Words
I’m a writer, so I write. Aside from reporting regularly for Gamefreaks and writing a community blog on Destructoid, I’m also all over the internet and the printed page. For a full list of the misshapen verbal contortions inflicted on the world, check out this sexy page.
But if you’re a clever type of person, just read below for some samples of my work:
Beginning with B
Grand Theft Auto IV
Metroid Primology
Dead Rising, Society Falling
District 9 is Playing Games
Beginning with B
I’m Batman.
Sorry I’ve kept it from you for so long. I wanted to tell you, but Alfred said it would ruin the mysterious brooding hero aesthetic. Whatever. He’s just jealous of my high tech, bat-themed gadgets (batarang, bat-vision, bat-plane, batcave), sexy fighting skills, unmatched intellect, cool costume, awesome car and manly jawline.
Last night I had to take the Joker to Arkham Asylum after I caught him being a very naughty boy at the mayor’s office. Unfortunately it was a trap, and as soon as we got inside he escaped and took over the asylum. I kept telling everyone it was probably a trap, and then it was totally a trap. I have bat-smarts. His loopy girlfriend, Harley Quinn, was there too, along with a bunch of other psychos I am directly or indirectly responsible for creating. I have made Gotham safer by forcing the criminals to dress in more identifiable clothing.
Like last night when I managed to drop down like a flying ninja and grab a joker henchman by the throat without making a sound. I hung him from a gargoyle like a pinata, then dropped him onto another guy. Then all the rest of them started freaking out like “Oh god he’s here!” and “Where did he go?!” and their heart rates went through the roof. I know because I checked them with my bat-vision. Did I mention that I have bat vision? I do.
Arkham is beautiful at night. It was nice to take a break from being awesome and just look out over the island. It would be a nice place to live if it weren’t full of the worst supercriminals in history.
And then came Scarecrow, that jerk. He kept gassing me with gas and sending me spiralling into madness by forcing me to relive the deaths of my parents. I hate it when that happens. He was also a giant for some reason. Don’t do drugs, kids.
Joker managed to take over the whole asylum and enact some sort of plan involving mutants and flowers. That guy is pretty crazy. He kept pestering me over the speaker system with that creepy laugh. For some reason it made me think of Star Wars. Now for some bat-sleep.
Borderlands now. I just got this game. You’re a treasure hunter on an alien planet which supposedly has a secret vault somewhere containing all the most awesome things in the universe – mostly cash. It looks a little bit like Fallout. Okay, it looks a lot like Fallout, but only if you took away all the depressing end-of-civilisation stuff, added more than three colours and replaced “talk to everyone in town” with “shoot everything, and then shoot everything again”.
Borderlands has a lot of guns. By which I mean it has potentially infinite guns. Firearms are randomly generated from a list of parts, meaning you get something different every time. So far I have been given a pistol with a sniper scope, a sniper rifle made of wood with a revolver chamber and a small yellow gun that shoots fireballs. Early days though, I have been assured that you can find machine guns that shoot electric rockets, among other things.
The single player quest can also be played cooperatively with friends. Players can drop in and out of each other’s games whenever they like, helping them with quests and generally messing about. The game records which quests you help a friend with and changes your own game to reflect that. Borderlands is all about loot, so if you both find a particularly shiny piece of stuff, you can enter a duel and fight for the treasure. My gamertag on Xbox Live is Zwuh if you fancy an adventure.
And I just picked up a grenade that shoots more grenades when it blows up, so if you’ll excuse me…
Grand Theft Auto IV
A man walks down the street wearing a brown tracksuit and old running shoes. He has the face of Eastern Europe, and his features speak of a long and difficult life. He pushes his way past a homeless drunk, who loudly announces his displeasure but soon returns to locating a nearby gutter. The tracksuit man begins crossing the road, but stops halfway and seems to survey his surroundings. Traffic begins to back up. A woman in a family sedan leans on her horn and yells expletives at the man in brown standing in the street. He moves beside her car and opens the door. Pointing a stolen handgun at her temple, he forces her out and assumes control of the vehicle. A police car travelling down a side street has noticed the commotion and flips on its siren.
