My wife and second daughter Esther are headed to Tekko today. As a sort of last-minute thing, they decided to cosplay as Honey Lemon and aunt Cass from Big Hero 6. They have a habit of only cosplaying as stuff that won’t be a pain in the ass to wear.
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I have decided to cosplay as Sir Not Appearing In This Film by staying home. I love how the costumes turned out, so I thought I’d share.
Link (YouTube) |
So on the outside we have a heavy-duty mining / industrial area. Then we go down a couple of elevators to reach an office-style research center with no offices or places for people to work. Then there’s a testing arena where they test landmines by blowing up pigs in an enclosed chamber. Then we have to descend a massive silo where people are doing biotech research. (How far underground are we by now?) Then we go down yet another elevator to the chamber where Victoria was being held. Then we go up a ladder to a wrestleman show.
Does this audience go through the research silo to get to the show? No? How did they get Victoria out of this lab without going past us? Did they drag her out through the arena? Isn’t this mine / office / lab in the middle of the desert? Is it next to a public place? How did the Patriot’s RV get into the area where he’s training?
The problem here is that it makes no damn sense to chain these environments together like this. In a world designed by a non-lunatic, each zone would be an isolated mission. However, then there would be no reason to visit the mine or the wrestleman show, since the only reason we visit those places is to get in and out of the lab.
A detail I didn’t notice until now: The Patriot RV is parked outside the hotel, meaning 47 must have crossed BACK through the arena to steal it?
Still, Mumbles is right. This part feels a little funny and self-aware. If they could have grasped that tone and ran with it they might have wound up with something that was fun and funny. It would probably still be offensive to long-time Hitman fans, but at least it would be able to stand on its own merits.
Link (YouTube) |
We’ve been doing this for five years, and covered over sixteen videogames. In all that time, the same pattern holds true: We get more and more negative as a particular game drags on. If we start out loving a game, we’ll come to recognize its flaws. If we start out ambivilent about a game, we’ll grow to resent it. And if we start out disliking a game, we’ll loathe it by the end.
But Hitman: Absolution seems to break with that tradition. We started out really negative, but now I guess we’re more amused than outraged. The game really is awful, but it’s awful in such interesting and varied ways that after a while I run out of anger and just want to stop and watch the train wreck unfold.
The bit with jumping out of the birthday cake was a fun idea. But it was patronizingly easy to pull off, requiring no more planning than choking a single woman in an empty room. And since it’s not part of the core game, there’s no reason to do it. And it’s stuck in a silly postage-stamp level that serves no other purpose and is part of a sprawling installation that makes no damn sense.
I’d love a postmortem on this game. What on earth were they thinking?
My column this week is a list of ways in which games are failing in their attempts to be movies. Last week sort of descended into an argument over whether games should be trying to tell a fixed narrative at all, so this time I thought I sidestep that by coming at it from a different angle: If you’re going to make a game-movie, then you at least need to get the movie parts right.
Some people have mistaken my story-nitpicking for a position that story is paramount. That’s not really the case. I just strongly believe that whatever story we do get should be serviceable. This is actually kind of challenging for a lot of reasons. You just can’t get away with things in a ten hour game the way you can in an hour and a half. Movies are usually consumed in a single sitting. But if a story-driven game can be consumed in a single session it’s considered a huge failure, or at least a bad valueAssuming we’re talking about full-price AAA games, here.. Games are consumed over the course of days, with long breaks between sessions. That gives the audience a lot of time to think about, replay, and discuss the plot. Details that might be glossed over in a movie will become major sticking points in a game.
Worse, we’re a little more picky about character actions when we’re the ones driving. If Commander Shepard works with Cerberus in a movie, I might argue that it’s out of character or dumb, but it’s not nearly as infuriating as being forced to push the buttons to work with Cerberus even though I can see it’s clearly a stupid idea. It’s the difference between seeing someone else fall for a prank, and being the unwilling victim of an obvious prank that I saw coming a mile away.
But game developers seem to be going out of their way to give us the worst of both worlds. They insist on ramming movie-like structures down our throats, but then they slap the story together all half-assed like it doesn’t matter.
Further note: I think it’s time for another mailbag column, so if you have a question for the column then askshamus@gmail.com.
For the last three weeks I’ve said, “We have a lot of mailbag questions, we really should answer these.” And then Josh takes up all the mailbag time talking about Bloodborne and Destiny. At least, this is how I’ve chosen to remember things. But next week we’re going to try to answer as many as we can, so now is a good time to send in your questions. The email is in the header image.
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Hosts: Shamus, Chris, Mumbles, Josh.
Show notes:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #99: Deus Ex, ESA, Lawful Goodness”
A few days ago I said this on Twitter:
T w e n t y S i d e d
After three months of unstoppable creativity,I suddenly have run out of motivation. Nothing I want to say.Don't want to play games.No music.
— Shamus Young (@shamusyoung) April 8, 2015
When I’m feeling very creative, I generally exhibit a well-defined set of behaviors:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Creativity Cycle”
Link (YouTube) |
Thanks to Chris for editing these episodes while Josh was recovering from… whatever.
Also, that thing that Rutskarn does at the start of the episode where he narrates generic cop-man thoughts? I’m pretty sure there’s no upper limit to how much of that I could listen to.
The story in this game is so hilariously at odds with the gameplay that I’m actually angry at them for playing it this straight. Even if the player arrested every possible suspect and only shot when they really needed to, the scene would still end with an explosive chase scene. It’s just absurd to have Dawes show up at the very end of that chase and complain that the suspect’s face was bruised. We’re supposed to be worried about Kai, but there’s no way she could possibly be responsible for as much damage as the player.
So Officer Mendoza… I see here on your report that you – and stop me if I’m reading this wrong – gunned down 12 men and did tens of thousands of dollars of damage to a hotel lobby. Then you took an automatic weapon from the crime scene and used it to kill another half dozen men in a public place. After which you stole a civilian vehicle and initiated a chase which caused five explosions, the death of ten more people, and the destruction of untold city property, including a construction trailer. Also you allege that Officer Kai punched a suspect and hit him with a lightweight wastepaper basket? Based on your report, we’re giving her a two day paid suspension, and you’re sentenced to fifty years in the electric chair.
What is this silly word, why did some people get so irritated by it, and why did it fall out of use?
The true story of three strange days in 1989, when the last months of my adolescence ran out and the first few sparks of adulthood appeared.
No, game prices don't "need" to go up. That's not how supply and demand works. Instead, the publishers need to be smarter about where they spend their money.
The game was a dud, and I'm convinced a big part of that is due to the way the game leaned into its story. Its terrible, cringe-inducing story.
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
No, self-aware robots aren't going to turn on us, Skynet-style. Not unless we designed them to.
Ever wondered what's in all those quest boxes you've never bothered to read? Get ready: They're more insane than you might expect.
A programming project where I set out to make a Minecraft-style world so I can experiment with Octree data.
I write a program to simulate different strategies in Starcraft 2, to see how they compare.
Crunch-mode game development isn't good, but sometimes it happens for good reasons.