DIABLO 3 IMPRESSIONS: ULTIMATE EVIL EDITION

Recently Diablo 3 came to consoles yet again in a bigger and badder way with the ULTIMATE EVIL EDITION, a version of the game that now includes the Reaper of Souls add-on that all us cool PC gamers have been playing for months. Now console gamers can enjoy the fifth and final act of the game’s single player storyline, as well as the madness of the Adventure Mode. Not only that, but those lucky sods with their PS4s and their XBones can rip and tear across Sanctuary as well.

Given that Sam and I have been playing Diablo 3 on the Xbox 360 with a copy rented from Redbox, we haven’t progressed far in the past year. There’s the occasional weekend that comes up when we decide to put our free time to the lazy art of sitting on the couch and mashing buttons, so we haven’t gotten to the point where we can reap (har har) the benefits of the ULTIMATE EVIL EDITION. Neither of us wanted to make a new character (sorry Crusader), and since the game was nice enough to detect the old save file, we’re still dawdling in the desert. For those of you without a frame of reference for where that means we’re at in the game, I’ll help clarify: Not. That. Close.

It was good to get some time in with the ULTIMATE EVIL EDITION, even though the game is identical to what we’ve been playing in months past given our progress in the game. We didn’t reach the end of Act IV to lift up our arms and cry for just one more act. Everything is exactly as it was in the past: we’re still a barbarian and a wizard desperately trying to avoid getting eaten by the minions of hell.

The controls are the same, especially that nifty console-only feature of rolling to evade incoming blasts of eldritch energy that the PC players should be totes jelly of. Menus are still navigated with the weird radial that remains far inferior to the menus navigated via the mouse on the PC, but that doesn’t render the game unplayable. The ULTIMATE EVIL EDITION provides more of the entertainment that Sam and I enjoy together when our weekends overlap, and doesn’t do much more than that except extend the shelf life of its content.

It’s still good fun, so now we ask ourselves: Do we go ahead and save our money for a copy of our own so we longer have to depend on its availability at the local Redbox? Now looms the prospect of finally upgrading to the newest generation of console babies, which means the possibility of losing our progress, especially when it’s the PS4 I’m eyeing and not the Xbox One (sorry Microsoft). Whether or not this will actually happen is still up in the air as the “how” is a puzzle unto itself, but if/when it happens, the adventures of Hogoth the Barbarian and Demena the Wizard will end abruptly. Or just get rebooted if we’re feeling nostalgic.

Late to the Party: Far Cry 3

I’ve been stumbling through Far Cry 3 for the past month or so after picking it up off the ground during a robbery masquerading as a Steam summer sale. First-person shooters have become less my thing recently, so I thought a game in which you don’t just run and gun might make for a comfortable change of pace.

I was incorrect.

Let me be clear: Far Cry 3 is not a bad game. The voice acting’s sprinkled with a liberal dash of meh, but the gunplay is entertaining and the experience system adds a reasonable amount of RPG number crunching to distract you from the fact that your main objective is force-feeding bullets to red-shirted men with strange accents. Good old family-friendly fun.

There are, however, two tiers of leveling. The first tier is that familiar sort of progress in which you do cool things and you get points for it, and then you spend those points to do even cooler things. Simple, elegant, and hard to beat.

The second tier, on the other hand, really wants to emphasize the fact that you’re on a tropical island trying to survive. You don’t have to manage hunger or thirst or any of that finicky crap, but you do have to hunt and skin animals if you want to carry more than one gun, a handful of loot, and $1000. It’s gross, and it’s also hella boring. Hunting in Far Cry 3 is the sort of activity you’d expect in an MMO like World of Warcraft. You go up to the friendly looking gnome and he tells you that, “Hey, guy, I need, like, five wolf pelts. I’d get them myself but I have to stand here and tell some other dope my sob story. Do this for me and get Generic Item of the Mundane.” Since nothing’s ever easy, you have to do it because for whatever stupid reason, you need that item.