The man in the sedan glances sideways at the sound before speeding off. A chase is conducted at high speed, the lead car frantically weaving in and out of heavy afternoon traffic. Unable to lose his new friend, the driver smashes the car window with a free elbow and leans out with loaded gun ready. Glancing back to fire pot shots at the police car, he failsto see that a blue convertible – its driver busy on his mobile – has trundled onto the next intersection. As the cars collide, the man in the brown tracksuit is propelled through the sedan’s windscreen and into the air. His broken body rolls onto the footpath and is stopped dead by the outer wall of an Italian restaurant. His lifeless body is left buried in a pile of garbage as the world turns grey.
Good thing the medical care in Liberty City is world-class.
If I had to describe Grand Theft Auto IV (Rockstar – PS3, Xbox 360, PC) in one word, it would probably be ‘ugly’. Nico Bellic is an unattractive man in a messy situation who has come to a dirty city because of his slimy cousin and some filthy Russians. The end result of all this ugliness, paradoxically, is a work of great beauty.
GTA IV focuses on Nico’s story from the moment he steps off the boat as an illegal immigrant in the middle of the night and sets foot on American SoilTM. His cousin Roman has regaled him with stories of his fantastic life in the good old U.S. of A, and promised him a piece of the pie. However, in the grand tradition of GTA characters being shown the knob end of life, on arrival this is quickly exposed as a creative reimagining of reality – Roman works as a taxi driver, lives in an apartment so dirty even dirt wouldn’t live there, and owes dangerously large debts to murderous people. So you lead Nico on a series of adventures which are less about climbing the criminal ladder – as in previous instalments – and more about not falling off.
The core gameplay – i.e. driving things and shooting stuff – in GTA IV is a slice of heaven (slice of heaven), especially when compared with previous games in the series. All the cars drive just realistically enough without sucking all the fun out of the experience. While the driving physics are a lot less arcade-styled than other GTA games – making things a lot more difficult before you adjust – the frustration of constant crashes is tempered by the fact that the next armed hijacking is only a few steps away. A good variety of vehicles is available – from hummers to scooters – and they all drive as you think they would in your head. Bizzarely, the best feature added to the new version is the ability for people in head on crashes to fly through their windscreen and splatter on the pavement – whether this is great because it adds realism or because I’m a sadistic madman is a moot point.
Anyone who has played any Grand Theft Auto will remember that gunplay, while fun, was never the mechanical strong point of the series. Gunfights have generally boiled down to screaming mother-themed insults at the screen as your thumbs epileptically strafed the controller. Luckily, improvements have been made, with an auto-aiming system which lets you switch between enemies with a flick of the stick, and the ability to aim at specific body parts (usually the head). There is also a cover system which lets Nico butt up against the nearest piece of whatever by pressing a button, making gunfights pretty exciting and tactical instead of a horrible sidetrack to car chases.
The missions, as always, are many and varied, with your standard “go here to do this but then oh god it has all gone wrong shoot your way out and chase this guy” fare mixed in with escort missions, assassinations, races and the occasional same sex dating experience. Some of them are quite epic in scope, and will have you traipsing all over the city to get things done. One potential sadness is that while the missions are always interesting and well thought out, there is less of the flair and madness than previous games. It fits perfectly with the more subdued and realistic tone of the game and story not to be able to parachute jump from a jumbo jet, but it cuts out some of the wacky fun factor.
Some would argue that the real meaty centre of a GTA game has always been the time-wasting shit you can do on the side. There’s been a lot of divided opinion on this, while they have pared down the amount of useless crap you can do to kill time in the game, what is left has been expanded and more fully realised. There are no longer a huge selection of vehicular emergency challenges, there’s no sign of any hidden packages (although you can hunt down all the flying rats in the city), and you can’t go to the gym to oil your pectorals. On the flipside, you can ring up anyone you know on your in-game cellphone and have them come out with you for a game of pool, a drink, or a trip to the local strip club. This sort of thing all contributes to the game world feeling incredibly alive – although the constant bothering from your cousin wanting to go bowling while you’re trying to eliminate bitches or surf porn can be grating. Any of the aformentioned activities can also be done alone of course – drinking, getting lap dances, watching TV, going to a comedy club to watch a motion-captured Ricky Gervais insult foreigners, and propositioning dockyard prostitutes, to name but a few. Sadly, there was no function to write an in-game blog, or poop, so here I am back in the real world.
