Gaming in a foreign land

Alright, so it’s just the UK, but still. I’m only here for a few months, but I’ve run into my fair share of difficulties trying to keep up on my gaming habit. It’s strange to say, given that gaming is a habit some people struggle to break, but the less games are a part of my life, the less I feel like myself.

Yeah, Europe blows.

I’m still keeping up with industry chit-chat, writing semi-daily for Kombo and Gamezone. The NGP looks amazing – I don’t see how Sony could screw this one up, though of course I won’t put it past them. I even got to play the 3DS again this past weekend at one of the public events they’re holding throughout London. My friends and I stumbled across it at the hip kids-street fair they hold at Brick Lane every Sunday. The little thing hasn’t changed much, and while it’s impressive, I can’t help but be more excited by the possibilities of the NGP. I’ve never liked 3D that much anyway.

Speaking of 3D, I can’t believe 3D movies here cost £15 – that’s almost $25. Dates are expensive, and tangled was cute, but hardly worth it. What was I talking about? Oh yeah..

So for one thing, Steam only works intermittently. That’s not entirely Steam’s fault, as my Uni (Goldsmiths College) purposely blocks the ports that Steam requires to connect. If Steam allowed you to mess with its connection settings a little more, I might not have this problem, but it is what it is. In offline mode, my games, paltry as the selection is (I’m on a Mac, naturally), tend to freeze up every few minutes. Steam support seems mostly stumped on this issue, though their most recent solution may have actually done the trick.

So PC gaming is finicky at best. Bringing a console would have been pointless – there’s no TV in my dorm, and the wacky power outlets they use over here would have probably fried my already-stressed out Xbox 360. Lugging my original, 80-gig PS3 halfway around the world would have been ludicrous, and as for the Wii, well, who the hell plays Wii anymore?

That leaves my PSP, DS and iPhone. The DS has seen practically zero use, despite a friend kindly lending me her copy of Golden Sun: Dark Dawn. I think the problem is that I’m just sick of the DS. I’m sick of the entire system. Flipping it open, the battery-draining sleep mode, my stupid scratched-up touch screen, dropping the stylus on the bus.. I just don’t feel like dealing with it anymore.

As for the iPhone, roaming is a bitch. It stays on airplane mode 100% of the time – I just can’t risk the charges if it decides to ignore my wishes and tries to send me my Words For Friends notifications or something. Mostly I just use it as an iPod now, and since most games tend to interrupt your music as soon as you start them up, I just don’t really play games on it anymore. I might, if there was a universal setting that prevented apps from pausing your music, but Apple apparently hasn’t thought of that yet.

So that leaves the PSP, which has seen the most use of any platform I have here. I’ve got a healthy library of games at my disposal: Birth by Sleep, Jeanne D’Arc (which has been on my pile of shame until now), Ghost of Sparta, and Persona 3 Portable. There’s a lot of variety there, though I think I’d be playing a lot more if I hadn’t brought Kingdom Hearts. I’ve been struggling to finish it for months, but it’s just such a stinking pile of crap.

I’ve actually got a pretty good metaphor for this: trying to be thrifty, I picked up a pint of Sainsbury’s (a general grocery store) brand scotch a few weeks ago. Imported Jim Beam and Jack Daniels are too expensive here, so I figured, why not? I filled up my flask and went to see a play (a normal day in the life of Mike Rougeau).

Do the math

But it turns out the stuff is awful – and my full flask has been sitting on a shelf, unused, for weeks. I can’t drink it, but I can’t bring myself to pour booze down the drain, either. The Sainsbury’s Scotch is preventing me from day-drinking – just like Birth by Sleep is preventing me from playing PSP. There are a lot of lessons to learn when you move to a foreign country.

I solved the flask problem by letting a friend drink all the scotch. Now I’ve got an empty vessel in which to pour whatever I want. I can’t exactly wait for someone else to finish Birth by Sleep for me, though. In fact, I may just write it off entirely so I can get to Jeanne and God of War – far superior games that I’d much rather be playing.

It’s frustrating to have to sit back and watch a  game like Dead Space 2 come and go while I twiddle my thumbs across Europe. There’s ads for it plastered all over the subway. I’ll also be missing the launch of the 3DS – another thing I can’t seem to get away from, yet won’t have access to until months after everyone else does. And as grateful as I am to have Steam on my Mac, the cross-platform library still blows. Left 4 Dead 2 and Deathspank are pretty much it. The first thing I’m doing when I get home (besides grabbing some In-N-Out) is firing up Demon’s Souls.

I do like to complain, but – and I’ll be honest here – there are worse places to be, and I know I’ll get to resume gaming soon.

