City 16

There’s a room in VVVVVV, an absolute shit of a room, that tasks your character with getting a shiny collectible trinket on the other side of a small box. It looks a little like this:

After the multiple hours it took to complete this task I grew to be thankful for its existence.

“Really Phil, it took you multiple hours to get to the other side of a small box?”

Yes, it did. Like I said the room is a complete fucking bastard of a twat. As you can see, we still have something of a fractious relationship. You see, in VVVVVV, there is no jump button. Instead you reverse gravity, flying up into the air until you reach the roof, at which point you can revert gravity back and start plummeting to meet the ground. As you can see from the screenshot, this room has no roof. Instead it has this:

Like I said, Bastard. Like I also said, I’m grateful for its existence. Why? Because it reminded me that I don’t just take on ridiculously difficult challenges because there’s an achievement involved. I’m also prepared to do them when there’s absolutely no discernible reward whatsoever.

Death.

That might not sound like much but it’s an important distinction. My previous attempt at a high difficulty/low margin-of-error feat of finger dexterity was completing Trine’s last level on very-hard with no-one dying, a task which nabbed a ‘Better Than Developers!‘ trophy. All well and good, and more than a little satisfying on completion, but that satisfaction is tempered by the question, “did I just go through all that for an achievement?” Despite the number I’ve managed to accumulate I guess I’ve still not decided if I’m OK with the whole achievements thing.

Death.

Veni, Vidi, Vici, which seems to have become the shorthand name for this challenge room in VVVVVV, reminded me that actually I just like these trial and error based high-difficulty challenges. It’s the reason I took to the Skate series of games and the reason I’m currently enjoying the WiiWare game Bit.Trip Runner. Perhaps it took me so long to come to this realisation because you just don’t see this style very often in games today. As the industry becomes more profitable challenge is left behind in favour of accessibility, because God help us if a publisher’s latest AAA title is beyond some perceived key demographic.

Death.

That last sentence probably sounded more vitriolic than intended. More accessible games are a brilliant thing because, for the most part, developers are terrible at difficulty. I’ve been playing Darksiders recently and came close to giving up on it for good after encountering the first proper boss fight. In the tradition of boss fights in games (which incidentally are all terrible and need to just fuck off for good) the key to success was in realising which of my character’s array of offensive and defensive manoeuvres could be combined against the boss’ varying attack patterns. In a way boss design harks back to the worst adventure puzzles and defeating one is reminiscent of figuring out that honey on the cat hair makes a moustache, except if you don’t realise it in 20 seconds a giant demon bat will scorch your bollocks off with fireballs.

Death.

Of course that’s just sudden and inexplicable difficulty spikes. When hidden systems in the game can mean the difference between success and failure the frustration levels go through the roof. Take Split/Second, a game which increases the difficulty of rival racers the better you do. The upshot is there’s no way at actually being good at the game, because early success just sets you up for failure towards the end. The general rule of thumb with Split/Second is that, if you’re doing well, the game will be decided at the last corner at which point an opponent will always – always – overtake you. Unless you’re able to destroy the car at that point you will lose and a poor defenseless controller may lose its life against a wall.

Death.

What Veni, Vidi, Vici, and VVVVVV as a whole – what all games that can successfully capture that addictive one-more-go feel of defeating a seemingly insurmountable obstacle – understand is that to be enjoyable the difficulty should be transparent. It gives you six screens that you have to learn forwards and back – or more accurately upwards and down – and then link together in one glorious and flawless run. That is the sole source of difficulty. There is nothing added that would suggest to the player that failure is anything other than their own fault. It even removes the annoyances of the era of gaming that it evokes; there aren’t limited lives and the checkpointing is generous. With no penalty for death all that remains is the challenge at hand.

Death.

And what a challenge. It’s both a beauty and a bastard. You have to learn each room sequentially, learning just how much to manoeuvre left and right, where the key apex points are to swing to safety and, at times, take seemingly counter intuitive actions to line up for the next screen. After a while your brain understands the route and all that’s left is for muscle memory to kick in and let the fingers learn it. At this point it’s best to let your mind wander while the rest of you gets on with it. While navigating an especially tricky section I drafted this sentence, including this clause here where I mention how I’m mentioning this clause. On reflection it wasn’t a great sentence, but it got me through the top flip down to 5th screen so I’m leaving it in out of respect to my past self.

Each section becomes exponentially harder, as it requires navigation of every preceding screen before you can even practice what’s ahead, but the slightest hint of progression is a joyous occasion that drives you to get even further. In fact, the most soul-destroying moments are when you suddenly lose control of all co-ordination and can’t get past the second screen… dark times. After a couple of hours I was back at the bottom, at which point I killed myself on the right-hand side spikes in a foolish effort to not land on the wrong side. It should have been demoralising, but I was just so happy to be within reach.

Success! Shortly followed by death.

Just be aware that if you try it before you go to sleep you will have that music stuck in your head all night.

Red Dead Redemption feels like the complete opposite. The world is huge (and feels even bigger because your main method of transportation has exactly 1 horse power) but largely barren. It means the interactions you do come across – and there are plenty of them, from travellers in need of help through to wannabe gunslingers looking to make a name for themselves by duelling the best in the west – feel more meaningful. They’re no less scripted, but the sense of community born out of a place where the environment is deadlier than the inhabitants lends these small world events a degree of authenticity. Even now, after logging about 70 hours with the game, I feel a small pang of guilt when I ignore a man whose wife has been kidnapped to hunt bears.

His survival chance decreased dramatically after I actually learned how to duel.

As I drew closer to my objective I let my guard slip and, without warning, the growl of a cougar and a flashing red screen let me know I’d been careless. Luckily it didn’t land the second, fatal, attack. After I’d killed it I had to pause the game, catch my breath and make a cup of tea. Cougars, man. Fucking cougars.

