Vigilo Confid...Damnit, Missed the Target

I'm looking down the sights, the plasma-rifle wielding X-Ray at the other end. He's taken out half my team already (damn these Thin Men alien bastards), but I can still pull this one out and stop the abductions in Italy. I just need to take this guy down, then the other two members of my squad can bury the last two with explosives.

32% hit chance.

Never tell me the odds.

Squeeze the trigger.

Fuck.

Despite all my careful sequencing, that one miss screws up my entirely plan, causing the remaining aliens to quickly mop up the last three poor sods unfortunate enough to be sent on 'Operation Sinking Feeling'.

---

'We can save this world'

Anyone who has played XCOM is probably familiar with this sort of experience. Playing the game is an oddly masochistic relationship - somewhat a characteristic of the roguelike experience (while I've only rarely heard XCOM described as a roguelike, it does share many of the same properties - encouraging repeat play, refinement of strategy and a willingness to fail and relearn).

If you don't know what XCOM is already, seriously, check it out. If you have any love of strategy games, roguelikes, or just videogames in general, it's worth a look. Heck, even if you like boardgames, the pacing and play style can feel very 'boardgamey'.

My usual MO with this game is to sink 10-20 hours into it over a week or weekend, before finally setting it down after an excess buildup of frustration and coming back to it a few weeks later.

The alien threat is consistently paced just ahead of your own soldiers and technology until at least the mid- to late-game. Then, if you have been playing right and have got just a little bit lucky, you can start to pull ahead.

Suffering breeds skill. Progress is fun and frustration is, well, frustrating. It falls into the niche of some games from the last few years (Demons' Souls and Dark Souls spring to mind) that make success all the sweeter for being hard won. No hand holding, no desperation to show off the story, just a good, consistent challenge.

I believe this is the point where I started singing 'Shittity-doo-dah'

Not that the game doesn't play on your emotions - in fact, it does so in a way that it shouldn't really be possible in such a story-light game. Part of it is the frustration factor, yes. Even the best-written story in a game struggles to compete with the sheer controller-throwing frustration of a properly challenging game (sidenote: we PC gamers really lose out on the 'throwing controller' front. Hurling a keyboard and mouse is a) expensive and b) challenging, what with all those cables. Any tilting tips?).

The face of XCOM pain

But XCOM kicks that up a notch - the ability to name all your soldiers can just make the pain of losing a soldier mid-mission so much worse. I like to name them after my friends and loved ones. That might be a little weird (it is), but it seems metaphoric self-flagellation is what I look for in my spare time.

Counting the losses on my current Classic Ironman playthrough

XCOM makes it personal; it makes it hurt. It's simple to pick up and play (and there are some not-so-insane difficulties), but has enough depth that, even having logged 70 or so hours, I'm still finding new techniques, tactics and making stupid, glorious mistakes. It encourages careful planning, meticulous execution, and risk-avoidance, while practically forcing you to take risks at the same time.

In case you hadn't figured it out by now, I really can't recommend XCOM enough. It's one of my favourite games released in the last few years, and I seem to only be able to go a few weeks without coming back to it. It's on sale a whole bunch these days and is available on pretty much every platform (including iOS). If you love strategy gaming and a bit of pain, check it out.

What I'm excited about from E3 2014

Edit: I blatantly missed one of the big ones
Evolve

How this one slipped me by yesterday, I don't know, especially since I had been following all the news. The newest title from the team behind Left 4 Dead, Evolve looks pretty interesting. It's a 4 v 1 multiplayer game with a team of hunters versus some giant, hulking monster, with the added bonus that the planet's flora and fauna also seem to be trying to kill you. This looks genuinely exciting, but I feel it will have the caveat that most of these games have - the ceiling for fun will be strictly reserved for when you can fire this up with 4 friends, and I don't think that that will be quite often enough. It might also get repetitive, but Left 4 Dead generally managed to overcome that.

Rise of the Tomb Raider (2015)

Scant few details on this yet, but I'm pretty stoked. I found Tomb Raider (2013) to be unexpectedly brilliant, and it held up magnificently when I replayed it a few weeks ago. Plenty of room for screw ups, I guess, but I have high hopes, bolstered by the fact that, as I infer from Twitter, at any rate, Rhianna Pratchett will be returning to write it.

