T w e n t y S i d e d
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.
Stolen Pixels #162: Rorschach Interview, Part 4
This week my site has been nothing but links to other sites. This place is rapidly deteriorating into a Shamus-branded version of FARK.
Anyway, the conclusion to the Rorschach saga is now available for viewing.
Come back later in the day, when I’ll post another link to the Escapist, but this time for my weekly column.
I swear I’ll put some content on this site soon. Really.
Shamus Plays: LOTRO Part 1
Sorry. I know most of the posts this week have been “Hey, go to another site for something I made!” I really did write a slate of posts this week, but… the dog ate them. No. Actually, I had posts written this week but then got wrapped in the the deluge of feedback from Quaking of WarCrysis 3, which was a lot larger than I anticipated. We’ll get things back on track around here Real Soon Now.
In the meantime, my new MMO series has begun!
The Big Freaking Podcast
I recently appeared on the Big Freaking Podcast to talk with hosts Shamrock and Ivan about old game franchises that deserve new life. It was a fun conversation, and we went pretty far back to find some long-long treasures.
We were talking about space sim games at one point, and I said I couldn’t think of any that had come out since Battlecruiser 3000AD. And then later I remembered Freelancer, which everyone insists on putting in the same genre. But I have a hard time seeing that. In my own view, Freelancer is to Elite as Fable is to Fallout. It gets shoehorned into the same category, and it can still be fun, but it trades looks and production values for a game which is smaller, shallower, and more linear.
You can read about Starflight on Wikipedia or this fansite. It’s a game from 1986. I was 17 when I played it, although it came out when I was 15. In my memories I have this idealized, perfect experience, and if that’s simply nostalgic whitewash then I really rather not know the truth.
Thanks to the Big Freaks for having me on. It was a fun discussion. You might want to give it a listen if you’re into the whole podcast thing.
From The Archives:
Programming Vexations
Here is a 13 part series where I talk about programming games, programming languages, and programming problems.
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?
Secret of Good Secrets
Sometimes in-game secrets are fun and sometimes they're lame. Here's why.
Object-Disoriented Programming
C++ is a wonderful language for making horrible code.
Fixing Match 3
For one of the most popular casual games in existence, Match 3 is actually really broken. Until one developer fixed it.
Diablo III Retrospective
We were so upset by the server problems and real money auction that we overlooked just how terrible everything else is.
Starcraft 2: Rush Analysis
I write a program to simulate different strategies in Starcraft 2, to see how they compare.
The Opportunity Crunch
No, brutal, soul-sucking, marriage-destroying crunch mode in game development isn't a privilege or an opportunity. It's idiocy.
I Was Wrong About Borderlands 3
I really thought one thing, but then something else. There's a bunch more to it, but you'll have to read the article.
Starcraft: Bot Fight
Let's do some scripting to make the Starcraft AI fight itself, and see how smart it is. Or isn't.