This Tragc Life of Mine

I am waiting patiently for Skyrim. The tragedy is that today, my day off this week, would have been a really great day to waste away playing through the first 8 or 9 hours. Instead, I cleaned the apartment and ran some errands. My leg will not rest.

THIS

Hope to be testing this out tomorrow night. Here's hoping my computer can handle it.

Fingers crossed!

Games From Whence I Came: EarthBound

One game that has undoubtedly had a huge influence on me and my tastes is SNES cult classic EarthBound. The old school RPG from Hal Laboratories and APE is, to this day, unlike anything else in games. I could go on all day long about the freaky stuff in that game from bubble monkeys to battling pukes, but instead, I'll talk about how the game makes sense. Despite everything being a mish mash of seemingly disconnected strangeness, every different curve ball the game throws at you just makes sense to a child's imagination. "Okay," the child thinks, "My best friends are a telepath, a genius inventor, and a karate man. Makes sense. There are friendly aliens who have a functioning society, but no arms. I like their buildings in the shapes of their faces. Of course the local gang leader has a giant robot tank. Duh!" Unlike the super realistic modern combat games that are the only thing kids can see when they walk into a game store anymore, this kind of madcap strangeness nurtures a child's imagination like nothing else.

(I'm not saying those soldier games are desensitizing kids to violence or anything, but I do want to go on the record that I think they've left an entire generation of kids thinking that head shots are the end all to humor and entertainment)

On the surface, all this stuff is pretty harmless and funny, so there's nothing to scare parents away from letting their kids enjoy this game, but the harmless facade belies a very serious story about innocence and goodness triumphing over pure evil when everything is on the line. Give this game to a kid who can read and he will enjoy this story and will be better and more mature for it.

Growing up I had tastes that most other kids didn't. I just liked anything that was weird. I attributed this to early encounters with EarthBound. Anytime I want to think of the most inspiring story of my youth, I recall four children who never hesitate to give up everything to travel to the future and face the heart of true evil, just because it is the right thing to do. EarthBound is the kind of story that defines you in the very best way.

The Binding of Issac

The Binding of Issac is a twin sticks shooter that takes place in procedurally generated Zelda-esque dungeons. Issac draws heavily on the Nintendo classic for inspiration, taking enemies, traps, locks mechanisms, bomb-able walls, and even some of the bosses seem very familiar. However, nothing about the game can be considered anything but unique. Any familiar shadow you may notice is just a shadow. Everything borrowed has been completely overhauled with the Team Meat Aesthetic.

The game play is carefully tuned to challenge and excite. The ability to shoot is limited to the cardinal directions, but can be angled by moving Issac while you shoot. This forces Issac to do lots of fancy strafing and gets him in the enemies line of fire. The rogue-like game play also has you carefully weighing your options and managing resources. All in all, the game play can get very hectic and tense, and carries a certain dramatic weight.

Very little is done in the way of traditional storytelling. A short cut scene at the beginning, and 5 second intermission between each level, and a short cut scene once you win. However, there is a story being told through the game play if you pay attention. Every power up changes Issac's appearance and by the end of the game he is totally unrecognizable, giving you an idea of how far he has come. And I mentioned earlier that the game play carries a dramatic weight that will have you on the edge of your seat.

The game is designed to be started and finished in about a half hour. But with unlockable characters and bosses, as well as a dozens of power ups to collect, this game will have something for you to enjoy long after you can reliably make it from start to finish.

My only complaint is they don't have game pad support for a twin sticks shooter. What's that about?

Real Life Games

Trying out Fitocracy this week. I'm a proponent of gamification. In just two days Fitocracy has motivated me to do more crunches than probably I have done in the collective rest of my life. I don't know that I have ever done a crunch before yesterday. It has always seemed like a good idea, but not good enough to until the promise of points was added to sweeten the deal. Not just points, but levels.

The levels add so much to the game of Fitocracy that I believe it makes the difference between a niche fad and a engine for cultural change. Adding levels to the game does two very important things to the idea of the game. Firstly, it shifts the competition from being high score centric to an RPG. Without levels, the game is just about high scores and highs cores allow there to be only one winner. By making the game an RPG it allows people to compete with themselves. It allows us to leave our flabby, unmotivated body, and inhabit the role of a body who has goals and knows how to reach those goals and motivate itself along that path. We are inhabiting a role within a game and it lends drama and purpose to all the otherwise insignificant small steps we need to get there.