Far Cry 3 falls into that very trap, but without the pseudo-social environment of World of Warcraft. You’re not playing Far Cry 3 with anybody—shut up, I know there’s a cooperative option—you’re doing this solo. Man versus the Wilderness. And somehow, it’s really boring. “Killing wild pigs to make a bigger wallet” was a design choice that an actual person came up with and said, “Players will love it.” Or maybe they just said, “Players will tolerate it.” Because it’s this same process that allows you to carry more than one gun.

I spent more time killing goats to make a bigger rucksack just to carry all the junk I pick up than I have fighting pirates which is supposed to be the meat and potatoes of this game. The amount of goats killed would flag my character as a Satanist. Lo and behold, I’ve had to upgrade it a second time within a half hour. And guess what? Now it’s nearly filled to the brim with old syringes, multicolored leaves, single playing cards, and other bits of useless trash that somehow take up an equal amount of volume in my rucksack made of dingoes.

All I ask is for an easy way. The major theme of the game’s “plot” is the walking the path of the warrior, so I get that the game is supposed to be an arduous climb. But why must the fun play second fiddle to the grind? Why can’t I just pay for a new backpack with $500 in blood-soaked cash from my handmade pig wallet? Real RPGs let me do that. 

Simulacra and Simulation: “Let’s Play” and Horror Games

I openly admit to being that bastard who made others watch him play video games. My friends chide me for this, but I’ve gotten better about it. But to be honest, I’ve never had a problem with being in the passenger seat when it comes to video games. When I was 10, I’d watch my friend Sean play through the Resident Evil games because I was too freaked out to play them myself. I may still be too freaked out as I still sit on the GameCube remake of the original Resident Evil.

As the Internet has proven, I’m not the only person who can sit by while someone else wrecks zombies or sneaks past guards in games. The “Let’s Play” trend of recording one’s self while playing a video game has become a strange one at that as several YouTube channels have made money off of what is essentially a common occurrence in one’s childhood. Now that I know I could make money making others watch me play video games, I feel like I screwed up somewhere.

It’s not just the gameplay itself that draws players in, however. YouTube users like PewDiePie and Markiplier shepherded their subscriber base with amusing commentary or over-the-top reactions to video games, especially horror games. A recent upload by Markiplier shows him playing the indie horror game Five Nights at Freddy’s. In the upper left hand corner of the video, Markus “Markiplier” Fischbach sits in a computer chair with a headset on, assuming the role of the gamer. It’s only a small portion of the screen that’s taken up by Markiplier’s face, so the rest can be dedicated to the actual footage of the game. As the gameplay progresses, every reaction by Markiplier is exposed by the camera mounted near his monitor. Every scream every nervous joke is caught on camera for the viewer to see.

The practice is amusing but also voyeuristic. Without clever and judicious application of video editing, one risks revealing a great deal. I’m jumpy to begin with, so if I were to record myself playing a game like Five Nights at Freddy’s or Resident Evil, most of the footage would be me launching backwards from my chair while hyperventilating.

It’s a similar case with the YouTube channel Game Grumps that produces 10-minute clips of web celebs Egoraptor and Danny Sexbang playing vidya games both new and old. The major difference between the Grumps and other YouTube “Let’s Plays” like Markiplier’s is that the former forego the video footage of themselves (likely because there’s two of them). Their commentary is much like the rest, however—jocular, infantile, and, at times, borderline imbecilic. More recently they’ve been playing the pseudo demo for the new Silent Hills game, PT. For a few minutes today, I relived those days when I watched another blow through a scary game because I too much of a wuss to do it myself. I did the same with Markiplier’s Five Nights at Freddy’s videos.

Somehow, having that layer of separation between me and the game makes it all the less terrifying. Knowing that someone else has the reins while I can look away at my leisure gives some comfort in experiencing the game, even if it isn’t directly. If I’m playing the game myself, sure, I can pause it at any time. But at some point, I have to resume the game. At some point, I’m responsible for completing it and experiencing it. It all falls on me.

