It’s entirely in keeping with Platinum Games’ devil-may-care attitude. For years, we’ve written off Japanese studios when it comes to first- and third-person shooters: always playing catch-up to their American counterparts, never quite delivering. But Shinji Mikami was never going to meekly push his team’s debut shooter centre stage with a deferential bow and an apologetic glance, pleading: “Might this be good enough, Yankee-Doodle-sensei?” It’s just not the Platinum way.
What is, you ask? Well. You kidnap Master Chief, that icon of contemporary Western shooters, that representative of all that is strong and successful about the white man’s videogame and its gun-toting alpha-male hero. You strip him naked and throw him into the alleyway behind your Osaka studio, keeping only his clothes. Why just his clothes? Because you don’t need the man. Master Chief himself is just a cipher. It’s his armour that holds the iconographic value.
And once you have the armour, this suit that embodies the great American videogame? Well, then, you do what the Japanese do best. You mod the f*** out of it.
When Sam Gideon emerges in the Augmented Reaction Suit (ARS) 18 months later, it’s clear combat has, once again, evolved. The round edges from the time it belonged to Halo’s hero are still recognisable, but the exoskeleton now bears fifty booster flaps, whirring transistors and other bells and electric whistles.
Sure, Halo: Reach gives you a jet pack. But Vanquish gives you the ability to slide 40 yards on your knees along concrete, ducking through the legs of a giant bipedal robot while firing rockets at point-blank range into its groin. Vanquish lets you shoot individual enemy missiles out of the air like you’re knocking apples from a low-hanging branch. Vanquish lets you speed up and slow down time at the touch of a button, lurching forwards and backward as you set the pace of war like a mop-haired conductor directing an orchestra of bullets. Vanquish changes everything.
Rome wasn’t built in a day. It was built in 365. While the multiplayer component to Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood has been in development for years now, the single-player game has been pieced together in just 12 months by much the same team as built the second game. And how they’ve used that time. When you first step into the Roman colosseum, it’s another Damascene moment. The sense of awesome scale and craftsmanship that’s gone into recreating this ancient monument is comparable to the first time you rode over the crest of the hill and saw Jerusalem laid out on the horizon of the first game.
It’s in ruins, of course. By Renaissance Rome the colosseum was a tourist attraction, much as it is today, the sand once stained by the blood of so many martyred Christians now overgrown with tall grass, the tiered seating worn and crumbled by time and the footfall of a hundred thousand sightseers. The result is a strange feeling of virtual tourism within tourism, as you marvel at the hustle and bustle of 16th Century Italy and marvel again at the remains of a Rome 1200 years older still visible through the cracks of the Catholic architecture now built upon it.
The year’s work hasn’t all been architectural, though. Brotherhood opens moments after the second game closed, implying that, for its writers, the story of Ezio Auditore da Firenze was planned in full long before Ubisoft Montreal split it into two separate games. But the game systems that the story and setting dress have been tweaked and added to in exciting, meaningful ways that run deeper than the tweaks to the combat system.
The Brotherhood of the title is more than a narrative congregation, though it is that too. At the start of the game Ezio arrives at the Villa Auditore from Florence still a young man. He has a boastful swagger, the sort of braggadocio any twenty-something who had single-handedly thwarted a circle of Templars and confronted the Pope within the Vatican itself would exhibit. Moments later, his lovemaking interrupted, his villa decimated by cannon fire, his friends and family dead and his torso sporting a deep wound, he escapes a grown man, finally understanding that a war that cannot be won single-handedly.
Behind the third rock to the left of the fourth tree, halfway up the tallest peak in the northernmost tip of Dartmoor in the south West of England, there sits a steel box. Its bright orange paint has been chipped by wind, rain, time and the fingers of victorious explorers.
Inside the box there’s a bottle of water, a pencil and a waterproof lined notepad. Open the notepad and you’ll find, in neat rows, a list of the names of every person who has found the box, a calling card record of all the treasure hunters who made it this far.
Across Dartmoor’s picturesque miles of weathered hills and heather-filled valleys hundreds of these letterboxes sit hidden behind clumps of gorse, inside crevices in a rock-face and behind waterfalls.
Amateur game designers put them here, although of course, they would never describe themselves as such. The first one was hidden in 1854.
Letterboxing is a rambler’s meta-game, one that has been in existence for a century-and-a-half.
Originally intended as an interesting game for children out walking the moors with their families, it has, over time developed into a widespread hobby across the region, with ‘clans’ of walkers buying guides that offer clues to their locations as they try to catch ‘em all.
The first time you hear about the existence of these letterboxes, either through word of mouth or by stumbling across one by accident, the entire experience of walking on the moor is altered. Before, pleasure was derived from the physical act, from the fresh air that fills yours lungs as your face is lashed by the wind, from the birdsong that tickles your ears or the plain aesthetic wonder of the hills that roll long miles around you.
