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. 

Five Nights at Freddy's: A Non-Review

Somebody made it past Night 1.

I haven’t played it. I won’t play it. But I am obsessed with it.

I’ve mentioned the game in a previous post about “Let’s Play” videos on YouTube. Five Nights at Freddy’s is a simple game conceptually. You’re a security guard watching over a small Chuck E. Cheese-knockoff called Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. The restaurant is complete with its own team of animatronic mascots, only there’s one hitch: they all run rampant at midnight. Left to their own devices, they’ll kill anyone they don’t recognize as their own. Armed with a CCTV system, hallway lights, and doors all powered by a shitty battery, you must survive for six (in-game) hours five nights in a row.

I refuse to play the game mainly for my own inability to handle jump scares that the game relies heavily upon. Give me a creepy atmosphere and some disturbing images and I’m ready to roll; have a zombie girl pop out of a closet and I’ll exit the room and go off the grid. I can’t handle it. And since most of Five Nights’ tension draws from the threat of a ratty animatronics getting up in your grill, I’m not about to install the game on my hard drive.

That’s not to say the game doesn’t do a creepy atmosphere or disturbing images. The fixed perspectives of the video cameras give snapshots of each of the different rooms in the restaurant, which are all what you would see at a children’s restaurant. Tables lined with party hats, a stage populated by anthropomorphic bandmates—these are images that starkly contrast the stories we hear on the answering machine from the previous guard. He alludes to a “bite” by one of the animatronics that left one guest brain damaged. Then there’s the news clipping of children being lured and killed by someone dressed as Freddy himself. The game doesn’t depend entirely on the jump scare; it’s pasted together with a macabre atmosphere and sparse lighting.

There’s a reason I still haven’t completed Dead Space on the Xbox 360 or the Resident Evil remake on the GameCube. Or the Amnesia: The Dark Descent demo. For some, jump scares offer a euphoric after-feeling that I don’t experience. Instead, I feel the heart-jostling shock and lingering dread that makes every step all the more difficult. Why do I want to progress when I know there are more things to jump out at me and make me question if I no longer need to go to the toilet anymore. It’s the same reason I don’t see horror movies in theaters or duck my head down when the trailer for whatever Paranormal Activity sequel is playing. Then again, seeing horror movies in the theater is more of a social experience and the presence of friends can soften the scares. This is not a luxury afforded by playing a horror game. Survival horror games especially exploit your solitude. They know that you’re not in a room full of people. They know you’re sitting on a couch or a computer chair. They know you might have someone sitting close by, but they’re not there to help. You’re in this alone.

That being said, I’m genuinely considering giving money to Scott Cawthon, the game’s developer who made the game thanks to Steam Greenlight. All of my experience of the game is once removed via the magic of YouTube and user Markiplier’s channel. The game only costs $5—an impressively low cost for the experience the game offers. Even though it hasn’t been me at the controls, watching someone else play it has been a genuinely thrilling experience, even if Markiplier’s commentary does ease the tension significantly. Just don’t expect me to spend a few nights at Freddy’s. 

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.   

Believing in Destiny: Exploring Bungie's Strange New World

Master Chief could have always used a cape.

Destiny is the far future incarnation of our world, evolving with the intervention of alien technology. The old world is wasteland: you find rebirth in Old Russia, where rusted cars litter the landscape and wildlife slowly retakes the buildings that stand on it. A floating orb calls itself your “ghost” and directs you to safety. You have no idea what’s happening, but you’re not supposed to. You’ve been dead for a while.

The premise is hardly new territory. Hell, at times it feels like its older brother Halo. Waves of alien troops descend upon you from spaceships, shouting their strange guttural language. You are one of the select super soldiers tasked with protecting humanity. Only there are a great deal more of you, and you’re supposed to work together.

Here we have the similar gameplay as the Borderlands series, where you go out to explore and shoot the threatening wilds. Each successful hit puts up a number to let you know how much damage you’re dealing, and there’s satisfaction in making those numbers bigger with a headshot. You level up your character through frequent firefights punctuated with minibosses. These early missions don’t provide much variety beyond go to this point and interact with something or go to multiple points and interact with more things, though that might change as the game progresses. Progress seems to move more swiftly in some aspects, however, as you’re not tied to a town hub just to get rid of gear. Within the inventory menu, pressing a button breaks down a given item into “glimmer,” the game’s currency.

My experience has been pleasurable. I don’t stop every few seconds to think how Borderlands might have done something better, so some of those comparisons may be unfair. The controls feel tight and intuitive. Crouching while sprinting makes you slide across the ground, giving you an illusion of security as you scramble for cover. Access to iron sights offers varying levels of shot precision and control. Like the game’s story, a lot of this is nothing new, but it’s virgin territory for Bungie.