Review: “Heavy Rain”: this rain is heavy

Heavy Rain is a video game. This may seem obvious, but nevertheless, I was surprised by the amount of interaction its world allows. The internet had led me to believe that it was little more than an interactive Blu-ray movie, and I don’t think I was alone- even Quantic Dream was in on it, with the first trophy the game rewards you reading “Thank you for supporting interactive drama.”

Nevertheless, though, Heavy Rain is a game. About half of it plays like an especially long God of War cutscene, spreading the QTEs around like a cold sore at summer camp, and the rest is a painful mix of surprisingly awkward movement controls and button-tapping pseudo CSI scenes.

As merely a game, I think, Heavy Rain would be a massive failure, an exercise in player punishment, producing little more than puzzled looks and dusty PS3s.  Fortunately, though, Quantic Dream had a, um, dream.

prostitutes, private eyes, perennials, oh my

Their dream was to produce an interactive, semi-linear, multi-faceted experience with elements of both movies and games. Is Heavy Rain a game? Yes. Is it a movie? Almost. Is it fun? I think not. It is something completely new, and perhaps for that reason alone it’s worth seeing through to its (many) ends.

Heavy Rain is a mystery thriller set in a gritty suburbia full of crooked cops, car accidents, inexplicable blackouts, sexual deviants and perpetual rain. It oozes atmosphere, but it’s nothing cinema hasn’t been doing for decades. Give the audience control over almost every important decision, however, and make those decisions matter in progressively more meaningful ways as the narrative hurtles toward its conclusion, and suddenly the formula takes on new life. Suspend a little disbelief, and it becomes fairly compelling.

Choose-your-own-adventure books lose their appeal once the reader turns 9, a professor of mine likes to say. So how does Heavy Rain, an experience that similarly puts the course of the story in the grubby hands of the audience, hold any weighty water at all? A film director delivers a perfect cinematic experience by maintaining control, sending viewers on a journey or showing them a series of events exactly as the director envisions it. Can giving the audience final say over the director’s cut possibly deliver a satisfying experience?

In Heavy Rain, there are few false choices, as there are in a choose-your-own adventure book. The first time you screw up a devilishly delivered QTE and one of the four main characters dies, you’ll be dismayed at the lack of a game over screen. You’ll experience an overwhelming desire to reload your previous save, but you probably won’t be able to, since Heavy Rain auto-saves at the end of every scene. The next scene will load and the world will continue its rotations, and the story’s conclusion will be significantly different than if you had rotated the control stick the right way at the right time.

Likewise, players will have to make dozens of choices, about what to say, where to go next, or whether or not to pull the trigger, the consequences of which combine, gather momentum and do the snowball all the way to the final scenes.

Streets cracked and buildings collapsed under the weight of the rain, which was much heavier than normal rain for some reason. Scientists remain puzzled.

Nevertheless, every one of the dozens of possible combinations of endings will feel complete and satisfying. I can’t imagine what a headache it must have been for Quantic Dream to spend so much time fleshing out all the possible branching plots, but I’m relieved they did. BioWare’s handy trick of simply removing or adding characters from or to the final cutscene depending on who died, who the main character had sex with and which character you forgot to add to your party just wouldn’t have been good enough in this case.

Besides all that, I was often pleasantly surprised with the amount of visual interaction certain scenes required. Without giving too much away, I’d like to describe one such scene, which requires a character to squeeze through several sets of electrified wires. The wires are arranged in a grid pattern, and the player has to determine the character’s route, one step at a time, by examining the relative proximity of each set of wires. Try to squeeze between three wires that criss cross too closely, and the character gets fried, and if the character gets fried too many times, he or she dies.

Add to that the considerable difficulty of some of the QTE button combinations, and the game achieves a commendable level of tension. I dropped the controller more than once trying to wrap my fingers around it Twister style. Some might argue that’s a cheap way of stressing the player out, but it’s effective nonetheless. More than once, I found myself cupping my hands over my mouth in a gasp at the end of a scene, after the QTEs had ceased. I’m not sure if another game has ever made me do that before.

I would like to label Heavy Rain a success. It’s a gamble, and no doubt an experiment on Sony’s part, testing the waters to see if there’s even a market for this type of experience. Despite the often questionable voice acting, the gaping plot holes, and the grating number of unanswered questions, not to mention the frustratingly unresponsive movement controls and occasional glitches, Heavy Rain sucked me in like few experiences have. I hope everyone who finds the concept intriguing gives Heavy Rain a chance. Quantic Dream may have just invented the next big genre.

Images from http://www.heavyrainps3.com

Past Deadline Review: “Uncharted 2: Among Thieves”: this game is a movie

Naughty Dog’s PS3 exclusive adventure Uncharted 2 is on so many 2009 game of the year lists for good reason. It’s a game that, unlike many, is meant for the masses, and everything about it is done exceptionally well. My girlfriend hasn’t really been enamored with a video game since 1996′s Tomb Raider, but she’s enjoyed both Uncharted titles, just like Sony’s commercial said she would.