There are others who watch the Let’s Play to experience a game that they either can’t afford to or don’t have the hardware to experience it themselves. Others might just use them as previews for a game that they plan on purchasing themselves. I, on the other hand, use them to enable my own cowardice.   

Rated M for Mature: Wolfenstein's Strange but Satisfying Tone

Dat typeface.

Wolfenstein: The New Order came out to "generally favorable reviews" this past week, exceeding the expectations set forth by the series' 2009 bland iteration in Wolfenstein. Admittedly, Bethesda put out one hell of a marketing campaign for it, featuring a revised version of history where--spoiler alert!--the Nazis won World War II and the world comprised of public player executions on soccer fields and Nazified versions of '50s and '60s pop songs. Even from the trailers, the writing looked impressive, so it was hard for me not to be excited. Just a little excited.

So I marathoned it on my days off. I jumped into the combat boots of William "B.J." Blazkowicz, hero of the games since 1992's Wolfenstein 3D. We storm the castle of high-ranking Nazi butthole Deathshead, aiming to riddle him and his legions of jackboots full of Allied lead. But, of course, things go south quickly. Planes come down, men get killed, and we survivors get captured by Deathshead himself. Soon we are posed with a choice that changes the game significantly enough that it creates two separate timelines: do you choose to kill the wet-behind-the-ears rookie or the battle-hardened veteran? Deathshead leaves the decision up to you.

It seems like only yesterday that I was playing BioShock Infinite, a game peppered with significant choices that it almost feels less like a shooter and more like a role playing game. Then you start blasting dudes and it feels like a shooter again. Given BioShock Infinite's origins, playing with player choice is not only expected, but almost required. It's not a BioShock game if the idea of player agency isn't toyed with. Wolfenstein, however, is certainly also a series about choice but with more immediate consequences, such as which gun to maim which Nazi.

But it's more than that this time around. Picking between my two comrades, I can't decide who to let die. As a player, I've had about an hour by this point to get to know these characters. The rookie pleads for his life. The veteran resigns to death. The Nazi tells me that if I don't pick one of them, we'll all just die. I pick the rookie. He pleads, asks if I'll get him out of there. The game fades out.

I feel immediate pangs of remorse right after I make the timeline altering choice. My conscience sings in cliches: the rookie had so much to live for, the veteran knew what he signed up for. I answered back with cold logic: the veteran was experienced and necessary to the mission. But the mission is a failure, we attempt to escape, and Blazkowicz ends up in a head injury and a vegetative state for fourteen years. Such is Wolfenstein.

The game is unrelenting in its depiction of a Nazi-controlled Europe. Most World War II shooters don't show the full extent of Nazi persecution. In a given Medal of Honor game, it was almost as if the only crime the Nazis committed was not having enough bullets in them. Developers depended on the history books to give you the explanation why the Nazis are the bad guys here. But Wolfenstein: The New Order is a post-World War II game. I don't only mean the setting of the game, but also the fact that it comes in after an era where much more of the shooter market was comprised of World War II games where the big objective was to thin Nazi ranks. The objective remains, but the narrative seems more daring this time around. We go to a labor camp in the game, evoking depictions of concentration camps in film and TV. Blazkowicz gets a numbered tattoo, echoing the very thing that so many came out of the war with on their arms.

While the thought of depicting a concentration camp in a video game can appear to trivialize the war, the game sets its stance on war early on: it's bad. Blazkowicz and the player bear witness to some awful scenes, often when they have no choice but to watch. Throughout the game, Blazkowicz whispers to himself in a way that sounds like a broken man, damaged by things he's seen. The player must see these things. Such things can't be whitewashed, or they almost assuredly trivialize this war.