The other thing levels do to the game, is it perpetuates a lie. And it does it beautifully. The lie is that if you stop working at your fitness for a day, a week, a month, a year, all the work you'd done will be there waiting for you to pick up where you left off. Even if you gain weight, you never lose points. It promotes lifetime fitness by saving your progress indefinitely. The body that Fitocracy players inhabit that I mentioned earlier, it is a static body, just like any character in an RPG.

The reason this is so important to the Fitocracy system is because there are two kinds of Fitocracy players. There are the kinds of players who are like the games creators. The players who don't need the motivation, the ones who were playing it anyway. The ones who powerlift and want to sculpt their bodies.The ones who can realistically aim for the high score of such a huge game. The other type of player is like me, who just wants to do a little bit to look good and improve their health. The casual Fitocracy player who needs the motivation inherent in the system to get into shape.

These casual fitness players need not only to be able to compete with themselves, but they need to be able to let fitness slide away at times of their life and be able to pick it up easily again. Coming back to fitness once you've let it fall off is perhaps the highest barrier in fitness. The levels make Fitocracy accessible to a fantastically more diverse player base. Not to say that Fitocracy doesn't do a lot to encourage consistency, experimentation and proper fitness practices, but its the little things that make the system accessible to people who can't treat the game like a boot camp that makes it, as I said before, an engine for societal change. I can' wait to see Fitocracy leave beta, and I hope it catches on and sweeps the nation.

Next

I just realized that these critiques would be easier to absorb if I broke them up into smaller posts, which will be easy, because they are already broken into small chunks.

My next game is Amnesia: the Dark Descent. I got it for 4 dollars as a part of the steam Halloween sale. Just in time too. I bought it on Halloween night. So far its pretty exceptional. I'll save my thoughts for another day though.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a Sci fi Action Stealth Game, which is normally pretty far outside my wheel house but turned out to be a pretty great game. In the graphics department it i very shiny and nice. The game play is solid and I never felt like the game was cheating me or the mechanics of the stealth didn't work or that the difficulty was balanced to heavily against me. The world of Deus Ex set in 2025 is a compelling detailed world and the protagonist was a well developed character you can project your values onto. Deus Ex does a lot of things right, but it also gets a few things really catastrophically wrong, and a few other things just a little bit wrong. Its certainly not my game of the year, but there's no denying its a title worth playing.

Mission Structure

My first problem with the game is the mission structure and the effects that has on the game. Every proper sneaking mission begins with Jensen getting briefed on what he needs to do and why, then he goes to an X on the map, learns a secret, goes to the next secret base. Obviously its a little more complex than that, but it doesn't take a wide leap of the imagination for anyone who's played it to dumb things down this way. I've already said I really enjoyed the game play, but there are a lot of missions in this game usually lasting from 30 minutes to an hour. That means hours and hours of basically the same task in different areas. I'd have no problem with this if they had only included something more engaging in each level. However, other than short snippets of dialog to update you objectives the characters make almost no effort to communicate with each other. All the missions add up to about 12 hours worth of narrative dead zones. I'm not even asking to be involved in the conspiracy story during these mission areas, I'm just asking to get to know the characters a little or at least have more engaging missions. Which brings me to my next gripe.

Lack of Character Development

Metal Gear Solid being the perfect example of how to develop your characters in a stealth action game, was very smart about providing the player with characters they could relate to or at least come to like. They had no problem stopping the action to get to know your supporting characters. I get the impression MGS heavily influenced this game, so its surprising they don't do a better job of fleshing out their characters. Jensen and his tech support guy Francis Pritchard have a relationship that starts out with snide insults, but eventually they start to like each other and they have a nice moment near the end of the game. Also, your company pilot, Faridah Malik, is probably my favorite character in the whole game and they do actually take some time to let you get to know her and they deliver some pretty powerful scenes focused on her that I wont spoil here. Besides your main character Adam Jensen that is the whole list of well developed characters in Deus Ex:HR.

It took me till the end of the game to realize it, but when the final credits rolled I realized I wasn't really invested in the characters of this story. The game is so focused on augmentation and conspiracies and their effects on society, they never get around to telling you the stories of the fascinating three dimensional characters who drive the story forward. I feel like the dimensions are there though. There are persuasion battles which have you breaking down a characters personality and telling them what they want to hear, and someone took the time to write a thousand little emails that help us picture what daily life was like in the labs and factories and secret bases we're stealthing through. But characters like David Sarif are too busy keeping secrets to engage you in any way, and the one character you want to see the entire game, Jensen's Ex-girlfriend Megan Reed, only shows her face for a few minutes at the end of the game.