Even on the PS3, Destiny is a pretty game. Perhaps it’s simply the size of my TV, but I still like the way the game works. Compared to its predecessor Halo, the colors are earthier but still colorful. Blue lights shine everywhere like K-mart was responsible for the fall of civilization, but it’s not a silly aesthetic. The armor of certain characters appear to have some pseudo-fantasy feel to them, with fur collars and the like. It’s different enough from the gamut of sci-fi shooters to give the world its own unique flavor.

The game won’t be able to avoid Borderlands comparisons, which is a shame. Destiny does a lot that Borderlands and other shooters already did, except that it attempts to do it in a larger massively multiplayer scale. To what end this scale shall manifest is still unknown to me. Missions I’ve played are limited to three players, and though the game makes matches with other players working on the same level, it seems all too random. Whether it succeeds at its MMO-like aspirations has yet to be seen, however, since we’re still in beta. It’s clear they want this to be a social game, not quite like Halo and its matchmaking, but on that grander scale. As of right now, it doesn’t offer that sense of wonder that inspires and encourages exploration that so many MMORPGs offer, but then again that may change. Until then, I’ll continue to struggle with the game’s mechanical identity.  

Review: Teleglitch Die More Edition

You've been running for a while now. Your legs want to give out but you know you can't stop because to stop is to die. The chattering of the abominations hot on your heels change fight or flight to an act of both. You count three, no, six of them barreling down the hallway. You backpedal, pull out the shotgun slung over your shoulder and fire three successive blasts. Each shot cuts down one, but those that remain continue on to pursue. You could throw the canned meat, that usually slows them down. But you haven't eaten in some time. Or there's the cangun you improvised only moments ago. Rain a hail of hot nails upon your pursuers. But you might just kill yourself in the process.

I shouldn't have eaten that canned meat.

Teleglitch follows a long line of rogue-like games with an attitude that says, "If you die, that's it." It doesn't do anything as drastic as uninstall itself from your computer, but if you die in Teleglitch you just have to restart the game. Its expanded version, subtitled "Die More Edition" emphasizes the brutality of the charmingly simple game and, while mathematically speaking you may die more often in this new edition, you'd still die plenty in the original.

There is a story to the game that reveals itself through various computer terminals and a brief opening interlude. Get this: you're at a space colony and things go south fast. Dark matter swallows hallways and mutants and zombies of all sorts scour the corridors seeking flesh. They've got two items on the menu: canned meat and you.

The game's visuals are a pixelated simple feast. Character models differ just enough that you can tell the difference between you and them, but that's the only distinction you have to worry about. Some enemies are a bit bigger, so you can guess it's going to take a few extra shots (or stabs if you're out of ammo) to bring down. The camera hovers over the landscape like a voyeuristic drone watching a lone survivor narrowly avoid being a main course for a mutant social gathering. It zooms in and rotates depending on how big of a room you enter, which can get dizzying but is able to be turned off in the options. Your map is activated by hitting Tab and the camera zooming all the way out, revealing everything you've explored thus far and obscuring the unknown in a blanket of black. Everything outside the randomized corridors and rooms is that same absolute black, reinforcing a fear of the unknown. While traversing the facility, you might come across a hallway that ends in darkness with a strange colorful ripple on its surface. "Anomalies," they call them. I'll let you guess what happens when you walk into them.

For the average PC shooter fan, the controls are a walk in the park. WASD moves your character swiftly through the claustrophobic environments. Your mouse wheel picks a different item in your inventory like a shotgun or a medkit. Right mouse button aims. Left mouse button shoots. The way the Good Lord intended.

Then there's the C key. By default, this is the "Combine" key that allows you to combine different items in your inventory to make new tools or weapons. Combine a can of meat with some RDX_250 explosive and make the sophisticated "meattrap." Box of nails and some more RDX_250? Nailbomb. It doesn't have the engineering depth of a game like Minecraft, but it does add some survivalist flavor to a game where your second objective to hopping teleportation pads is to survive.

It's no Game of the Year contender, but it's a challenging and simple odyssey that proves it's well worth its cost. You can pick it up on Steam for $3.25, where it normally retails for $12.99.

Why Assassin's Creed is Dumb (Spoilers if You Actually Care About That Sort of Thing)

What's with the Jolly--ooo I see what they did.

I'll fess up now: I've only played the first Assassin's Creed game in its entirety, the one where you're the American-sounding Arabian assassin with a baller hood and parkour moves to boot. It was okay. It took me a while, but only because I got bored with it. It's not a terrible game, and indeed the gameplay was good enough that they recycled it with a little bit extra for four more games with a fifth one coming soon. I just found the story dull, the gameplay repetitive, and HOLY GOD IS ALTAIR A TERRIBLE PROTAGONIST.