Seriously: fucking cougars

Elsewhere the story is somewhat of a mixed bag. Each character you can do missions for hangs around a little too long. After your 4th or 5th long horse ride with the same person retelling you their philosophy of the west you start to wish the character didn’t refuse to fire at friendly NPCs. Even Marston himself runs out of interesting ways to tell people he’s trying to save his family far before he stops telling people he’s trying to save his family.

"Hey, John. Have I told you about how I'm a grumpy old curmudgeon trying to bring a little law and order to my town? No, you're probably right, now isn't the time."

More successful than the story missions are the strangers you encounter throughout your travels. These are essentially narrative-vignettes about people trying to make their way in the region; writers looking to capture the romanticism of the era, producers looking to forge a new age of cinema and even just concerned spouses looking for their loved ones. The first ones you come across will all too often result in the stranger turning out to be mental, to the point where you start trying to second guess each person’s particular deviancy, but as the game goes on you’ll find some genuinely interesting characters that you’ll encounter in multiple places throughout the game. Particularly worthy of mention is the ‘I Know You’ strand, featuring an unknown man with a penchant for testing your moral fibre. It’s one of the most intriguing mysteries of the game and its resolution ties-in brilliantly with the final cutscene.

So, a couple of story niggles aside, pretty much perfect then? Not quite. Red Dead Redemption is unusual in recent Rockstar games in that many of the core systems at work are non-diegetic. Take the fast-travel; you just need to set up a camp and with a couple of clicks you can travel instantly to any location you’ve previously visited. Bizarrely the game also includes an in-world fast travel system with coaches that can be hired. Pay for a coach or move a few feet away and travel for free? Unless you’re deliberately trying to preserve the atmosphere it’s not much of a decision.

Marston contemplates the mystery of the fast-travel fire.

Death is handled in a similarly blunt manner with the game displaying a hilariously over-sized DEAD screen and reloading the last auto-save. There are plenty of doctors dwelling in major settlements so why not just have your character wake up there à la GTA? Also, and this is getting really picky, there’s really no excuse for your character to die the moment he steps in a body of water. How much this stuff bothers you is probably dependent on how much you buy into the atmosphere woven by the setting, visuals and audio. In case it’s not clear yet I bought into it a lot, much to the consternation of my flatmate who kept reminding me that I could fast-travel instead of taking 15 minutes to ride my horse into Mexico. I hadn’t forgotten Chris, I was just ignoring it.

TL;DR version: Red Dead Redemption, it’s better than GTA.

There’s a problem at the heart of the current generation of Rockstar open world games that is perhaps best summarised in a post on the Gausswerks: Design Reboot blog,

The actions of the player character in GTA4 can best be described as the actions of two separate characters, one who reflects the player’s decisions during normal gameplay (run over a sidewalk full of people, kill a bunch of cops), and one that is unilaterally imposed through scripted sequences. (Look at Niko as he shows that he loves Kate. Look at Niko as he feels bad about crime.) The game privileges the “choices” of the second over the first, even when they’re in direct contradiction.

Essentially the Niko of the game’s narrative – an ex-soldier still haunted by his actions in the war and unhappy that he has to continue to kill and steal for America’s criminal underbelly in order to carve out a peaceful existence for himself and his cousin – doesn’t correspond to the willfully destructive Niko of my time between cutscenes.

Aww, he's a sweety.

It’s unfair to suggest Rockstar are solely responsible for this as a factor in any cutscene-driven narrative game is that, once that cutscene ends, the game has to give control of their protagonist back to the player – an agent of chaos. My Gordon Freeman smacked friendly NPCs in the face with a crowbar in Half-Life 2 just to see their reaction and my Solid Snake (and there’s a phrase you can rarely use innocently in a sentence) tortured guards in Metal Gear Solid 2 because he enjoyed their hobbling animation. Neither of them reconcile with what we’re told about the characters through their respective narratives.

Perhaps, then, the reason the Rockstar examples are so conspicuous is because of how extremely it pushes in both directions. Their recent games have tried to push the depth of the story on offer, rising above parodying movie genres to become their own critique of American culture. Where Vice City’s Tommy Vercetti was an even twattier version of Scarface; GTA4′s Niko Bellic is written to elicit sympathy and understanding from the player in order to tell their (admittedly over-the-top) tale of an immigrant resorting to a life of crime. Conversely this is a Grand Theft Auto game and, while the ridiculously cartoonish nature of the violence has been dialled down a notch, it still enables a cacophony of violence and mayhem. Between cutscenes my player-controlled Niko will plough his car through legions of pedestrians, murder hot-dog vendors that refused to serve him because he’d jostled them and nudged passers-by into the sea because they’re pathetic little ragdoll animations made it funny. He also shows an alarming disregard for his own safety. In fact he acts almost as if he were a videogame character in a digitised playground of guns, cars and explosives.

Don't worry, I'm sure he was really conflicted before he set this petrol station on fire.

Here’s the thing. This protagonist gap never bothered me in GTA4. It was clear where the Niko of story-led narrative ended and the Niko of player-led super fun times began. The tonal shift may have been extremely blatant, but it’s exactly that blatancy that makes it so easy for the player to mentally shift between the two positions. When faced with a late game decision I chose to spare the life of the man Niko had been searching for because it felt like what the story-Niko would have done. The player-Niko would have probably thrown a grenade in between the two of them and then jumped at the point of explosion just to see how far across the road he’d fly.

In Red Dead Redemption, however, a similar disconnect does bother me. It bothers me a lot.

