T w e n t y S i d e d
I hope you’re enjoying these because they’re fun to write and I’m not inclined to stop.
Best Writing of 2009
As a counter to the silly list of laughable writing lauded by the Writer’s Guild, I suppose I should provide my own list of games. I’m not going to limit my list to members of a particular union, but instead I’ll simply look for stuff that’s actually good.
In no particular order:
Dragon Age
Not the best work BioWare has ever done, but it was a decent yarn with some fun characters.
Secret of Monkey Island
Hey, a re-release is still a release. Aside: Oh delight and rapture, the re-release was wonderful.
Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled
Okay, I worked on this one so I should disqualify it. Still, if you’re into Final Fantasy 4 style jRPG games, this one should do nicely.
Lord of the Rings Online
Not a 2009 release, but as an MMO it’s always under development. I saw it for the first time in 2009, so it’s new as far as I’m concerned.
I could rip the game to bits for all of the crazy compromises it makes to shoehorn MMO gameplay into a setting that was almost completely at odds with such a concept. I still get a little crazy if I think about it too much.
But they were careful to honor the language, the lands, and the tone of the original work. Considering the origin of the books as a linguistics project, this is quite fitting. They were faithful where possible, and made compromises when they had to. In the end they managed to adapt Middle Earth to the often absurd world of MMO gameplay while preserving its dignity. This is a great accomplishment and there are precious few developers who could hope to do as well.
Dear Esther
Okay, I’m clearly cheating now. Dear Esther came out in 2008. I played it for the first time a few months ago, and it haunted me for days. It’s a free mod for Valve’s Source Engine.
The game doesn’t fit into any existing genre. I guess I’d call it an exploration narrative.
Champions Online
HAHAHAHAHAHA!
Whoops. Need to take my inhaler. Just laughed myself into an asthma attack.
While I’m doing that, go ahead and nominate games you thought were well written. The rules:
1) The game must be from 2009
2) Or not.
Lumines
I was serious when I likened Lumines to Tetris. The elegance of the gameplay has a “why didn’t anyone think of this before?” thing going on. Simple. Pure. Captivating.
Having said that, I think the game fails at a couple of crucial points. In its natural state, the game is a system of organizing binary data in time to electronic music. This game is essentially a drug for people with my particular mental makeup. The mixture of left brain provocation (introducing disorder to a system which the player must combat through sorting) and right brain stimulation (the music) is the kind of thing that causes me to completely lose track of time.
The problem comes with the different “skins” in the game. Every three-ish minutes, the game completely re-invents itself. The pieces change color and appearance. The music changes. The animated background changes. The rhythm changes. Most of these skins are like this one:
Stolen Pixels #163: The Luminous Master
This comic is a little more autobiographical than the previous 162.
I’ll be posting my brief review of the game later today.
Writers Guild Announces Best Game Writing Nominations
I really thought this story was a troll or a joke. But no, the Writers Guild of America announced its five nominations for the Videogame Writing Award of 2009, and their picks are the following:
X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Activision)
So you’re going to nominate a videogame tie-in for a movie which itself wasn’t very successful and was dinged for various things that all boil down to bad storytelling.
Let’s look at a couple of reviews. No, I’m not going to some indie site like this one where story snobs are always ranting about how characters need clear motivation and plots need continuity. Everyone knows we’re crazy. Let’s go to the big reviewers, who are more likely to overlook this sort of business:
IGN:
The story is baffling, even next to the movie, which says a lot.
And Gamespot:
You play as the titular Marvel mutant, with the game’s muddled storyline mimicking and expanding on events in the movie of the same name. […] Unfortunately, the game doesn’t do a great job of introducing these nefarious individuals–such as the Blob and Gambit–and often throws them in with little explanation of why Wolverine needs to beat on them in the first place.
THIS game was nominated for “Videogame Writing Award of 2009”?
Wet (Bethesda Softworks)
Wet is supposedly an homage to the old grindhouse movies of yore. Those movies were notorious for their awful, ludicrous dialog and hackneyed plots. Wet is an attempt to capture this. This is not an attempt to smarten it up Quentin Tarantino style, but a deliberate attempt to replicate horrible writing. It’s not that this is an invalid thing to do as a writer, but it ought to preclude you from making the best writing list.