Alien: Isolation

I haven't been following this one too closely, but we're about due for another decent Alien game. Seriously, it's such a great IP, it's difficult to imagine how any competent studio couldn't produce at least a passable game from it if given half a chance (*cough* cheap shot *cough*). It looks innovative enough it it's approach it will at least be interesting to watch as it develops.

Batman Arkham Knight

No colons here. This is an easy win for me. I've loved every instalment in the series so far, including Arkham Origins, produced by a different studio. At worst, if they just clone the gameplay from any of the previous ones, I'll still be happy, so don't necessarily trust my opinion here. The gameplay teaser trailer was interesting, though the (admittedly extremely narrow) snapshot of the writing and voice acting sounded a little off to me. Still, can't go too far wrong. Let's just hope it doesn't live up to my recent pedigree regarding delayed games.

Mass Effect 4

Again, the details are basically non-existent, but I have almost total faith in Bioware, assuming EA don't get their grubby paws too far into the honey-filled genie bottle.

Grand Theft Auto V

...on PC. Most of the news outlets have been focussing on the 'on PS4' angle, but I'm a PC purist when it comes to GTA. One of my greatest regrets about Rockstar is that they may never publish the unparalleled Red Dead Redemption on PC.

Grim Fandango Remastered

I never got to play the original, but any case where old LucasArts games are being remade is an automatic win, as far as I'm concerned.

What's Wrong with Watch Dogs

Okay, so I made a mistake. I let myself get excited by a game. I told myself I wouldn't, not again, the pain just wasn't worth it. But nothing quite compares with that siren-song lure of flashy marketing blandishments designed specifically to appeal to my geek brain. What better time to be reminded of this than during E3?

So, a couple of weeks ago, my mental train became the rhythmic judder of 'WatchDogsWatchDogsWatchDogs'. I pre-ordered it, I took a day off work so I could play it at launch, and went to some lengths to pre-load it so it was set to go on release.

Launch Day Expectation

There were two things that should have set off alarm bells from the start. Firstly, the review embargo - the date before which journalists are barred from publishing their reviews - wasn't until launch day. That bothered me. The obvious deduction from this is that the game publishers have concerns about how it is going to be received and are running damage limitation on their day-one sales and pre-orders. But this isn't a universal warning sign - there are plenty of great games which have held their reviews until launch day. So, hope against hope, I wasn't too put off.

Launch Day Reality

Much has already been written about the second alarm bell (which, in retrospect, was more of a biohazard containment failure warning klaxon), which was that the game would be delivered digitally, on PC at least, through UPlay, Ubisoft's carbuncle of a games platform. Needless to say, to the surprise of literally no-one, there were many, many problems extending from launch day into the rest of that week (some of which are still issues for me - read on). You can read plenty about this elsewhere, but needless to say, f&#! DRM and its criminalisation of legitimate users.

For anyone not familiar with what Watch Dogs is, you play as Aiden Pearce, hacker extraordinaire, blasting his way around a hyper-connected Chicago with pretty predictable, revenge-based motivations, unsurprisingly rooted in the death of one or more close friends or loved ones.

Snark aside, I had high hopes for the story. It struck me that a game about a morally-grey hacker going toe-to-toe with the seedy immoral underside of a hyper-connected, near-future Chicago, backed by a major studio ploughing AAA-level dollars into a game for which they've been driving the hype train for months sounded like it would be anything but boring.

Yeah, about that...

Early on, I was lulled into a false sense of security by a pretty engaging if slow-paced start. I was hoping this would be a nice slow build into something increasingly pacey and far-reaching, much like the 'classic' generation of 3D GTA games (461 words before the inevitable GTA comparison). What I got was something that slowly devolved into an increasingly formless mush.

For reasons that I shall explain below, I can't actually comment on the story in its entirety, but the 60% or so that I made it through was punctuated with weird tangents that didn't really go anywhere or mean anything on their own. There was a sort of meandering feel to the missions where none of them were that interesting in isolation, and I found myself waiting for a payoff that never really came.

The worst example that I played was at the climax of the first act. For reasons that don't entirely merit going into, Aiden decides that he needs to sneak into a prison to intimidate a potential witness into keeping his identity a secret, citing fears of risk to his family.