What makes all of this more than just an enjoyable distraction, though, are the characters and the atmosphere. Nico is one of the most fully realised characters I have seen in any form of entertainment. The struggle to overcome his unpalatable past (the details of which are kept artfully vague) and make a new life for himself in America is moving, and when he fails due to circumstance or the actions of others, we feel for his plight and share his delight in exacting revenge and mayhem. The cast of characters which surround him are fantastic as well, more rounded and flawed than you can find in a boxload of blockbuster films. A personal favourite is Brucie – a fitness nut with a hyperactive personality and a CAN-DO-MOTHER-FUCKER attitude. But he’s not gay, man. Brucie doesn’t do that sort of thing. It would disappoint the ladies.
The graphics look beautiful, even on a regular television, with just enough stylised touches to maintain the hyper-real GTA feeling. The voice work is also impressive, with each face given an appropriate vocal, and much of the humour and characterisation in the game coming from the verbal exchanges.
But the real star is Liberty City, the filthy whore has my heart. It’s pretty, sure. But the city in the game is a real presence, to the point where you could easily call it a character in and of itself. Where in previous open world games the city is relegated to a (sometimes pretty) bystander, a place for things to happen, Liberty feels like a place which happens whether you are around or not. People bustle to and fro, heading to work or their house in the suburbs, or to rob the corner store. Dirt and leaves blow across the streets and disrupt piles of trash. Clouds roll in and pelt the streets with rain. Minor car accidents draw crowds and police as you run by. The attention to detail is much appreciated and sets a new standard for immersion – it’s interesting to have the urge to sit and watch a digital sunset on an imaginary rooftop.
Hell, there are a billion other things I’ve failed to mention. The dozen or so quality radio stations, all with a heap of tracks to keep you humming or talkback to tickle your laughing stick. Helicopter tours of the city. Decking yourself out in a 1970s vintage black suit and furry Russian hat. Online multiplayer mayhem through the city streets. Punching hobos.
Rockstar should be congratulated for creating a game that can more accurately described as an experience. Switching on the console feels like stepping right off that rusty boat and into a new world. So do whatever the fuck you want!
Metroid Primology
If you like old things repackaged as shiny new things, then Nintendo loves you in your private game bits. High on the success of their plan to release ancient Gamecube titles as new Wii games by slapping the phrase NEW PLAY CONTROL! on the front of the box, those clever sprockets have… done the same thing with a different game. This time it may well be awesome, however. Because it’s Metroid.
Metroid Prime, actually.
All three of the games in the Metroid Prime series are to be released on a single disc for the Wii around August 24th, 2009. The first two games – Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime: Echoes – have been rejigged with Wiimote functionality, while Metroid Prime 3: Corruption has been included to mock people who already bought it.
All three games will be accessible via the main menu, letting you jump in and out at the press of a few buttons. There will also be achievements (and possibly other things) to unlock by completing parts of the games.
For fans (like me) this is a great chance to replay three great games. The Prime series has given us some of the better games on both the Wii and Gamecube. For newbies, it’s a chance to not suck and be lame, finally. At only the price of a single new game, it’s almost a good deal. Buy it anyway.
Dead Rising, Society Falling
Welcome to Willamette, Colorado! On entering this lovely town your first thought will be “hey, what a lovely town” followed closely by “where can I get some stylish consumer products?” Not to worry, just head on over to the Willamette Mall for all your shopping needs. You’ll meet new people and have loads of fun, but always remember: braaaaaaains…
Dead Rising (Capcom – Xbox 360) casts you as Frank West, a man of incomparable physical and mental density. Frank is a photojournalist who receives an anonymous tip suggesting something is going down—old school—in the town of Willamette. When he arrives he is greeted by proverbial hordes of undead, a mall filled with survivors (for the moment) and a deepening mystery. You’re tasked with finding out the truth behind the outbreak, saving the remaining humans, and—above and beyond everything else—surviving the mayhem.
How you do that, surprisingly, is largely up to you. There is a 72 hour time limit (in-game time) which will have you running around like a crazy person the first time around, until you realise that it’s actually pretty generous. The main plot of the game plays out at scheduled times during the three day horror, and Frank is given a reasonable amount of time to hobble to the right location. Between these compulsory events there is often time to kill (wit) which you can fill any number of ways, from saving survivors to wiping out the living dead en masse.
Which is what you’re really here for, right?
Pretences about story aside, Dead Rising offers you a huge map filled to the brim with rotting corpses and copious potential weapons. The sheer amount of zombies on screen at once would make George A Romero mess his pants with excitement. There can be hundreds of bodies shuffling on screen at once, all of them well modelled and with enough variety to really sell the idea that a whole town has gone to hell. As the game progresses so do the numbers of zombies, until by the end you are getting very friendly with a lot of new (dead) people. This overflowing zombie party is the reason this game moves from ‘good’ to ‘tha mofokin shizzy’—there’s just nowhere else you can get the real feeling of being plonked in the middle of a zombie invasion.