But now? Now you view your environment through a different lens. Every rock becomes a potential veil to another piece of treasure, each tree the-x-that-maybe-marks-the-spot, each tor another mountain to climb in search of a possible prize.
While letterboxes are sparsely distributed, sometimes miles apart, the thrill of discovering one drives you on to the next peak in the hope that you can outwit the hider, and write your name in the pages of the book the box conceals.
The appeal of letterboxing will be familiar to the contemporary gamer. Video games have always held secrets for the inquisitive: bonus coins hidden behind fake walls, extra lives tucked away behind remote pillars and even, in the case of Symphony of the Night, an entire extra game nestled away at its conclusion.
The benefits of collectibles are various. Doubtless, they encourage the player to explore the world the designer has created with redoubled attention, taking time out of pursuing the primary objective in order to simply explore. In the same way that letterboxing encourages curious walkers to view their environment with fresh eyes, so the premise of a hidden bonus asks the player to view the game world not as a corridor down which they must race to the finish line, but a world filled with secret trinkets.
For the designer they offer a simple way to ask the player to take their time with the world, perhaps stopping to stare at a view or piece of scenery that they might otherwise have passed by, a subtle device to demand attention.
But with the advent of Achievements and Trophies, the art of the collectible shifted. Now designers had a way to formalize the art of finding secrets and catalog the player’s success and failures in finding them. In the 16-bit era, secrets were just that: undisclosed bonuses to be shared in hushed tones in the playground, or exchanged in furtive text at the back of magazines.
Today every game pause menu lists all of the treasures in the game and how many you have found, or, perhaps more pressingly, how many you have missed. In this way, the collectible has been elevated from an interesting curio, tucked in a game as an unspoken reward for the inquisitive, to a persistent nag on the player’s attention.
Two games released in the last few weeks, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow and Front Mission Evolved, boast end of level results screens that taunt the player with records of how many hidden items and collectibles were missed, undermining that sense of success and progress one should feel when completing a level. ‘You did quite well’, they seem to suggest, leaving the player with that depressing feeling of unfinished business, the very same that they likely dived into a video game in order to escape.
The act of cataloging the player’s successes and failures in collectibles is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s important to state to the player how many secrets and collectibles are left to find in the game. By knowing that there exist 150-odd letterboxes scattered across Dartmoor, the letterbox hunters have a clear goal in trying to find each and every one. But the difference is that, when letterboxing, finding letterboxes is the only goal in the game.
In video games, collectibles are, almost without exception, a sideshow to the main challenge. In placing such heavy emphasis on collectibles, either through end of level records or achievements, this side goal is promoted to main attraction, one that runs concurrently to the main ‘quest’.
Likewise, by introducing systemic benefits to collectibles in recent times, such as the character upgrades in Crackdown, or bonus experience points in Enslaved, players feel as though they need to be finding collectibles in order to progress and, that sense of delight in finding something wonderful and unexpected dissipates as the treasure hunt becomes one that feels as though it’s integral to survival and success.
This introduces a tension to narrative-led games. In Uncharted 2 or Modern Warfare 2, for example, how often are you being propelled forward by the narrative, characters screaming at each other to ‘Move! Move! Move!’, only to have the nagging feeling that, if you were to ignore their orders and check behind that tree, or in that office side room you might find a bonus piece of treasure, or collectible dog tag for your efforts. In this way, game system and game story work at odds with one another, introducing yet more tension and confusion to play.
Perhaps then, there needs to be a simplification of the collectible, a return to a time when the full extent of the reward for finding some hidden object lay in its raw, joyful discovery, not in the benefits it bestowed upon your player.
This breathing space allows the simple pleasure of finding something unexpected and hidden to once again flourish. Perhaps the answer really does lie behind the third rock to the left of the fourth tree, halfway up the tallest peak in the northernmost tip of Dartmoor in the south West of England.
In part, the problem’s with the title. The Front Mission name has always been synonymous with the Japanese tactical RPG: a futuristic robot version of chess, all giant bipedal tanks blowing the limbs from one another with ponderous missile attacks planned in between sips of tea and head-scratching.
In 1997, when Squaresoft first tried its hand at a real-time version of the game – giving players direct control of the Wanzers and a cockpit-eye view of the action – it dubbed the release Front Mission: Alternative. The title made clear that the game was an experimental spin-off, an alternative for those who find thrills more readily in split-second evasive sidesteps from a hail of rocket fire than the statistical dice rolls with which the series made its name.
Front Mission Evolved, though? That implies to the series faithful that the old way of playing is obsolete and that every TRPG, if it dreams hard enough and makes friends with enough Western developers, can one day be an Armored Core clone. Before the game’s even begun, it has alienated long-standing Front Mission fans, suggesting that their series has switched genre with no plans to look back.