I would have like this world more if Jensen let his guard down a little and made a few friends during his missions, and like I said earlier, there was plenty of time for it.

The Boss Fights

All four of the boss fights felt very displaced from the rest of the game. In a game about game play choices, you'd think you'd have a little more options here. But I've already talked about how the boss game play is all botched up. I wanted to take this space to mention how they are awful from a storytelling perspective. Being an elite mercenary hit squad, you'd think they have better things to do than lurk around labs and supervise prisoners, and yet, they just seem to be standing around waiting for you to show up whenever you encounter them. The game makes no effort to explain who they are or why they hate you. The second boss seems to have some unexplained power to stop Eliza from talking to you, but they never really explain how that works. And what about the third boss and his stupidly delivered final words "Men like us never get back the things we love." Which he says to Jensen right before Jensen heads down a corridor and gets back the thing he loves. They're not just poorly crafted fights, they're idiotically obtuse characters who serve no purpose in the game. I'd rather have fought deadly robots.

Also, and this is funny so soon after fighting Bioshock's boss, but the final boss of Deus Ex is broken. Because the game had been loading you up on high powered guns for the entire last level, you should have no problem disabling the robots in this fight. The only other danger is the electric floors. They have an Aug for that. You can be totally immune to the only dangerous thing in the final boss fight.

What Deus Ex: HR Does Right

Like I said before, the game play is very tight and the different options they provide for achieving your goals make exploration and replay a worthwhile experience.

The story of Earth 2025 is excellently delivered through the details of the world. The Hub City intermissions in Detroit and Hengsha will take hours to explore fully and each part of the level shows you something different about the state of the world in 2025. Just by exploring Detroit you can discover that the economy is in the trash, apartment buildings have been taken over by gun toting squatters, people are living in the sewers, warring gangs control an entire portion of the city, and all that in spite of Detroit being home to the corporate headquarters of the second largest biotechnology corporation in the world.

All the details of the game create an interesting world to frame the morale choice at the end of the game, which will tell you something about yourself and about your faith in humanity

The few characters that Deus Ex takes the time to flesh out are very nice characters. They aren't able to shine as much as I'd like since they aren't given a lot of time to interact, Jensen is a good leading man who the player can project his or her values onto.

Strong Female Character?!

I mentioned earlier that I really liked Faridah Malik, partly because she is the only likable person Jensen knows, but mostly because she is pretty awesome. What makes a strong female character and how does Malik fit the bill? Well, immediately upon meeting her she is friendly, interested in your feelings, and attractive without being a slut. Plus she give you rides and stuff. Malik also gives you a side quest where you get to know her a little better while investigating the death of one of her close friends. During the mission you get to see that Malik is compassionate, loving, resourceful, and just plain cool as you help her get some Hengsha style Street Justice.

Remember when I said I wasn't going to spoil the great scene involving Malik?

!Massive Spoiler Alert!

In one scene, she is forced to make an emergency landing while riding you to china. On the ground she is attacked by a dozen heavily armed men and a robot. You have the option of sneaking through and sacrificing her as your diversion, in which case you have to helplessly watch her die, execution style, at the hands of the Mercenary leader. If you choose to stay and fight, you have about 1 minute to disable all the dozen men and the giant robot. If you choose the safe route, you get to watch a powerful moment of the game, and if you choose to stay you get to play a powerful moment of the game because the game makes it clear, a life you care about it is on the line and the fight won't be easy.

Malik is very composed through the whole thing, encouraging you not to face insurmountable odds, sacrificing herself for your sake. I'm glad they let you save her because she certainly doesn't deserve to die. Despite being one degree away from being an unimportant tertiary character, I would put Faridah Malik on the same pedestal of Strong Female Video Game characters as Alex Vance and Samus Aran. She is compassionate, fun loving, resourceful, talented, fearless, avoids being annoying or unhelpful, and most importantly, she has dignity in the face of certain death. If Deus Ex: HR isn't a win for women in video games I don't know what is.

Review

Deus Ex is a good game with solid mechanics and an incredible, detailed world, but the narrative isn't strong enough to warrant 30+ hours of game. Unless you're really into morale choice, this game isn't something you need to rush to complete. The story is in the details, so take your time and absorb everything or you wont be getting the full Deus Ex experience. If you need a character driven narrative though, this story isn't for you. If stealth is what you're into, then it's playable and re-playable and you'll certainly be getting a lot for your money. Despite a few glaring flaws, I give it a thumbs up for the things it does amazingly well.