Partway through the mission, the situation changes when another group drag off the witness in question, ostensibly to kill him. Aiden reacts roughly along the lines of 'oh no, I have to get to him before they kill him'. I may just be a heartless bastard, but this made absolutely no sense to me.

You can play Aiden as a freedom-fighter style hacktivist, or a self-interested criminal - that's an intentional-if-meaningless choice the developers have given you. Here, his reaction didn't quite jibe right with either. While Aiden might feel a genuine sense of horror that this street thug is about to get killed (notwithstanding the scores of people Aiden himself kills throughout the game with far less provocation), he didn't exactly sneak into a prison to save him. What's more, if the thug does die, it solves Aiden's problem anyway.

I say 'solves the problem', but it actually doesn't. Nor does Aiden's 'Tryhard of the Year' intimidation attempt. Because by this point, there is already a clear threat to Aiden's family, and throughout the game Aiden's real identity as the vigilante hacker is repeatedly advertised on the radio with a repetitiveness seemingly designed to make me intentionally slam my car into a wall. What you are left with is a mission which does not advance the main plot, does not make an interesting climax for the first act, and which is ultimately pointless. This is one example, and a particularly egregious one, but it's not alone.

The story is best summed up as 'filler', something on which to hang the gameplay, which left me waiting for the real beat to drop and the pace and tension to ratchet up. I'm still waiting.

While, for me, the story is what usually makes or breaks a game, I accept that this is far from the only thing that matters, and games are many things to many people. I can forgive a weak story where there is excellent gameplay that carries the experience, particularly in an open-world environment which lets you to inject your own narratives.

My overwhelming reaction to Watch Dogs' gameplay was - it's fun. It was consistently enjoyable for the 23 hours I've somehow rack up so far. That said, it's nothing groundbreaking, which in itself, is fine - not everything can be truly new and exciting, except that, in the case of Watch Dogs, that's precisely what was being hyped as.

Hacking is the obvious 'innovation' here, and it makes you feel empowered in exercising control over the environment. For the most part, though, it is just hitting buttons at the right time, and when driving, it often doesn't work quite as responsively as it needs to. There's also a pretty limited range of things you can hack. In close-quarter encounters, it generally didn't feel all that impactful compared with using your guns.

I actually found the gunplay more satisfying than the hacking. It's very well implemented, and one of the stronger sides of the gameplay. The obvious problem with that is that the game is meant to be all about hacking. Shootouts are all too often unavoidable, and there generally isn't enough incentive to use your phone over your guns.

Beyond the main storyline, the map is packed with other things to do. And I mean packed, like a rush-hour tube full of sardine tins, to the extent that the icons on the map seem to be trying to crowd each other out.

Many of these side-quests and activities were very diverting, and I sunk a lot of time into them, with the attitude of 'just one more' again and again (and again). But given the choice between a better-developed story, one that grips me at my very core and leaves me trembling at the knees and coming back again and again (I'm looking at you, Bioshock Infinite), versus crawling around a map from location to location completing yet another flavour of 'find the thing', I think it's pretty clear which I'd choose. One of these I will happily experience over and over, repetitiveness be damned, while the other, well, I'd be unlikely to do it even once. Watch Dogs, sadly, falls firmly into the latter camp.

So, a good way into the plot, I found myself a pretty deflated. Not wholly disappointed, but disillusioned about so many 'almost good' things in the game that hadn't quite come to fruition. So now, we come to the big roadblock, rising from the ground in front of us as if guided by some unseen hacker; the giant red rubber stamp over my whole experience with the game.

My Watch Dogs experience. Sadly, I'm the car in this scenario.

While playing the online mode where you invade another player's game (where the game comes closest to brilliance), I died, and came back to my own game world, finding myself with...nothing. None of my unlocked weapons, skills, nothing. This was distressing, to say the least. Apparently, I was not alone. While everything remained tangibly unlocked in the games menu, it effectively blocked me from doing very much, and certainly from continuing with the main story. Astoundingly, this still appears not to be fixed, more than two weeks on. This from a game that was delayed for more than six months to get it right.

This was the defining test of the game for me. With no easy fix in sight, I was faced with starting over if I wanted to continue the story in the near future, and, confronted by that prospect, I discovered that I just wasn't excited enough to do so. Up to that point, I had been enjoying an admittedly flawed game, but this brush with a near-enough game-breaking bug was jarring enough to remove the last of the gloss, and I've barely been back to it. Disappointingly, I haven't even found myself craving to fire it back up, instead burying myself in tried-and-true alternatives, and that realisation was pretty disappointing.