Luckily, Frank has two hands and no brain, so you are able to utilise everything the mall has to offer as a weapon—and everything, for once, is almost true. Recently described by a friend as “the game that lets you pick up the junk other games don’t”, most everyday objects you would find in a mall are available for killing corpses. Sure, there are the usual suspects: a baseball bat, iron pipe, the odd handgun. But there are also paint cans, mannequin torsos, teddy bears, sledgehammers, park benches, soda cans, frying pans, coat hangers, lawnmowers, tasers, water guns, buckets, aluminium shelving, cardboard boxes, handbags, bowling balls, severed hands, HD-TVs, shopping trolleys, cash registers, handfuls of diamonds, gumball machines, soccer balls, breadsticks, chainsaws, air-conditioner vents and my personal favourite, the post-hole digger. These objects (and more!) can be picked up and used to inflict various forms and levels of pain on unsuspecting bodies. The baseball bat, for example, is a standard swing-and-hit weapon, the shopping trolley can be pushed through a crowd of zombies to knock them all down (while shouting ‘wheeee’) and the bowling ball can be lined up and tossed to scatter a group, or swung at speed to crush some heads. Each weapon has its own level of damage and speed, and they are generally found where you would expect—toys in a toy shop, guns in a gun shop, you get the idea.
It’s not all weaponry in the mall, though. If and when you get ravaged by zombie teeth and arms, you need to eat food of some kind to heal up. There is quite a selection too, and all these also have varying degrees of effectiveness. Being set in a mall, there are also clothes. Frank loves clothes, although he tries to hide it with his macho-man exterior. All the clothing and accessory stores in the game give Frank some option to change his appearance, including hair colour, sunglasses and footwear. Yes, cross-dressing happens, because I know you were asking. You can make our hero look as mentally unstable or painfully ridiculous as you want.
In the midst of all the blood and intestinal fluids, the other thing which will endear you to Dead Rising is the characters. They come in many forms—from the heroes, villains and ambiguous of the plot, to the pathetic and often hilarious survivors you are tasked with rescuing (if you choose). And of course, Frank West. Our boy is worth mentioning for his complete disregard of heroic convention. Basically, he’s an ugly, ex-jock who isn’t particularly bright or even likeable. Oddly, this is a nice change from the usual athletic and clean cut models which strut haughtily through many games. Plus, he’s covered wars, you know.
The other standout performers are the Psychopaths. These are people from the mall and the town driven mad by the whole zombie deal—and mad is an understatement. They’re fucking bonkers. Each one also works as a game boss of sorts, confronting Frank in various places and forcing a deadly battle. One of my favourites is the supermarket manager, so obsessed with his store that he remakes a trolley into a Mad Max style death cart and tries to run you down in the produce aisle.
Zombie fiction is never about the zombies. In the end it should be an excuse for psychological drama, and Dead Rising seems to know this. Even though the acting and dialogue are warm cheese, they never go far enough that you are disconnected from the tales of the people (and cheese is delicious). The undead are best when just used as an obstacle to a goal and a reason for people to lose their nut.
But all mindless blood sports have downsides, and Dead Rising has flaws. First there’s the difficulty: it’s DIFFICULT. First time players will get used to the angry red fail screen, as Frank starts out as a ridiculously weak Nancy-boy. For most it will be impossible to move on without levelling up first—which can thankfully be done by restarting the game at any time while retaining your current level. Things get a bit easier once you can come to grips with the controls and learn a few new moves.
There is only one save slot, meaning you can only have one game in progress (per profile) at a time. The in-game text is very small, which is no problem for those who have a sugar daddy willing to spring for that widescreen plasma, or bionic eyeballs, but the rest of us have to squint until our sockets bleed.
Luckily, the only thing you will miss reading is the incessant bother-calls from your radio. Your control room contact is Otis, one of the maintenance guys, and he will call you to let you know about missions and side-quests. He’ll also call to tell you about the benefits of eating, where to find cool clothes, and how fucking important it is to practice good oral hygiene when meeting foreign diplomats. These calls can be ignored, except that he will keep on ringing and ringing until you pick up, and if you hang up on him (accidentally or otherwise) he’ll call you right back, berate you for being an anti-social dick, and then go right back into the same conversation. Nothing more fun than being neck deep in zombie death when Otis dials in to let you know there are great shops in the Plaza to update your look.