The commercial only tells half the real story, though; When the guy leaves the room, his girlfriend picks up the controller.

Nothing is more mainstream than movies, and Uncharted 2 is the most cinematically produced game I’ve ever played. But what exactly is it about Uncharted 2 that’s made comparing it to a movie practically a cliche? For one, the voice acting is the best I’ve ever heard in a game by far, especially Nolan North’s; the few cringe worthy moments in the script are caused by cheesy one liners rather than poor acting. The set pieces are huge, and the plot twists and turns wildly throughout.

Massive praise has already been rightfully heaped on Uncharted 2, so I’ll instead pose a question: Does its cinematic nature come at a price? In a 90 minute movie, one or two plot twists suffice. In a normal 12 hour game, the same is true, because the story to action ratio is much greater; the bulk of most games is spent shooting things, not watching the cardboard characters awkwardly interact. In Uncharted 2, however, the plot twists and dramatic one-handed rescues of about three movies are jammed into one extra long narrative arc. At least the characters aren’t one dimensional; far from it, in fact.

I can't remember if Indie ever took out a helicopter

But for such a visually realistic game, Uncharted 2 asks players to stretch their suspension of disbelief awfully far. When Sean Connery gets shot in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indie has to fetch a magic cup just to save him. Likewise, when Uncharted 2‘s Nathan Drake gets shot in a cut scene, he’ll be bedridden in a Tibetan mountain village for three days. During normal gameplay, though, he soaks up bullets like a magnetic sponge. Necessary, I know, but inconsistencies like that irk me nonetheless, and even detract from my immersion.

In the end, though, these gripes really don’t take away from the awesome technical achievement and, even more importantly, the joy of playing this great game. The graphics are absolutely beautiful and the controls, gunplay and physics have all been massively improved since Uncharted the first. Scaling walls, statues and just about everything else is intuitive and fun. Though there could have been more weapons, I enjoyed the variety of those present. The scarcity of certain ammo types added an extra tactical element; you really have to make those five sniper bullets count, because you’re not about to get any more. Stealth kills, especially those executed when hanging from a ledge or crouched behind cover, are neck-snappingly satisfying, and add another strategic aspect to combat. The environments are often massive in scale and the campaign, at its best, is nothing short of riveting.

this chapter is a pain in the ass, seriously. but in a good way

Unlike Uncharted the first, Uncharted 2 has multiplayer. Online multiplayer. Sure, it was probably only added to prolong the life of the game and discourage used game sales, but it’s surprisingly robust.

There are playlists, matchmaking, ranks, a variety of game modes, and everything else you’d expect, plus a few bonuses. Racking up kills and completing objectives earns you cash that can be spent unlocking new skins or “boosters,” Uncharted‘s version of Modern Warfare’s perks.

Online matches play more like Halo than Modern Warfare, though. Tactical options like Modern Warfare‘s claymores or cold-blooded perk are MIA, and gameplay is centered around running and gunning, cover and teamwork. However, Uncharted lacks the power weapon factor of Halo, making camping less rewarding. Yeah, there’s still a rocket launcher, but I never felt like it was being abused. Grenades are often irksome, but everyone has those, so no one’s at a disadvantage there.

One thing that didn’t become evident until I was a few hours deep in online matchmaking was how heavily the vertical aspects of character movement factor into the matches. If you’re getting shot, climb over a wall and hop down the other side, or hang off a ledge and wait in ambush for someone to run by. Climbing, hanging and leaping really set Uncharted apart from its vertically impaired contemporaries.

online multiplayer is surprisingly robust and full of features

Co-op modes include objective based missions and elimination rounds similar to Halo 3: ODST‘s Firefight and Gears of War 2‘s Horde, which pit you and a few teammates against continuous waves of enemies. Uncharted 2 even provides co-op matchmaking, unlike ODST. Co-op elimination game types are, at their best, adrenaline-filled bouts of teamwork, strategy and sweet desperation. They’ve been cropping up a lot lately, and I’m hoping they become a standard mode in online shooters.

Despite my initial skepticism, Uncharted 2‘s multiplayer quickly sucked me in. I never felt clueless, even at the outset, and my only complaint is the lack of splitscreen. At this point, though, that’s really more of a complaint with the entire industry than with any particular game, and this isn’t a review of the Playstation Network, so I’m not going to bother talking about how much that sucks.

So was Uncharted 2 really the best game of 2009? I don’t know, I didn’t play every game in 2009 (chuckle). Regardless, you shouldn’t take my petty complaints with the storytelling too seriously; everything considered, Uncharted 2 is the closest thing yet to a must have for PS3 owners.

Some images taken from http://www.unchartedthegame.com/U2AT/.