Square Enix, however, isn’t too interested in Front Mission’s existing fans. Sales for the series have been so lacklustre in the West that the publisher left the fifth entry in Japan. No, Front Mission Evolved is gunning for a brave new audience with this Double Helix-developed title: one to whom a mecha-themed cross between Modern Warfare and Forza Motorsport should, in their estimation, prove irresistible.
You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here.
This is boring, but the reasons for my weariness, perhaps a little less so. At the start of September I took up a position as European Editor of Gamasutra. For those of you who do not work in the videogame industry, Gamasutra is a website written for the people who make and publish videogames. It’s the online presence of Game Developer magazine in the U.S. and is elder brother to GameSetWatch, for whom I wrote a number of columns and pieces of game-related fiction in the past.
The site is well-respected in America, and having freelanced for them on numerous occasions in the past, it’s a pleasure to be working alongside the super-talented team there in an on-going capacity.
I waited a month to mention the appointment here because… well, because I am tired and my word teats have run dry. But also because, that lead time has meant I have some neat things up there which I can now point you to.
My work for Gamasutra is in addition to my other regular commitments. I’m still active over at Eurogamer as one of their core reviewers and I contribute to Edge magazine as and when they need me. I also continue to work at Flash game developer, Littleloud, albeit in a part-time capacity now.
Finally, in July I signed the contract for my first book on videogames. The book has the working title, ‘A History of Gaming in 151 Video Games’ (an idea I borrowed wholesale from Radio 4′s ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’).
Terry Stokes, art editor on Edge back when I first started writing for the magazine, is designing the book. He’s my favourite graphic designer working in games-related publishing so, even if everything I write is stupid and wrong, it least it will be stupid, wrong and achingly pretty.
50 pages in and progress is hard won, but nevertheless rewarding. My deadline is mid-January, with a tentative release date of Summer 2011. I’ll post some excerpts as and when my editor says that’s permissible.
Finally! I’ve been nominated in the category of Best Writer (Online) in the British Game Media Awards this year, a category filled with writers whose work I respect a great deal, including Christian Donlan, who is comfortably in my top three favourites working in the field right now. The ceremony (?) takes place in London on Thursday week.
So, yes. Tired. But not defeated. As another of my close friends and influences leaves game journalism/ writing this week, it’s hard not to wonder whether the brightest and best always move on to pastures new.
But still, I’m doing everything I can to stay here. Videogames are ridiculous and those who devote their time and energy to writing about them are more ridiculous still. And yet, this is our medium. And what a privilege to examine why games matter, inspite of, and perhaps even because of their ridiculousness. I want to get better at doing that. This is not a stepping stone.
Writing is a Nintendog’s life, but it’s the only one worth living.
Water, that most precious of all life’s commodities, is the highest prize of virtual worlds too. Land, in its immovable dependency, has always been a straightforward task for game artists. Water, by contrast, is a creature of ten thousand different forms. So water has become an artist’s calling card and a benchmark of computer performance. Turn on a tap in a videogame and you can tell a great deal about its world, the men and women who built it and the hardware that fires it. If the water’s good, chances are the same care and attention runs through the rest of the experience.
Judged on this asset alone, Hydrophobia represents a high bar for the medium. As with BioShock, this is a game world straining to hold back the sea and failing. The Queen of the World, a giant ocean liner city which finds itself the stage for a terrorist attack at the game’s opening, is riddled with holes: leaks that cause water to drip, stream, slosh and wash about its insides.
Shoot a barrel and the resulting explosion will cause a frothy wave to billow out around it, transparent undulations rippling off in all directions. Open a glass door to a side room in which the water is at a higher level than in corridor outside and the wave of displacement gushes out with all the credibility of a tsunami. It’s impressive and, thanks to some concerted attempts to integrate it into the game’s puzzles and mechanics, it’s interesting too.
There’s little time to stop and stare at the fluid realism, however. Kate Wilson, the improbably acrobatic security engineer whom you control, is propelled through the game with all the urgency of a high-pressure hose. Your immediate fight is against physics. The water level changes about Kate constantly, her sprints morphing to swims and back again. Wrestling Kate through the forces that buffet her is a challenge nearly matched by the one presented by the hyperactive camera, never comfortable in the tight shafts that define the game’s environments and therefore requiring constant attention.
But, camera aside, this is not an un-enjoyable battle. Developer Dark Energy Digital smartly derives puzzles from changing water levels in rooms to access higher air shafts and tunnels and – at this fundamental conceptual level – should be praised for the efforts made to ensure water is more than a gimmick.
The problem, then, is everything else: the lacklustre combat, the imprecise platforming, the lack of meaningful feedback, the repetitive hunting for keys to locked doors, the over-fussy map, the intolerable cover system and the poor signposting that will leave even the most attentive player floundering for direction and purpose. These factors frustrate, pulling the game time and again under the high mark established by its water.