But a video game can't run on such harrowing content alone. Given the almost B-movie backdrop of the game, Wolfenstein could run dangerously close to undiluted melodrama and undercut any weight the game might carry in its more serious moments. We've got to have the moments of humor because, let's face it, we're playing a game where a good portion of the enemies are giant robots whose scanning sounds like a guitar lick from a garage rock outfit. Wolfenstein can take itself seriously at times for some very human moments that we rarely get in video games. But in those other times, if it takes the player to a Nazi moon base, it's okay if a character says, "I'm on the motherf***ing moon."

Why We Fight: What Titanfall's Not-Single-Player Does For The Campaign As We Know It

These days, for me to touch a competitive multiplayer game is a rarity. Long gone are the days when I'd hop onto Xbox Live and cook fools in Halo: Reach or whatever Call of Duty game was in vogue. They say practice makes perfect but practice in an FPS game is a soul-crushing endeavor: enduring the torment of junior high students berating you for not having played the game as much as they have. Because of this, you "suck" like a "noob" and they've done all sorts of disgusting things to you and with your mother. Enduring the harassment becomes tiresome and to stoop to their level would not only be beneath you but possibly borderline illegal.

While you'd like to pump a few digital rounds into your foul-mouthed opponents, you can't because the little asshole came flying in through a corridor you forgot about or had no idea existed because unlike that kid whose been on since 8 AM because he was "sick," you just logged on after getting home from work. Because you have a job.

Anymore, FPSes are expected to provide players with single player and multiplayer options. The former, while might be saddled with an interesting story and compelling characters, is always overshadowed by the multiplayer element. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare had a reasonably strong narrative for a military shooter, and while some of its campaign moments are fondly remembered, the game's multiplayer was the real honeypot and for good reason.

But the shooter genre has always been characterized by a schizophrenic divide between play styles: you could either play by yourself and let the story wash over you or you could dig into the trenches and combat fellow players on the virtual battlefield with no prominent narrative outside of what you might tell your buddies the next day. Games with a cooperative element would likely have story, but they nearly always were the single player with a second controller plugged in. Not a true multiplayer narrative. 

Developer Splash Damage is perhaps best known for their two Enemy Territory games based in the Wolfenstein and Quake universes, but in 2011 they put out a multiplayer-only game called Brink. Technically, it contained a single player option but the gameplay was strictly based on the multiplayer element. If players chose single player, they were just playing multiplayer with AI. But the game attempted to have a narrative that came through the competitive gameplay. Players were split into factions at war in a dystopian future city and a vague story was told through the matches. While the game didn't do all that well at launch, I'd like to believe that Titanfall drew some inspiration from Brink. 

My own experience with Brink is limited, but I think its lack of success might serve to underscore the inherent difficulty in dropping story into multiplayer. You can attempt to compose a complex narrative like Bioshock Infinite for a multiplayer game, but in the end it's going to take away from the pacing of a team-based deathmatch. The reverse is equally disappointing: lackluster story will only sap the life out of a single player campaign. 

Titanfall does seem to borrow some of Brink's superficial elements: multiplayer-based narrative with parkour-style movement. It does so with some better success, however. For one, it makes no attempt to deceive its players: Titanfall is all multiplayer, baby. There is a campaign, but it's not single player. Instead, it's your standard multiplayer match with a story-infused mission briefing in the game lobby before the match begins. Each map is a different mission with a unique intro. You're not just jumping out of a dropship. You're discovering an abandoned colony. Or watching as a drunken pilot is being shoved into a sewer hole for safe keeping. Then, throughout the match, NPCs chime in with updates about not only how the match is going but how it affects the world outside the map. Depending on how well your team is doing, their scripted chatter's going to change. 

Now, Titanfall's narrative isn't going to challenge your notions about the human condition and what it is to be a thinking individual with agency. Most reviewers weren't big on it, like Tina Amini who showed little love for the paper-thin storyline in her Kotaku review. But Respawn's effort is a step in a good direction if not a significantly large step. And maybe not the strict "right" direction, but its potential does make me feel warm and fuzzy. Respawn makes starting the match a little more interesting by giving each match context. You're not just shooting other soldiers. You're capturing a giant railgun to sic on some spaceships. If your team loses the match, guess who's getting introduced to Mr. Giant Space Cannon. These aren't just random acts of coordinated violence: they're part of a larger picture. You're part of a larger picture. 