As is his descendant, who you also play as in all of the games. I dreaded the intervals where you're cooped up in a sterile-looking penthouse between pseudo-time-traveling. You have two things you can do: move your character and press a button. Any button. They'll all do the same thing, assuming you've encountered something you can interact with like strange writings or a person. Most of those intermissions are spent conversing with that lady from Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and all of those sequences are boring. Yes, they serve to further the plot. But never mind is the plot silly and convoluted for the sake of being convoluted.

In these games, you either play as Desmond, just some modern day dude who gets caught up in a secret war between the Assassins and the Templars. Oddly enough, the Assassins are the "good" guys, but that's just because between them and the Temples Templars, they're the less dickish. The Temptations Templars want to rule the world because that's a convenient motive for bad dudes. But you don't just play as Desmond, you also play as one of his several ancestors who--get this--were all Assassins. Crazy, no? And the way the game explains is that you're tapping into Desmond's genetic memories to, uh, learn stuff. I guess. It was to find a relic in the first game, I think it's to learn how to become an Assassin in the third game. Don't ask me about the rest. The third one wasn't too clear either.

Of the games I've played, Desmond seems to be progressively groomed to be the savior of humanity from the Temps and their diabolical designs. The second game's intro gives Desmond a little bit more to do, like beat up some innocent security guards hired on by the Evil Templar Organization because somebody wants a little taste of freedom. Desmond gets to do more than just talk to Sarah Marshall; he gets to punch some guys.

Already, it's a step up from the first game's modern day interludes, but it's still not great. Desmond is still uninteresting and clueless (granted, it picks up right at the end of the first game), and despite being voiced by everybody's favorite voice actor Nolan North, he has the charisma of a fake potted plant. The long-ass introduction with Desmond from the beginning of Assassin's Creed III doesn't help things, although given my ignorance of the end of AC II and the everything of AC Brotherhood and AC Revelations, I missed where the weird got turned up.

Yup. Weirder than genetic memory.

But in the process, they also picked up a new cast member, everybody's favorite interdimensional godlike manchild from Star Trek: The Next Generation, John De Lancie.

Q, now with 100% more goatee.

But he doesn't have his mystical Q powers in this as far as I can tell, and he's only there to be the hard-to-impress dad to Desmond's angst-ridden son. Again, I missed some things so maybe the father-son dynamic is more worthy of my emotional investment than I'm giving it credit. But then again, this game is from the same makers as Assassin's Creed with Most Boring Video Game Protagonist of 2007, Altair. 

So good of an Assassin he doesn't have a face.

So we have a fourth game coming up, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag (pictured at the top). As you can probably tell, it's about pirates, which sounds promising. But so did III with its Revolutionary War backdrop, until it killed the entire series for me. As I mentioned before, you play as at least two different characters in these games, Desmond, and some random descendant. Desmond's plotline serves as a pointless frame in which, honestly, if ditched could improve the games ten fold. An argument could be made that the cuts to modern day from the first Assassin's Creed were to help the pacing and give players respite from the action. Except there isn't much action. The parkour movement gets stale after you realize that all you're doing is holding a button down with an additional button if you want to move faster. The missions are identical: kill this bad dude and escape the guards. The extras are all scavenger hunts that aren't remotely interesting because, get this, to do find stuff you have to hold a button down for an extended amount of time. It's a boring sandwich with slightly less boring meat (or vegetables if you're awful). 

In III, you again play as Desmond and, get this, some rad English Assassin named Haytham who's gotta take some targets out in the Colonies. And he's pretty alright. It might be the accent, but he's already a load better than Altair and an improvement over the rich boy Assassin of AC II. He's interesting. He's got a three-corner hat. He hooks up with a Native American lady. He turns out to be a Templar. Damn, didn't see that one coming. And I don't mean that in the good way. If there's anything I learned from my college creative writing classes (except that I don't like a lot of creative writing students), it's that you can't be coy with your readers, and Ubisoft, the first few hours of your game is a hot mess of coy sauce. It's at that point that you start playing as his European-Mohawk offspring, Connor. And it's at that point I stopped.

Nothing against playing as that character (except that he's a kid and one of your training missions is a game of hide and seek), but it's then when everything takes a dive. One of the characters you associated with as Haytham is a premium buttpipe, but only after you encounter him as Connor. Maybe the last few years corrupted him, but it's still a stark contrast to what we saw of him pre-Connor. 

I felt burned. Duped. Like I'd been played with a plot line sleight of hand that had picked my precious time from my back pocket. The game's dull framing narrative was bad enough, but then they took away a protagonist I actually enjoyed playing as. Maybe Connor would grow on me if I kept playing, but I don't have it in me to give the game another chance. Assassin's Creed IV comes out near the end of October. It's got pirates, and from what I've read Desmond is dead at the end of III so that's a vast improvement. 

I'm looking forward to not finishing it.

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.