If I made a new game that perfectly recreated old-school 8-bit graphics, it could still be good and people could still enjoy it. But it would be an outrage for it to win an award for technical excellence in graphics.
Compounding this is that every review seems to go out of its way to say how boring the story is and how unlikable the protagonist is.
Why was this game nominated?
Assassin’s Creed II (Ubisoft)
This nomination makes sense. Haven’t played it myself, but people seem to dig the story.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Activision)
If we lay aside the controversy over the airport level, I don’t remember anyone remarking on the story in any meaningful way. What had this game brought to the table that could possibly justify it as the best writing? This is a first person shooter. Hugely popular, yes. Sold well, yes. But great writing?
The Joystiq review says:
For instance, at one point you come across the hulking wreck of Air Force One crashed nonchalantly in a front lawn. Isn’t that sort of a big deal? That could be the entire plot of a season of 24, yet it isn’t even mentioned in the game, underlining the disconnect between story and gameplay. When you jump from character to character with each level change, and miss big chunks of the narrative that unfolds around you, you’re not as personally vested as you would be if you played the same character all the way through.
Why was this nominated?
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (Sony)
People really enjoyed the banter in this game and remarked on it in just about every review I took in. Makes sense.
Full disclosure: I haven’t played any of these game yet.
I should note that games can only be nominated if their writers are members of WGA. Still, what does this tell us? That they don’t have many writers? That their writers are mostly hacks? Or that the WGA can’t tell the difference between a good story and an incoherent heap of contrivances and plot holes on top of a pile of money? The one thing all of these games have in common is that they were all high-profile big-budget titles with huge advertising budgets. This is the kind of list I would expect out of the hype machines, not the Writers Guild of America. This is the equivalent of nominating Megan Fox for best actress for her performance in Transformers 2. It’s okay if you like these games, but praising them for their worst attributes? Why are we doing this?
DJ Steve Porter
Here is an interesting story.
Some company came up with this Slap Chop kitchen gizmo and released a short infomercial about it. DJ Steve Porter did a remix of that, turning the infomercial into a dance song:
Link (YouTube) |
He did the same thing with Shamwow and other infomercials. His efforts went viral and he became internet famous. He became so internet famous that he graduated to being actually famous and did a television interview. And then he turned that into a dance remix:
Link (YouTube) |
His stuff is pretty catchy, and someone realized that his remixes of advertisements were more effective than the original advertisements, although his work couldn’t exist without the original. Anecdote offered up as proof: I would never have discovered or cared about Mighty Fine Burgers, but his remix of their site made me wish there was one in my area. And his mix of the show Community caused me to seek out the show on Hulu. (Verdict: Meh. But then sitcoms aren’t my thing. Still, his mix got me to check it out, which is what advertisers are always trying to do.)
It really is crazy the things the internet has brought us.
Experienced Points: I Have Seen The Future, And it is Annoying
I’ve touched on the problems with the “helper” programs that run with games, but GTA IV brought something new and horrible to the table.
As I mentioned in the article, I knew GTA IV was a mess going in, and I bought it more or less to see how bad it was. The number of things wrong with the PC version is shockingly, offensively bad. The stuff I talk about in the article is actually the least of its problems.
From The Archives:
A Telltale Autopsy
What lessons can we learn from the abrupt demise of this once-impressive games studio?
Batman: Arkham City
A look back at one of my favorite games. The gameplay was stellar, but the underlying story was clumsy and oddly constructed.
The Middle Ages
Would you have survived in the middle ages?
Top 64 Videogames
Lists of 'best games ever' are dumb and annoying. But like a self-loathing hipster I made one anyway.
Programming Language for Games
Game developer Jon Blow is making a programming language just for games. Why is he doing this, and what will it mean for game development?
Spider-Man
A game I love. It has a solid main story and a couple of really obnoxious, cringy, incoherent side-plots in it. What happened here?
The Loot Lottery
What makes the gameplay of Borderlands so addictive for some, and what does that have to do with slot machines?
Shamus Plays LOTRO
As someone who loves Tolkein lore and despises silly MMO quests, this game left me deeply conflicted.
What Does a Robot Want?
No, self-aware robots aren't going to turn on us, Skynet-style. Not unless we designed them to.
Object-Oriented Debate
There are two major schools of thought about how you should write software. Here's what they are and why people argue about it.