But if you couldn't give less of a shit about context or a big picture, you can go into "classic" mode where you can just get down and dirty. Ditch the pretense of story for what you really bought the game for: to humiliate strangers and tell them what you did to their moms.

Late to the Party: Finishing Mass Effect 3

2007 was a good year. I graduated high school, started college, and received what I still believe to be one of the greatest RPGs put out in recent years: Mass Effect. The premise was simple: you were a space marine chosen as the first human Spectre—elite agent of the galactic Citadel Council. Mass Effect had a fully fleshed out world that could give the Star Wars Extended Universe a run for its credits. Unique alien races with developed cultures and histories and a bounty of planets to explore. Yes, the exploration could be tedious and even frustrating in standard definition, and though it wanted to be a third-person shooter, the combat mechanics made the firefights clunky. But I loved it and regardless of the “improvements” that the sequels made to the mechanics, the inaugural game remains my favorite in the series.

I looked forward to carrying Jim Shepard—my Shepard—over to Mass Effect 2. I didn’t expect any heavy decisions from Mass Effect to interfere with my Mass Effect 2. Some familiar faces returned, and those faces that didn’t were missed. The endgame was suitably epic with its “suicide mission,” despite the narrative’s insistence on reminding me that this was a SUICIDE MISSION (caps lock necessary). But regardless, I lost some characters I wasn’t attached to, saved those I was attached to, and wondered what the big bad Reapers had left to throw my way so I could take it out in typical American Earthling fashion.

Unfortunately, the canon of Jim Shepard ends there.

I played through the first two Mass Effect games on the Xbox 360. I played through 3 on the PC. To put it succinctly, the combination of price and poor reception for the ending barred me from buying it immediately, and the superior performance of the game on PC only complicated my decision further. My excitement stayed strong long enough for me to play the demo upon its release. The gameplay felt identical to Mass Effect 2, which was expected, but the glaring issue of characters having undergone some sort of brainwashing that changed them entirely. Urdnot Wrex (who died in my first playthrough of Mass Effect) was best-buds-chummy with Shepard, a far cry from his respectful-but-still-gruff demeanor in Mass Effect 2. Already, Mass Effect 3 was shaping up to be a bizarre continuation of a beloved series for me.

Finally, I gave in when the game was cheap enough on PC. Already, a friend of mine was playing it and another avenue for gaming and socializing was enticing. Unfortunately, there was no easy way of moving my save file from my Xbox 360 to my PC, so Jim would have to be remade from scratch. I began with character creation, trying to be as close to Jim Shepard as I was before. I thought I’d get some options to craft the backstory as I had at the beginning of Mass Effect 2 when I tried to start a new game. No such luck. So far, my Shepard was my Shepard in name only.

Even without the issues stemming from this not being my Shepard, inconsistencies in both gameplay and narrative manifested quickly: no sign of or reference to Urdnot Wrex, who was alive as far as I knew from my last playthrough. Instead, he has been replaced by his brother who sounds and acts like Wrex 1.0 than Demo Wrex. My conversation options seemed more limited in that opportunities to choose what Shepard was going to say were infrequent compared to previous games. Bioware did a lot to make the game accessible to not only newcomers to the Mass Effect series, but to role playing games in general. Starting a new game in Mass Effect 3 is not just creating a new character. It’s tailoring the whole game experience. Decide you don’t like fighting but you like some story? They’ll dial back the combat for you. Find story a buzzkill? We’ll minimize the cutscenes and let you maim ‘til your heart’s content. All of this would be admirable had they done this in the beginning.