It wouldn’t if I was playing Red Dead Redemption in the same way played GTA. If I happily went about killing, stealing and lassoing characters, suffering the trivial consequences of my anti-social actions, the game would have unfolded with the same disconnect described above. The character: a former outlaw, troubled by his past and with his own personal morality code, blackmailed into bringing his former brothers-in-arms to justice. The player: attempting to create fun through an ever-changing series of events pushing the limit of what the game will allow like a child with ADHD. Bizarre? Sure. A big deal? Not really.

Okay, so I did do this a lot. But otherwise I've been good.

My problem is that I’m not playing the game like that. I’m actually playing the character like Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name. Ostensibly someone who is out for himself yet has a tendency to get embroiled in other people’s problems and usually resolves them in a way that satisfies his own code of honour. For a long while my role-play matched perfectly with the intentions and attitude of the character I was controlling. It was the first time in a Rockstar open-world game since Bully that I felt my actions actually matched with the character shown in the cutscenes.

Then I arrived in Mexico. As part of John Marston, the player character’s, search for his former comrades he starts to work for both the army and the peasant uprising that opposes them. For me it mirrored the set up to Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars. Eastwood rides into a town ruled by two warring factions, the Rojos, a local gang, and the Baxters, the Sheriff’s family. Eastwood’s stated plan is “The Rojos on one side of the town, the Baxters on the other, and me right in the middle.” However, it doesn’t take long before he’s clearly siding against the Rojos because of a young mother they kidnapped over a gambling debt they claimed her husband owed them. In Redemption, Marston stays in the middle of the two warring factions of the region throughout the majority of that section of the game.

This is despite the fact that the army is shown to be seemingly taking entire villages of women for the soldiers’ pleasure. Sure, this being a Rockstar game, the rebel leader is shown to be a vain, womanizing, delusional figure but, and this is the key difference, he’s not a fucking rapist. The set up is so ridiculous that in one mission for the army I’m using a gatling gun to cut down hundreds of rebels assaulting a train full of army supplies and then, a couple of missions later, I’m murdering soldiers guarding a train full of army supplies. During one mission, in which I was asked to torch the houses of rebels I thought “no, I don’t want to do this.” It was the opposite of the GTA problem, completely at odds with my envisioned character and, as far as I could tell, the depiction of John Marston throughout the rest of the game. Unfortunately it’s a linear story path. Unless I completed the mission I couldn’t continue the story. I kept waiting for the moment I got to choose to betray one side or another but it never came, the story plays out the same way, without any choice, no matter how you choose to play it.

The Rebel Leader: Twat, not rapist.

Redemption features a rudimentary morality system entitled Honour (or, I suppose, Honor.) The Mexican campaign betrays people on either end of the scale. Those playing the thieving, murderous bastards (the GTA4 method) can’t choose to ultimately side with the army in reward for riches. Those that have chosen to help people and stay on the right side of the law have to do an uncomfortable amount of missions doing dirty work for the army at the expense of the impoverished peasants. The only genuine surprise from these missions is that one side chooses not to turn on you.

I probably helped this soldier two missions ago. Now I will shoot him in the face.

The explanation given for the set-up is that Marston’s family is at risk unless he brings the outlaws he used to run with to justice. Except the game never earns the right to have Marston go to such extremes. The player never sees Marston with his family at the beginning of the game (I’ve not completed the story yet so don’t know if he does later on) so it’s unreasonable to expect the player to care about them throughout when the only connection we have to them is Marston’s exposition to other characters. I’m not saying I need the protagonist to be a Freeman-like blank slate for player insertion, I’m fine with my characters having their own distinct view of events, but using backstory to motivate the character to do things at odds with his own code of honour, as well as the code of honour implemented through the game’s own systems, cheapens the experience for the player.

I’m interested in hearing your take on this, assuming you have one. Many within the games industry seem to now favour the approach of emergent narrative of games such as Just Cause 2 and Far Cry 2 over more traditional stories told through cutscenes. I’m all for this, especially in respect to the ridiculous nature of Just Cause 2, but I don’t think it should completely negate traditional narrative methods especially as Red Dead Redemption is, all things considered, a brilliant game. After all, I wouldn’t have had such a negative reaction to that set of missions if it weren’t.

Non trovo alcuna gioia in questo, ma non c’e altro modo.

Assassin’s Creed 2 is, undoubtedly, a much better game than its predecessor. That’s not to say it doesn’t have problems of its own. Essentially I’m nitpicking here, holding the game accountable for things that, truth be told, are part and parcel of its genre. The difference is that AC2 was so much the game I’d hoped for, and not the game I’d expected, that the few things that didn’t quite work bothered me far more than the collective mess of problems that usually plague open world games (hi Mercenaries 2). These, then, are those.

Tutorials

As someone who almost never RTFMs I have no desire to criticise tutorials in general. A quick overview of the controls and basic mechanics during the first mission is pretty much essential as games become increasingly convoluted. AC2 gives you a quick run down of the controls and basic mechanics during its first mission. It then continues to do so for what seems like the first half of the fucking game. Every single thing you can do in the game, from collecting feathers to beating up cheating husbands to using prostitutes (not in that way), has a main story mission attached to introduce it. The ceaseless parade of engineered scenarios explaining the use of these mechanics soon becomes tiring as you long to be let free to cause havoc your own way.

Late in the game you’re given a pistol-like attachment to your hidden blade and the subsequent mission, an actual main target assassination, is set up in such a way as to force you to use it. When you’re wasting a proper story-based assassination, the whole point of the game let’s not forget, to introduce (and perhaps justify) a weapon you’ll probably never use again then you’ve got a problem.

