#oneaday Day 641: In Which I Berate the Games Industry for Being Fickle

Oh dear, everyone. Do make your mind up. About everything. And stick to what you believe.

Just a few months ago, roughly halfway between Black Ops coming out and the Battlefield 3/Modern Warfare 3 combo being announced, everyone had decided for the umpteenth time that they were, in fact, sick of games involving Soldiers With Guns. Originality was dying, we regularly heard, and commercialism was diluting the creativity of gaming down into a series of lowest-common denominator products designed purely to cater to the largest possible audience — seemingly, the beer-chugging dudebro. (Yes, I know some ladies play Call of Duty, too. But like it or not, gaming is still an overwhelmingly male-dominated pastime.)

Fast forward until now and suddenly everyone is happily spaffing in the faces of Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3 with looks of rapturous ecstasy on their faces. I’m sure they will both turn out to be competent games with pleasingly spectacular visuals, but nothing has changed — they’re still games set in war-torn cities featuring Soldiers With Guns. I still have precisely zero interest in them, so what has caused people to suddenly decide that actually, no, we don’t have quite enough games featuring Soldiers With Guns in them?

I’m not objecting to the fact that these games exist on anything other than a personal level — I’m quite aware that there are plenty of people out there who play, enjoy and even love them. The thing that is bugging me is the fickleness on display by the industry and the public. Popular opinion seems to ping-pong from one extreme to another — “I hate this!” to “This is the best thing ever!” overnight. And, seemingly, it’s taboo to speak out and say “Hang on a minute…” — largely because in these days of publisher dominance over review scores, we all know what the consequences of rating something slightly below what everyone else rates it is. You get a Cliffy B (or equivalent) ranting and raving and crying that his product has been treated unfairly.

I have played a bit of Modern Warfare 3. It was fun-ish. It didn’t make me want to rush out and buy it. I was playing the co-op Survival mode. We played, we shot men and dogs, we survived. It was nothing I hadn’t done before in many other shooters, and in many cases in much more fun situations. Killing Floor, for example, is very similar to Modern Warfare 3‘s Survival mode but is much more fun owing to its variety of enemies and settings that go beyond war-torn towns.

I have not, on the other hand, played Battlefield 3. My totally uninformed position gives me a sneaking suspicion that things might take on a similar turn there. While the FrostBite 2 engine is undoubtedly pretty and gorgeous and capable of lovely feats of graphical marvellousness, as we regularly heard in the early days of the CD-ROM revolution, graphics do not make a good game. Battlefield 3 is, as far as I can make out, also not doing anything hugely revolutionary that hasn’t been done elsewhere before. Military shooters are a dime-a-dozen, and military shooters with vehicles have been done before, too — and on larger-scale maps by titles such as ArmA.

I don’t dislike the genre per se — to sound like a Daily Mail reader desperately trying to prove he’s not a racist for a moment, some of my favourite experiences with past games have been in the shooter genre. Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, No-One Lives Forever, SiN, TimeSplitters — all are examples of an overcrowded genre, but all, too, are examples of games which go a step beyond just being a cookie-cutter game involving Soldiers With Guns.

And yet two almost identical-looking games featuring Soldiers With Guns are tipped to be the biggest-selling titles of the year, while other games fall by the wayside. Where’s the justice?

Live and let live, I guess. So long as there are people online for me to play Dungeon Defenders with — and there seem to be plenty at the moment, thankfully — I’ll happily leave the Soldiers With Guns fans to their business and get on with mine. But I still wish that for once, when everyone finally tires of Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3 and the inevitable sequels to both get announced halfway through next year, people will actually stick to their guns (no pun intended) for once and say “No! Look, we’ve had enough. Do something different, for fuck’s sake.”

I don’t see it happening, however. Still, as I say, so long as the more creative underbelly of the industry continues to thrive as it does, I’ll happily go on supporting the games that no-one else is playing. It’s a much more exclusive club, and one that’s a pleasure to be a part of.

#oneaday Day 610: Gears of Bore (No-One’s Ever Made That Joke Before)

I suppose with the world gripped by Gears frenzy I should probably explain why I’m not a fan of the series.

I have nothing in particular against shooters. I have nothing in particular against space marines, either — I have a copy of Space Crusade sitting proudly on my shelf as proof. But something about the first Gears of War really rubbed me up the wrong way after the “my GOD these graphics are nice even on a standard-def TV” shock wore off. I played it for a while and got a reasonable way into it before realising that I wasn’t really having any fun. The series’ oppressive brownness was getting to me, and what few attempts at humour there were in there just came off as silly action-movie posturing — I guess that’s kind of the point, but still.

Consequently, Gears of War 2 and now Gears of War 3 hold little to no interest to me. The first game didn’t make me want to get to know these characters any more, so why should I spend any more time in their universe? It wasn’t just due to the risible dialogue, of course — the infuriating bullet-sponge nature of most of the regular enemies in the game put me off somewhat, too, along with numerous sequences in which snipers could insta-kill you if you didn’t work out where the best cover spot was. Constant repetition of a short sequence in shooters is something of a bugbear for me, and Gears hit me right in the fury spot with one particular section.

Alongside all that, I’m not a huge fan of competitive multiplayer games (largely because I’m typcially crap at them) and it all adds up to a package that I’m not interested in in the slightest. I don’t begrudge people their excitement for the new game, but it seems that the days in which every triple-A title was an essential purchase for everyone are long gone — at least so far as I’m concerned, anyway.