The only other important niggle is in the survivor escort missions. The people following you to safety are afflicted with terminal idiocy, and will often run screaming into a sea of zombies so they can promptly die. The only thing stopping you from shooting them your damn self is the yummy experience points they give you in exchange for a safe trip.
These are small issues, though, when the whole experience is so super fun. The game picks up the zombie concept and runs with it in all the right directions—great characters, enigmatic plot, bucket loads of undead and approximately one billion ways to deal with them. Adding to this with the countless stupid outfits and a quite-fun survival mode, Dead Rising feels like a regular game with all the cool shit already unlocked. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go wear a horse’s head and spit on some corpses.
District 9 is Playing Games
On the weekend I went to see District 9, the sci-fi film/social comment by director Neill Blomkamp. The film chronicles the fate of a bumbling bureaucrat in South Africa who is put in charge of evicting aliens (yes, space aliens) from their refugee camp in Johannesburg. Twenty-eight years earlier their ship broke down over the city and the people and the government are sick of having dirty space aliens all over their land. Chaos and insights into the nature of humanity ensue. If you haven’t gone to see it yet, I highly recommend it. Five thumbs up.
(The wife thought it was a crap-burger with lame sauce and a side of fail fries, but she can get her own damn blog.)
But what you may feel as you sit passively with your eyes directed at the theatre screen, is that you suddenly want to play a game. More than that, you might start to think that, beyond all reason, District 9 kind of feels like it already is a game. Don’t fight it, you are not alone.
After the film, I wanted to sprint home and kill some virtual dudes. Imagine my surprise when I loaded up Halo and discovered (although it may be no surprise to Halo fanatics) that Neill Blomkamp has also directed a set of short films as a marketing lead-up for Halo 3. Snap. He was also attached to the dismal failure of the Halo feature film, before it dismally failed. The man is clearly something of a nerd in the area of video games.
So the film is a game disguised as a film. There will be spoilers if you haven’t seen the film. Massive spoilers.
Thematically, District 9 is dripping with gaming cliches – particularly of the first-person shooter persuasion. Ever played the game where you play an ordinary guy who is thrust into events beyond his understanding, meets some aliens, teams up with them and Fights The Power? Or the one where someone is infected with an alien virus or DNA and is then forced into conflict with government forces and gangs?
Aforementioned ‘ordinary guy’ forced to take action, quite-human-like alien with a heart of gold, authority figure who betrays the main character, aggressive mercenary who is also a total jerk (and a racist, just in case you didn’t want him to die enough). All that’s missing is a data relay person talking through your communicator watch – pick either a hot, bespectacled young female or a cocky male geek with a goatee.
The way the film plays out, with an ever increasing tension and ever-bloodier firefights, lends itself very well to the idea of discrete levels in a video game. If that isn’t blatant enough for you, some of the gunfights have cuts to a literal gun-camera, leaving you half expecting a health bar to pop up. On top of that, our intrepid hero – infected with that pesky alien sauce – goes through a gradual transformation which eventually lets him use the previously useless alien weapons to go nuts. Level Up!
District 9 seems pretty cool when you see the giant, broken, alien mothership hovering over downtown Johannesburg. Slowly you settle into the gritty realism of the government relocating giant insects, catching glimpses of futuristic looking alien weapons and enjoying the uncomfortable xenophobia. Then a couple of Nigerian gangsters get propelled through a wall. Someone starts tossing around grenades that explode in electrical mushroom clouds. Evil security forces are spontaneously combusted with energy rifles that shoot pure awesome. There are automatic rifles that set things on fire, and the fire is green for no reason.
Oh boy. What’s better than insectoid aliens with cool guns? A twelve-foot mechanical insectoid alien with built-in GPS, machine gun, six different weird ways to explode nearby humans, guided missiles, a localised gravity well that can attract and recycle other people’s bullets and double as a pig launcher, plus AM and FM radio bands. Yes, you do want to play with it.
It used to be a one way street – movies influence games to have longer cutscenes, more camera angles and dramatic pauses, and provide the material for disgustingly awful “movie-inspired games”. District 9 feels like a shift in the other direction.
Slightly unfortunate that a film about accepting and integrating with foreign cultures makes me want to shoot aliens to death.