The truly egregious aspect of all this is how simple the solution is:

1. Display a text box showing what button activates your new weapon or move, or give a brief description of the mechanic. The game does this already.
2. Create an Animus based tutorial that the player can access to practice outside of the main game-world. Given that the game’s plot is centred around a man experiencing his ancestor’s life through a computer simulation there is a ready-made logical excuse for this. Even the first game did it in its opening tutorial.
3. Make it fucking optional.

The 'How to chase things' level. I'm not kidding.

Combat

Last post I praised the improved assassinating. This post I’m going to criticise the general combat. I’m even going to overlook how ridiculous it is that a game made in this day and age still feels the need to surround the character with enemies and only have them attack one at a time. The real problem with the combat is, ironically given the plot, how artificial it feels.

Of course the same can be said for the freerunning mechanic in which you just press the run button and let the magic happen. The difference is that when freerunning you’re constantly course correcting, looking for viable paths over rooftops, jumping, grabbing and stabbing the occasional archer, all at speed. Your own actions may only basically respond to what’s happening on screen, and there are definitely moments when it all breaks down and Ezio’s left stuck at a ledge, but the rate at which you process and enact on the visual information gives a feeling of fluidity that, mostly, matches what happens on screen.

The problem with the combat is not that its frustrating, it’s actually so easy as to be laughable, but that it’s just sterile. Every attack has a one button counter. Most enemies are taken down with a simple press of the counter-attack button at the right moment (and the margin of error for the counter-attack timing seems a lot more forgiving than the first game). For a while the heavily armoured enemies look like a problem until you realise you can just switch to unarmed combat and counter them to take their weapon and, usually, kill them in one move. The attacks from each enemy are so spaced out within a fight that there’s no sense of panic or frantic tactical assessment, just pressing the right button at the right time until, eventually, everyone’s dead. It’s not a battle, it’s fucking Parappa the Rapper with fancy visuals.

You gotta believe!

Also, it’s fucking ridiculous that a game made in this day and age still feels the need to surround the character with enemies and only have them attack one at a time.

Collectible Execution

To be fair most of the collectibles, the glyphs for example, are no problem and, as I said previously, there’s actually a fairly compelling reason to go after them. The feathers, though… Those stupid bloody feathers. You know what, the feathers are actually worse than the collectibles in most games because of the fact there’s a story related reason to find them. It means you might actually be tempted to go looking for the blasted things. Every other group of collectibles has a system attached that tells you where they are. Buildings that contain glyphs, for instance, are marked on your database which means your search of each one is limited to one small area. Not so with the feathers, which could be anywhere in the game world. You’re told how many are in each district but the districts are pretty large and the feathers, unsurprisingly, are quite small.

I’m going to do something I never thought I’d do and lift a suggested improvement from the last Prince of Persia game and its light seeds. Instead of making the player comb the game world for hidden objects, make them blindingly obvious but hard to get to. The developers of AC2 clearly think the game would work as a platformer, as proven by the surprisingly enjoyable tomb missions. If they had made the feathers into mini platforming puzzles, asking the player to figure the route and series of moves required to reach them, then the whole affair would have been a lot less laborious.

There are 100 feathers in the game. What the fuck are Italians doing to the birds?

The Present Day

Yeah… Those sections in the present day (or near future, I can’t really remember) still don’t work for me.

You get to do more this time and I loved the fact that the platforming, and even fighting, in these segments happens completely without any on-screen display (completely logical outside of the Animus yet so many games would have chickened out) but the story is complete shit. This time it all goes a bit Mayan, which isn’t at all an overused plot device in the run up to 2012. Worse still, the ending actually detracts from any closure to Ezio’s storyline who, you may remember, was the character I was actually fucking invested in.

Desmond can't quite get past Lucy's uncanny valley.

Hmm, all that was far more of a tirade then I’d expected to make. Still, with expectations dutifully lowered hopefully you’ll enjoy the game a whole lot more. As I draw this somewhat unplanned Ubisoft mini-season to a close I leave with one final thought on Assassin’s Creed 2: The fact that the game shows the passage of time by giving Ezio a beard in later levels is hilarious.

Vai, amico, libero da fardelli e paure.

It’s commonplace for a game sequel to improve upon the original through various methods. The obvious ones are being bigger or adding more. Those developers with a more philosophical bent will add explosive action because, in gaming, anything explosive is a sure-fire moneymaker. Sometimes people with no understanding of the concept of cliche will add a darker, more intense story… That’s always a good move.

Increasingly, though, the developer will actually look at the criticism of the previous game and take steps to significantly change the experience for the better. It’s a move that should be celebrated and, in recognition of this, I’m going to look at some of the changes Assassin’s Creed II has made that fundamentally improve the experience.

Mission Structure

I’ll start with the major one. The first Assassin’s Creed tasked you with killing nine people, each in a different district across three cities. First, though, you had to find your target. This process involved completing a minimum of three out of a possible six information gathering missions. This introduced a whole host of problems. The most important of these was that there were only a handful of mission types (usually interrogate, pickpocket or eavesdrop) so, by the time you were looking for your third or fourth target, you were becoming bored of the whole thing. The other issue was that the bare-bones nature of the set-up to each assassination meant you only ever met a few recurring characters, the defining trait of any of which was the extent to which they disliked you (ranging from ‘sarcastic pleasentries’ to ‘all out foaming at the mouth’).

The sequel presents its main story as a sequence of linear missions. At first this may sound like a step backwards, bringing the game in line with the majority of open-world games out there. In practice it, somewhat ironically, unburdens the game of its rigidity. Major assassinations now feel like a progression of events that naturally lead to Ezio being within reach of killing his next victim. It makes each assassination feel unique instead of formulaic. It also makes Ezio a much more social creature than Altair, with many of the missions involving enlisting the help of others.