I’ve spoken to some who’ve come to Bioware’s defense. Yes, it expands the audience. But someone who plays Mass Effect 3 as their first exposure to the series is not going to be happy when they go back to game one. Why can’t I dive sideways? Why does my gun keep overheating? Where’s the reload button? Why won’t Shepard stay in cover? There was a different mindset behind Mass Effect than its sequels. Maybe it was EA’s evil influence or just an overzealous move to improve the original’s weaker mechanics. What is inarguable is that Mass Effect is the weird grandpa whose worldview seems backwards to its son and grandson, Mass Effect 2 and 3. But I was there with the weird grandpa from the beginning. I understand his worldview. 2 and 3 need to get the hell off my lawn.

Whose Story is This Anyway?

Grand Theft Auto V offers a unique twisting of video game narratives with its new character switching mechanic. While the idea of switching from character to character on the fly is hardly a new idea--tactical World War II pseudo-shooter Hidden & Dangerous comes to mind--GTA V's concept offers an alteration to the concept that may be aped and explored in future games.

For the uninitiated, GTA V follows three protagonists--Michael, Trevor, and Franklin--as they paint the great fake state of San Andreas all the morbid shades of red that a vicious psychopath can fantasize about. At almost any given time, players can knock over a convenience store in Trevor's boots, press a button, and drive a (stolen) taxi as Michael, or go golfing with Franklin. The world is your blood-soaked oyster in which the player is arguably in three places at once. While playing as one character, the other two don't go into cold storage in a base location--they live their own lives. As the camera descends on a newly selected Trevor, the player discovers the unhinged self-made man shirtless and vomiting into a fountain. Switching to Franklin might show a less visceral scene of the rising young criminal Franklin washing his car in the driveway. 

GTA V's mechanic isn't mere suit-changing, however. While Hidden & Dangerous and GTA V couldn't differ more, H&D exemplifies the closest example to what we've seen of GTA V's quick head-switching. The same novel simplicity of pressing a button and seeing a different body with a different gun and different skill sets is present in a game that predates Rockstar North's latest release by over thirteen years. The basic AI can control the non-player-controlled characters to some degree while the player can select his own unit to play soldier with. They all work in tandem to complete their Nazi-blasting objectives.

But unlike GTA V, each character lacks a defining narrative. While each one might have a rich, elegant back story (unlikely) written up by the developer, they are inherently separate from the narrative of the game or the gameplay itself. Michael, Trevor, and Franklin's narratives never let up until the player takes the reins, and even then the player's agency in each character's story extends only so far. In between missions, players are left to their own devices--steal cars, evade police, sex up strippers--but when they get to the mission side of things, they only have so many choices to make. The choices increase during the game's exhilarating heist missions, such as who to hire on your crew or what approach to take, but then there is a struggle between whose tale the game is telling.

In Hidden & Dangerous, the player was not the commandos simultaneously but their commander. GTA V, however, wants us to believe that the player is an unholy trinity of sociopaths, three-in-one. I can't help but wonder if Rockstar wanted to revise the experience of GTA IV and its Episodes from Liberty City into a singular new game, and also grant players the ability to choose who to play as and when. In truth, GTA IV's collective protagonists never team up except for Niko and Johnny, but translating that dynamic into V would only serve to problematize the narrative. Players might find it harrowing to choose between playing as Niko present from a smuggled diamond deal or to play as Luis who interferes with said deal with the sharp report of an AK-47. But GTA V doesn't share that problem. The characters are allied.

From its beginning, I found myself wondering whose story is told in GTA V. The game continues to tell me that it's all three of their stories, but my brain keeps arguing otherwise. I find myself relating to Michael insofar as he is a white male with a keen interest in movies. But could this be an answer in itself? Could my relation to Michael be what makes the game his story? Could it be Trevor's story for another person? In a sandbox game like this where the characters come pre-developed, it's hard to say it's the "player's story," but in a series dominated by lone wolves, it's a shock to the system to have three rabid dogs with their own personalities. But GTA V is, after all, a game of freedom and choices. Choose your gun, choose your wheels, choose your avatar of destruction.