquired acting as the baseline for your next attempt. It's a narrative trick carried through the sequels and side-games. In the run up to Dead Rising 2, new development team Blue Castle Games toyed with an alternative to releasing a demo, releasing a cut-price XBLA game called Dead Rising: Case Zero. This was a standalone chapter of the DR2 story introducing the characters and allowing people to get a taste of the game, for a price of 400 Microsoft points. While I couldn't advocate making the excellent free demo system free, this was four or five hours of unique content that was well worth the money, and which enjoyed very high sales figures when it was released. In the contentious arena of paying for add-on game content, the developers and gamers both gained from this different approach.
I genuinely feel that I can't express my happiness with the 360 without mentioning Left 4 Dead and Borderlands. Two brilliant games, delivered with brilliant DLC strategies and brilliant multiplayer options. I've sunk countless hours into each of them, and their sequels, and if it weren't for the fact that the internet is already awash with how amazing they are, I'd probably wax lyrical a bit about them here. Dead Island takes the things that makes those games great, throws in a whole bunch of dismemberment and bloodshed, and drags players through a really decent sized gaming world, hacking and colour-coded looting as they go, in groups of up to four players. The single player game can be dark, tense and lonely in direct contrast to the kind of high-jinx that are more likely to be perpetrated by co-op partners.
Reviews of Dead Island scored a broad selection of points, and it was taken as a given that the game suffered technical issues, but having played it from the beginning on the Xbox 360, while I appreciate the virtues of the patch, it has only ever crashed for me twice in what must be well over one hundred hours of play. I still fail to see how anyone can decry Dead Island for relying on ubiquitous Zombies when it is a game redolent with the loot and RPG-light mechanics of Borderlands and proper co-op play fun. It doesn't aim to ape the tension and fear of trying to survive L4D levels with a bunch of chums, but it does its own thing just as well. Breaching the limelight with the unfulfilled promise of the launch trailer, embroiled in controversy for a line of comment code left in the game and courting justified anger at the tits statue, Dead Island is a prime example of a game torn between developers, publishers, critics and gamers. It's also brilliant fun.
I wanted to use this space for GTA IV. I love GTA games and can probably be counted among their biggest fans, playing as I have from that very first GTA iteration I picked up for my grey playstation. I was then found chortling my way through the futuristic scope of GTA2, the hilarious offshoot of GTA: London and into the modern blueprint for open world games with the seminal GTA's III, Vice City and San Andreas. The hours I've spent in those worlds don't comfortably bear reflecting upon, given the hoverboards I could have invented or the literary works to rival Shakespeare that I might have created using that time. Obligatory Internet Wink. That's before I consider the sheer joy I got from clambering up the Team Mafiya Work ranked leaderboards in IV, as GTA was boiled down to its constituent parts: Driving, picking stuff up, dropping stuff off and killing things, and sprayed over the canvas of an online Liberty City. Perhaps it isn't for everyone, but alongside the triumphant pomp of The Lost and Damneds coop Club Business mode, IV encapsulated many of the things I love about online gaming.
Sleeping Dogs leans on the established rules we've learned about open world games, throws in a combat model a bit like the Batman: Arkham games, gets the driving a little bit wrong with the floaty ambivalence of Saints Row games, and presents an almost touching script that is a mishmash of undercover cop thriller, Jackie Chan movie and something Arnie might have starred in during the 80s. It navigates this heady mix to deliver an interesting story that manages never to dip too heavily into tired cliché and by the end of the game it left me questioning some of the things I've come to accept about GTA games that I wouldn't have the temerity to doubt previously. These mostly surround hand to hand combat, but Sleeping Dogs also manages to include fun mini-games that are not entirely incongruous with the age old problem of mixing narrative with player agency.
Dumped by Activision as a True Crime game being unworthy of production, Sleeping Dogs was blown back to life from the ashes that Square Enix salvaged. The flame burnt impressively in the charts and in the playing experiences of many gamers. It would be easy to dismiss its popularity as something fleeting in the interminable wait for GTA V. The truth is that Sleeping Dogs does some things better than GTA and Saints Row, and manages to put a human spin on the characters of the cops and gangsters that are so often painted by numbers in other crime tales.
I'm sure you don't want to read much more, and I'm going to cut this entry short and shortly and go off to ponder writing one about XBLA and XBLIG titles while I wait for responses to a questionnaire I've sent some of my gaming peers. This was sent to put my fanboy jubilation in some context before I start to dig into other areas in the Embracing Entitlement span. How I've avoided mentioning the team-based brilliance of Battlefield 3, the awful guilt I felt about buying Battlefield 3 PREMIUM, the more than 20Gb that BF3 occupies on my Hard Drive and the shocking inanity of the Battlefield 3 single player game is beyond me.
Honourable mentions also go to Syndicate, which bucked the EA trend of requiring an online pass and delivered some of the most fun online co-op of this generation, especially at the hightest difficulty levels. Viva Pinata games offer some of the most in-depth, finely balanced gameplay ever wrapped in deceptive technicolour. Battlestations: Pacific broadens the catalogue of 360 offerings still further with an atmospheric take on naval warfare. Enslaved, Red Faction: Armageddon, Bulletstorm and a host of other games skirt the limelight without troubling too many buyers, but are accomplished games with unique and gratifying features, perhaps overshadowed by bigger names and bigger marketing campaigns. I haven't even saved any room for Far Crys 2 or 3. For shame!
There is a further list of games I haven't even got around to playing yet, and this impacts directly on the overall desirability of the next console generation for me at all, although I am going to cover some of the things that my gamer sensibilities, and newfound sense of entitlement have brought to the forefront of my thoughts about the PS4 and Nextbox.
Join me next time for a breakdown of what makes my gaming peers happy and unhappy, before I launch into the tempestuous areas that actually surround the concept of gamer entitlement, and investigate some of the things that get my back up, as a gamer.