Narrative Structure

I’ve already covered most of this in the last section but specific mention should go to the way the game handles the slightly bizarre disconnect between the series’ two timelines. I’m assuming a level of familiarity with the plot of the two games but, for those unaware, they essentially cast the player in the role of a guy in the present experiencing the genetic memories of his ancestors through a big machine. In the first game this manifested in the player being taken out of game-proper just as you were getting into the swing of things and dumped back into the present day to listen to a big diatribe from your corporate captor (yes, the game features an evil corporation. Quelle surprise) and go to bed.

The sequel keeps you in Italy for most of the game, only pulling you out two or three times over the course. It’s actually infrequent enough that you start to warm to the moments you do spend outside of the Animus, becoming a welcome break from the main setting rather than an annoying distraction. Unfortunately these brief narrative segments are still no-way near compelling enough to justify themselves. Still, you do get to do more than just have a lie down.

Assassinations

The biggest problem I had with the first game: you couldn’t assassinate people. No matter how stealthily you made your way to the targets, dispatching guards before they knew you were there and avoiding archers in the distance from spotting you, the final confrontation was always a standard fight, followed by guards chasing you through the city. The infuriating thing was that I remember engineering situations where, by any normal application of logic, I should have been able to kill my target without ever being noticed. I even once stood on a roof overlooking my victim and tried to leap onto him while stabbing him with my hidden blade. Instead Altair jumped off of the roof, fumbled around a bit and then engaged in a standard sword fight. It struck me as a glaring omission.

The sequel allows you to leap onto your target while stabbing him with your hidden blade. You can assassinate while hanging from ledges and even when hidden in hay bales. There are more assassinations to perform, both in the main mission and in side quests, and most of them allow for a silent kill. Mess it up and you’re back to a series of fights to kill your target but, with the increased number of missions, messing one up feels less like a wasted opportunity as it does a motivation to learn from your mistakes and be more careful next time.

Collectible Motivation

Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of collectibles in open world games. Often they’re a lazy excuse to encourage the player to explore the world, with little or no incentive to do so. The first Assassin’s Creed was one of the worst examples of this, littering flags all over the three cities but offering no rewards for seeking them out. For the sequel there are actually more types of things to collect but, importantly, every single one not only offers rewards but actually ties these collectibles to an element of the story. Codex pages not only unlock weapon upgrades and health bonuses but take the form of journal entries from Altair, detailing events after the first game. Glyphs are encryptions left by a previous Abstergo test subject and, upon the completion of a ‘decryption’ puzzle, unlock a segment of a video enticingly called ‘The Truth’. In actual fact the video is pretty terrible, guilty of the series’ worse tendencies toward sci-fi indulgence but, conversely, the puzzles themselves are generally compelling, each one revealing some of the Templar’s machinations throughout history. Even the feathers, the game’s direct replacement of flags, are collected in an attempt to help your mother recover from her period of mourning over the loss of her youngest son. It’s good motivation to actually go looking for them even though it was somewhat hilarious that by the time I’d collected the last one Ezio’s mother hadn’t spoken a word in over 10 years.

Character

To be perfectly honest Altair was a bit of a dick. Ultimately he was vindicated, coming to learn to uphold the tenants of the Assassins of his own volition. Towards the end of the game he was continuing with his mission not out of blind faith to the brotherhood but because the price of allowing the Templars to achieve their goals was simply too great. Boy did it take a long time to get to that point though. For a long while it’s all too easy to identify with the procession of fellow assassins who disliked him, because his main character trait seemed to be misplaced arrogance.

Ezio is much more likable character, and more human in his motivations. The ‘avenge the death of your family’ plot might not be original but it works well. One great touch is that each assassination ends with Ezio uttering “requiescat in pace” (rest in peace). It shows a sympathy for the target and, more importantly, a tinge of sadness at the necessity of Ezio’s work. It gives the character a core of humanity that was largely absent from Altair’s portrayal, and makes him a much more relatable lead.

All this isn’t to say that the game is perfect. In the next part I’ll be looking at some of the decisions that don’t quite work, and which elements could use tweaking in order to enhance the experience.

! – SPOILER WARNING: This post contains spoilers for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and, specifically, for That Level, entitled No Russian. I’m not talking mild ‘tiptoe around the content’ spoilers either; I’m going to be spoiling the shit out of this thing. If you have any plans at all to play MW2′s single player campaign then, seriously, don’t read this. – !

The first time I hadn’t even meant to play it. A friend was round and I was just dipping into the campaign. Being further ahead of me in the story he would sometimes interject with a “this bit’s awesome” or a “this level is a bastard”. You probably know the type.

My plan was always to play No Russian properly: no people, sound up, lights off. We’re experiencing a medium in its adolescence and I’m always interested when a game looks like it might be genuinely unsettling, especially if that game is billed as the biggest release of the year. Before I even know it’s coming, though, the screen has gone black for just a little too long. The only sound is that of guns being checked and ammo being loaded. Finally the visuals fade in and I… my character is stood in an airport.

“This is…” my friend begins. “I know,” I reply, cutting him short. I can’t remember at what point the contents of Modern Warfare 2′s most controversial level were spoiled for me. I don’t even think anyone had to set it all out in front of me, instead the puzzle was pieced together by a snippet here and a mention there; a hundred reviews and previews and discussions and whispers, each one doing their best not to reveal the content but going about it in slightly different ways.