I’m not sure exactly when this happened. I know it was definitely this generation, as I vividly recall throughout the PS1 and PS2 eras picking up the “essential purchase” titles almost as soon as they were released. Perhaps now there are simply too many high-profile, high-quality games being released to make this practical, perhaps I’m no longer interested in the “blockbuster” genre, or perhaps I’m increasingly disillusioned with ever-more underhanded tactics to get players to part with even more of their money beyond purchasing the game itself.

Whatever the reasons, as I say, I certainly don’t begrudge the Gears fans their upcoming fun-fest, but I’m more than happy with what I’m playing right now: Xenoblade Chronicles (awesome), Minecraft 1.8 (buggy but awesome), TrackMania 2 Canyon (aweso– you get the idea) and Wing Commander III (surprisingly still great). The fact that I’d rather play a Wii game, an indie game, a niche racing game and a space sim from 1994 is perhaps a sad indictment on the mainstream gaming industry, however.

Ah well. Horses for courses and other such clichés. If you’re playing Gears this weekend, have a blast. I will not be joining you!

#oneaday Day 61: Killing One’s Dick Off

Bulletstorm should be the last game that appeals to me. I’ve criticised games such as Killzone for having generic-sounding “ShootMan: Kill”-type names, and my frustration with the market’s oversaturation of first-person shooters is well-documented.

So why do I find myself wanting to play it?

Well, there’s quite a few reasons, actually, and despite Bulletstorm‘s generic-sounding title and the fact it is indeed a first-person shooter, there’s enough in it to get me interested. Most importantly, though, it’s a game which doesn’t take itself too seriously in the slightest. It knows only too well how ridiculous it is, and it’s happy to provide said ridiculousness in spades.

There’s a couple of specific things that get me, though. First up is score attack. Score attack is something that I seem to have developed something of a liking for in the last couple of years thanks mostly to Geometry Wars 2 and Pac-Man Championship Edition DX or whatever the bloody thing is called. Score attack is a simple, asynchronous way for people to play “together” and compete. It allows people on opposite sides of the world the chance to enjoy some friendly competition without those pesky timezones getting in the way. It encourages people to talk about the game. And it encourages people to replay the game rather than just ditching it after they’ve beaten the campaign.

The second thing about Bulletstorm is ironically one of the things that I thought would put me off it, and that is its immaturity. It has a sense of humour and throws obscenities around with gay abandon and from everything I’ve heard from reputable sources of information (well, friends) is all the better for it. A line about “killing your dick off” is supposedly a particular highlight, but the fact the demo for the game ended by referring to the player as “dick-tits” pretty much convinced me that this was a game built on the same values as late 90s shooters in which cheeky, immature fun was at the forefront, not trying to be over-the-top epic.

Fun is good. A lot of shooters, in my experience anyway, seem to be forgetting that part. When you repeat the same bit over and over again due to cheap deaths and hear the same annoying bit of inevitably-shouted dialogue over and over again, it kills all sense of immersion in the story which the developers are clearly trying so hard to achieve. Sure, I haven’t played the full version of Bulletstorm yet, but since the plot is rather secondary to the gameplay and the scoring, it strikes me as something that will be rather less frustrating than the reason I put Gears of War down and have never touched that series since.

All of the above isn’t to say that I am going to get Bulletstorm. I haven’t decided yet. But they’ve done something right along the way, as it’s the first shooter in a very long time that I’ve been genuinely very interested in playing.

#oneaday, Day 32: Brown Ops

Earlier today, this animated image from Insomniac Games’ Resistance 3 did the rounds. Impressive. But also rubbish.

Ooh, controversial.

But seriously, look at it again. What is the one thing that sticks in your mind after watching that short clip? You probably answered either “post-apocalyptic”, “monster” or “brown”.

The trouble with things like this is that they completely lose their impact after a time. I’m sure Resistance 3 is technically very proficient, particularly if that clip was rendered using the game engine, which I’m guessing it was. But the fact it looks like Gears of War meets Fallout meets any other post-apocalyptic brown “destroyed beauty” sort of environment completely kills any interest for me—there’s just too much of it around. And not just in the sci-fi genre; I haven’t played Modern Warfare 2 for months (I traded it in after I got bored and decided I had no interest in the rest of the Call of Duty series after it) but my one enduring memory of that game, too, is that there was a lot of brown around.

This is nothing new, of course. I vividly remember getting all excited over the original Quake, the first high-profile “true 3D” first-person shooter. My brother, obviously already sick of it having been exposed to it every day on PC Zone, referred to it as “oh, the brown game”. And yes, Quake was overwhelmingly brown, though there were a few blue bits in it too. This was just the beginning, though.

Yes, post-apocalyptic environments probably are going to be grey, brown and miserable. Although one thing that Halo: Reach shows is that it is possible for armageddon to be happening and it still be a vibrant place filled with colour. In the case of that game, it’s arguable that the impact of the destruction is all the more profound because of the splashes of bright colours that are everywhere.

Or alternatively, developers, how about fewer games involving things that have collapsed or are in the process of collapsing? Fewer games where there’s nothing but rock and stone? More games in organic, natural environments that aren’t dead. More games that aren’t afraid to take a few risks and be a bit more stylised rather than “gritty” and “realistic”. Some of my favourite games of all time are the Timesplitters series, proving once and for all that I don’t hate FPS games, I am just very tired of them all being identikit and boring. Timesplitters was colourful, distinctive and humorous but still managed to be atmospheric. And the news that CryTek are considering resurrecting the series fills me with an enormous amount of joy… and hope that they don’t fuck it up.

Perhaps this is why I like JRPGs at a time when more and more people seem to be getting switched off by them. They may be their own particular kind of generic, but at least they offer some colour as part of their aesthetic.