“Remember – No Russian,” says Makarov, the terrorist leader who I… my character has been sent undercover to befriend. “This level isn’t that bad,” says my friend, the terrorist sympathiser who seems intent on cajoling me to unleash hell. We… my character and the cell he’s infiltrated walk into the airport itself and open fire on the unsuspecting, and unarmed, civilians. Here’s the thing: I do find it unsettling. I don’t want to kill these pixels but, at this point, I’m unaware of how the mechanics of the level work; whether non-participation would lead to suspicion and failure. Worse still I’d be showing myself up in front of my friend, who’d just admitted to having no problem gunning down the legions of cowering men and women. In the end I… my character walked the terminal picking off the mortally injured as they dragged themselves across the floor. I deliberately aimed just to the side of a crowd of people, winding up killing another crowd I hadn’t noticed in the background. I’d linger just a beat to long on visual cues like the departures board ticking over into a wall of ‘Delay’ signs. Still, I… my character was complicit. I felt numb.

The thing about No Russian: no matter what issues I have surrounding its execution as a level, or even its inclusion in Modern Warfare 2, in me it succeeded in its goal. Whatever its failings, that was and always will be my honest initial reaction. The game does a great job of hightening the atmosphere within the level itself. The long build up and fade in; the enforced slow walk of your character; the clean mundanity of the setting in contrast to the dusty war torn locales of the rest of the game; the underlying, unsettling, pulsating background ‘music’. Even the civilians themselves have animation models not present in the rest of the game. They’ll drag themselves across the ground and, in some cases, those too injured to even do that will be dragged to safety by others. Everything in the level is designed to provoke a reaction from the player. Mission accomplishes right? Not entirely…

I played the level again earlier today in order to see if it would provoke a similar reaction. It didn’t. After an initial, cathartic, round of gunfire in the opening section’s main bulk of passengers I had no problem moving from room to room killing everything in sight. There was no particular pleasure to be found in it but neither was any of the unease of my initial visit. In the time between my two playthroughs I’d become aware the level plays out exactly the same way whether you participate or abstain from firing completely which, ironically, destroys most of the atmosphere. Even on my first go I realised that the level dissolves completely once the tactical assault teams arrive, bringing the game back to its usual, familiar territory as you become more concerned with staying alive than with what the level is trying to achieve.

This man has clipped through his suitcase. Way to take me out of the moment, computer game.

It’s unfair to expect the level to evoke the same emotions on revisiting, but anecdotal evidence suggests that most of the people I’ve talked to felt no real issues when playing it. Most raise the point that you can do far worse to civilians in many other games. Certainly I have no problem with mowing down pedestrians in GTA, my favourite pastime in Prototype was punching citizens into meat chunks and in Fallout 3 I smiled with evil delight as the town of Megaton erupted into a mushroom cloud of my own making. I can’t entirely explain why this level was different for me but I have a couple of theories. Perhaps perspective plays a role: I’m less aware of an identifiable character in a first-person shooter and the genre itself has a standing tradition of casting you as the hero, saving mankind from aliens or terrorists or Nazis, often single handedly. More likely I think it’s due to the amount of RPGs and adventure games I have played. I’m used to assuming a role and to connecting with a story because they are the elements that those genres tend to emphasise. Are gamers who primarily play shooters prepared to allow themselves to be drawn in to such an attachment? It seems slightly at odds with what they look for in a game.

I feel it’s important to make something clear: I’m glad No Russian caused the response it did in me. Even if the level had provoked the same reaction had I played it alone, and I’m not entirely convinced it would have, I wouldn’t have skipped it. Games shouldn’t shy away from including mature content when the definition of ‘mature’ extends beyond tits and swearing. That said my biggest issue with No Russian is that, tonally, it doesn’t fit in with MW2 at all. Frankly it’s a ridiculous game. the preceding level culminates in a snowmobile chase and, just two levels after, you’re protecting America from an all out Russian invasion. If Jack Bauer went postal in a public place, gunning down civilians left and right? That’s the kind of out of place juxtaposition we’re looking at here. Even the narrative set-up to No Russian itself is handled poorly, with little background given to the terrorists or their ideology. Even a cutscene to give some contextual information about their beliefs would have increased the purpose of the levels inclusion tenfold. Instead we’re left with some cookie-cutter speil about them being Evil. At best the whole thing seems somewhat of a gimmick and is rendered slightly tacky for the fact; at worst it’s a poorly realised exploitation piece designed to court controversy.

And yet… It worked. My initial response was my initial response. For better or worse Modern Warfare 2, by its mere profile alone, has managed to set the bar for emotional set-pieces in an FPS. If a developer can come along and wrap that same sense of unease into a properly defined narrative then a true classic could be born.

Bioware recently released a character creation tool for their upcoming RPG Dragon Age: Origins. I’ve spent some time messing around with the various settings, knowing full well that crafting the character I want to use can often take me days before I start the game proper, and it’s set me thinking about Dragon Age and about character creation in general.

This is Dragon Age's Maximum Face character, achieved by moving all the sliders to max. Thanks to the PC Gamer UK guys for divulging that fun little distraction.

As promotional tools go releasing a character creator early is a stroke of genius. I’m amazed that all RPGs don’t do it. Not only does it give the player a glimpse into the technical, mechanical and narrative aspects of the game but manages to do so without ever showing a piece of gameplay footage. It’s also useful for the player, giving them time to weigh up the different options and aspects that they can pursue without having to deal with the moment of “fuck it this’ll do, I actually want to start the bloody game” (while at the same time, I’m sure the developers are hoping, forming an attachment to their character that will increase the chances of them actually buying it.) It feels weird to actually take some time to praise what is, in essence, a marketing move but, frankly, Bioware’s previous attempts to sell the game have been so cringe-worthy that I was almost put off the whole damn thing.

I get into trouble when I start messing with sliders. I was only able to rescue this character from an expression of permanent surprise after much fine tuning.

Above is the character that I was seriously considering using until my cycling of the menus in order to collect some pictures led to all her characteristics being reset. I’m somewhat on the fence about whether to go for a male or female character this time around. I generally play males in RPGs and never really considered the alternative until Mass Effect came along. Mass Effect’s male lead was such a typical Space Marine douchebag that I couldn’t bring myself to spend even a second with him (that Jennifer Hale did the voicework for the female Shepherd didn’t hurt any.) I probably had a lot greater attachment to my Shepherd than I do to many of my RPG characters partially because the fact that she was female made her a more compelling character without the story having to make any changes for that fact.

That said, my favourite character creation is my Baldur’s Gate half-elf Ranger, Lujan (+50 respect points if you can identify where the name comes from.) Or I should say my favourite character creation ‘was’. As I typed that sentence I realised that Lujan died when my old computer’s hard-drive corrupted. This makes me genuinely quite said, an odd response considering the least important, and least flexible, thing about Baldur’s Gate was what your character looked like. This is, of course, the main aspect of creating your character: the attachment you feel toward them is less about what they look like as it is about the actions you have them perform in game.

I’ve never played as a dwarf before and I must say that I’m seriously considering it. Of course I was instantly disappointed by Dragon Age’s lack of beard configuration options. In Keith, the dwarf above (specialisation: twatting things), I chose the optimum beard length to dispersment ratio and I’m still a little disappointed I can’t go further. What’s the point of taking on the role of a dwarf if your beard doesn’t make NPCs fall to their knees?

Beards aren’t the only thing about the character creator that get the short shrift. Elsewhere, and I’m going to keep comparing against the D&D based Baldur’s Gate because the developers have kept crowing about how DA is a spiritual successor to the series, there are much less options defining both race and class. From the sounds of it this is actually a good move, as the choice you make will have dramatic effects on the whole narrative, right from the story that kicks off your adventure. This is nothing but good news, especially as Bioware’s previous attempt to cultivate a meaningful backstory choice for your character, in Mass Effect, was used in only the most superficial way (to paraphrase, it basically manifested as follows: “so it was you that [survived the siege.]“) Another thing that’s missing is the choice of an alignment which I was all set to spend A Lot Of Words talking about until I realised I should probably save it for my next Let’s Improve Gaming thing.

The most interesting removal, from my perspective, you might spot in the second screenshot. Where’s the Charisma stat? I generally move through my RPGs entrancing the NPCs in the glare of my charasmatic avatar. I then rob them blind. The closest stat Dragon Age has to charisma is Cunning, which nevertheless implies something different. This could turn out to be an interesting move, one I’m quietly excited to discover. It would be a special kind of madness to deny the wordy resolution path from players but it could mean that the warmth people will show you is tied more to your in-game deeds. By the same token it could just transpire that Cunning is a cache-all re-skin of charisma designed to distance the game from its ‘spiritual predecessor’. Either way, I’m looking forward to finding out.

If you’ve spent any time with Dragon Age’s character creation tool then link to your chosen character in the comments and tell us a bit about why that character in particular appeals. It should be interesting to find out why we choose the lives we do…

I seem to have amassed a large collection of what I’d call ‘guilty pleasure’ gaming. These are the games that will not be remembered in times to come as gaming classics. More often than not they’re flawed, stupid and the embodiment of simple, pointless fun; in many cases deliberately so. For me they generally come in the form of sandbox action titles, a genre which seems to value content over coherence. I bring this up because I’ve finally found an example of the genre that, despite falling squarely into the mould, I don’t consider to be a ‘guilty pleasure’. Prototype, or [PROTOTYPE], is actually quite good.

The difference is that most sandbox games that favour the playground element of design, in which you’re given a tool set and set out to wreak havoc on the world, have one element that seems to detract from that very purpose. Take Saints Row 2, a game I’m about to be very unfair to. Many praised Saints Row 2 for giving the player the ability to enact the hyper-cartoonish destruction and violence that was present in the PS2-era GTA games but very much missing in the fourth. This is a worthy and noble pursuit for a game but the way in which Volition implemented it left me cold. If you’re anything like me there came a moment when playing GTA3, or one of its sequels, in which you stood your character on the roof of a passing car and used it as a mobile base to terrorise the streets. The character would slide backward motionless once the car hit any significant speed, forcing you to course correct every couple of seconds, but that was part of the charm and simply the fact that you could do it, when the developers clearly hadn’t put in any coding to allow you to, was cool. In Saints Row 2 doing the same action triggers a mini-game in which you can pull off a variety of poses and gain a rating for how long you can keep your balance. If I remember correctly, gaining the top rating gives you a traffic cone you can wear on your head. It’s Cool™. This was my problem with Saints Row 2: the developers had a mini game ready for any stupid action you could think to undertake. All very well, but if I’m messing about and avoiding the missions of the game I don’t want to be constantly reminded that the fun I’m making for myself has been authorised by the developers.

This is the vapour that is the apparent result of punching a guy into pieces.

Prototype understands this. Killing civilians draws no reward or penalty, I can’t even remember if you get any experience bonus for killing uninfected civilians, and even the infected ones draw such a small amount of points that they aren’t actually worth bothering about. In fact there’s absolutely no reason why you should be able to unlock a Curb Stomp upgrade that allows you to stomp on dead bodies (or even why this would be an upgrade as opposed to something you can just do) but there is and you can, if you really want to. And I did.

The unlock system is another reason why I warmed to Prototype over other, similar, games. It’s a centralised system which allows you to upgrade your character at any moment once you’ve gained the right amount of experience (something which builds up at a ridiculous rate). It was the lack of a centralised system that proved to be the main flaw in another game, one I enjoyed more than most people. In Mercenaries 2 progression led to the ability to buy more powerful airstrikes which could be used to destroy absolutely any building in a game. However, unlike in Prototype, and, more unforgivably unlike in the first Mercenaries game, these airstrikes could only be bought by visiting specific military bases located across the map. When you start a mission you’re given a list of recommended items and in order to actually obtain that list you’d need to quit the mission, find which bases were selling which items and travel to each individually to buy them. Frequently I’d do none of that, instead turning up to the mission location unprepared and having to wing it based on what I could scavenge. All very well, perhaps, but this meant that there was no sense of an escalating growth of power, a key feature in almost any mission based game. It was also a bizarre move considering the first Mercenaries gave you access to the Russian Mafia through your PDA, allowing you to call in any airstrike or package from any location with a couple of button presses.

For a while I was worried I might start to tire of kicking helicopters to death. Luckily that point never came.

Because Prototype’s progression of power is intrinsically tied to the escalating powers within the character the game is much more accessible in terms of growth. The sheer number of powers means that there is always a reason to complete the high-experience objectives or side quests. As well as the upgrades that are necessary for survival, like the ability to shoot hundreds of tendrils from your body, are a bunch that serve no purpose than to increase your ability to mess around, like the power that allows you to surf a body along the ground while blood smears along behind them.

The game is also geared to reduce the time spent searching for those survival essentials. The consume mechanic means that civilians, and this game is set in New York so there are thousands of them, essentially act as health packs. Guns can also be taken from any member of the large military presence, although I can’t think of a time in which I actually needed to use one, and, eventually, any tank or helicopter can be stolen at any point. It’s one of the few true playgrounds in the sandbox genre, with little of annoyances that so often plague it.

Here are the innards of some guys. Prototype's primary colour is red.

It is, of course, flawed in its own right. Some of the upgrades are so powerful as to render the others useless, the story isn’t in the least bit memorable, any hints at character morality are instantly destroyed when I start punching hundreds of people into bits, a lot of the missions aren’t particularly inventive, the movement system isn’t anywhere near as interesting as Infamous’, and, from a technical standpoint, it looks like a bit of a dog (although this places it as a pretty normal example of an open-world game). That said there are hours of fun to be had kicking helicopters to death, tormenting the local populace and running up the side of a wall in order to chuck cars at water towers. For these reasons Prototype is clearly the best stupid game I’ve played in a long while.

It’s a familiar scenario: After making the seemingly endless trek to your objective, besting numerous foes on your way, you are finally on the home stretch and boom. Headshot. In online games the sniper is always there and always ready to punish rash moves and errant mistakes.

“Dirty snipers” is the rallying cry of whoever in the house happens to be playing, or watching, as the familiar sniper rifle icon separates your username from that of the person you are currently cursing. When done badly the sniper can be the single biggest frustration in a game. Battlefield Heroes, for example, was pretty much ruined for me almost solely because of snipers.

Technically that’s not fair. It’s not the fault of players sporting the sniper rifle that they are ruining Battlefield Heroes; characters simply move to slowly. As a byproduct of the players unurgent gait across the landscape any half-decent sniper can, of course, be a persistent annoyance. The match that forever turned me against the game consisted of the large Coastal Clash map, two snipers spawn camping and multiple deaths. At this point, especially at the early levels, you are pretty much helpless if you spawn away from cover.

This is less of a problem if there is an easy method of countering a persistently pesky sniper. Team Fortress 2′s Heavy class is, unsurprisingly, a sniper magnet. He’s slow moving, large and his gun has no accuracy against far away targets. The difference between Team Fortress 2 and Battlefield Heroes is that, during those times when you find your Heavy is being consistently taken out by a sniper in the distance, the fix is surprisingly simple. In Battlefield Heroes any solution you engineer to get rid of a tricky sniper has to be done with your existing class and environment. In Team Fortress 2, however, if you have a similar sniper problem you can choose any of the other 8 classes to fix it. Particular fun can be had as the Spy as your new Sniper friend is often not expecting to be troubled from the safety of his base, at least the first couple of times you kill him.

If snipers are such a frustrating part of online games shouldn’t they just be removed? Categorically: no. As I said at the start the sniper is always ready to punish a rash move. Good, rash moves should be punished. Death is cheap in gaming with the penalty being a simple spawn timer and a reset to base. Unlike spawn campers, grenade spammers or turret hoggers the sniper enforces care and attention in an environment that breeds the opposite. Snipers bring back the risk that balances the reward. In TF2 you may find yourself legitimately having an issue with them as the lumbering Heavy, but if a sniper was giving you a consistent problem as, say, the Scout then you’re not paying enough attention to your surroundings and the means you go about completing the objective.

More importantly sniping can be a lot of fun. It’s a slightly different mindset you have to adopt to be effective with the class. Perhaps ironically, given my issues with Battlefield Heroes, the best fun I’ve had playing a sniper has come from Battlefield: Bad Company*. In Bad Company the sniper class, and in particular the ghillie suit, is fantastically realised. It was Bad Company in which I learned of the concept of safety bushes: whereas many snipers may prefer the perceived safety of a building or roof, the real thrill comes from crouching down and moving from bush to bush getting as close to the action as you possibly can. There is genuine pleasure gained from the fact that as long as nobody sees your muzzle flash you are practically invisible. There have been moments hidden away in my bush in which an enemy soldier has run directly past my ear or a tank has rolled past oblivious. A good sniping position increases the tension tenfold: death is suddenly less cheap as you’ll lose your spot but at the same time you have a limited number of times you can operate from the same place before you’re spotted.

Just a little closer.

This is the perhaps the source of the frustration, and joy, of the sniper: they are playing a different game, aloof and distant from the main ground war. It’s the ultimate griefer class of the traditional class-based shooter dynamic. Frankly, if you don’t hate them then they aren’t doing their job right.

*I’m going to lose some respect points here by mentioning I’ve never played one of the main PC Battlefield games.