The bottom line? Watch Dogs is a fun game, but it could, and should, have been so much more. The prospect of a fun game alone would not have been a good enough to draw to get me to content with UPlay and launch-day disasters, but that's just a testament to the power and success of the game's marketing engine (if you want an idea of how hyped this game was, when the delay was originally announced, Ubisoft shares dropped 26%). Would I still recommend it? Just. But only if you find it at a significant discount and, ideally, if you can somehow avoid using UPlay at all. Just wait for the bugs to get fixed first.

The Real Watch Dog

Gaming Articles

More posts on the way soon, both on GRaBaW and gaming, but in the meantime, I came across a couple of quite nice articles concerning both video and tabletop games, which may be of general interest. 

First - a Rock Paper Shotgun interview with the mighty Charlie Brooker, on his history with videogames, and how they (somewhat inadvertently) made his career. 

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/07/15/gaming-made-me-charlie-brooker-part-1/

Second - a nice introduction to board gaming on The Dread Gazebo ('So You Want To Be A Board Gamer'). http://dreadgazebo.net/intro-to-board-gaming-part1/

Ready Player One

Here we are again. This is the last post I'd planned in my 'gaming overview' series. I may  do more, but that depends on my having enough to say ('that's clearly not been a problem so far' *snarf snarf*). One thing I'd definitely like to do more of is talking about some individual games (of all varieties), in the same manner I have been with books.

This isn't strictly related to anything. I just wanted to show off the lovingly girlfriend-made Companion Cube

So, onto the actual topic at hand - video games. I think most people reading this would have at least played something that qualifies as a video game - especially with the proliferation of mobile gaming and so-called 'casual' games. As with other forms of gaming, however, that doesn't mean that most people actually enjoy them!

The basic premise that, shockingly, seems to be missed by those that are quick to dismiss video games as silly, pointless or harmful (a group which includes a lot of the media, particularly in the US - though this thankfully seems to be changing), is that, as with books and films, there is an intense amount of variety in the medium! Just as there are trashy books and mindless or outright bad films, you do get the lowest common denominator garbage being turned out by studios. Sadly, (again, like films), these seem to make up the majority of the market at any given time, so the best can be lost to those who don't watch the industry amid the rest of the noise.

What we get with the best games, however, is an experience that can easily supersede the best films. An exceptional game, is, hands down, a more powerful experience than an exceptional film. You are put into the place of the character(s) in a way that films can never hope to match (cf. my post on RPGs). You ARE that character for the game, acting for them, even if we are not given control of, or even agree with, their decisions (depending on the style of game). 

The emotional impact of these games cannot be overstated, and it is something I wish more people were open to taking the time to experience. The games with this level of payoff, however, tend to be the ones that require a reasonable time investment - 6 to 30 hours and upwards. This, though, in storytelling terms, is the real value that gaming brings over films, books, and television - putting you right there in the place of a character. Making you live the experience.

All that, however, is assuming that story is the driving force behind the game. 'Good' games do not necessarily mean good storytelling. I would say that the ideal is an solid balance between excellent gameplay matched with a robust story (such as Red Dead Redemption), but there is a lot to be said for those that swing more towards (amazing) story with okay gameplay (Bioshock Infinite), and I'll happily play something which is all about the gameplay, with paper-thin plot (Demon's Souls). It all depends on what you're looking for and enjoy.

It's with these last few examples that we really see the case for 'video games as art'. Video games like these - which are very few and far between are transcendent. With Red Dead Redemption, we have a depiction of a dying age - the Old West in America in 1911, and a timeless story of regret with a single recurring message - you can't outrun your past. I honestly can't talk in as much detail as I would love to about this game without spoiling it, but it succeeds in carefully exploring its setting and depicting a beautiful range of characters, all the while delivering a fantastic gameplay experience.

The original Bioshock was a stroke of creative genius, embodying the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand in the form of an underwater city - an industrialist's utopia, and exploring the inevitable disaster that follows. In this, you actual find a deceptively deep study of human choice. All in a beautiful, psuedo-Steampunk Art-Deco style wrapper. Atlas Shrugged just can't step to that. I'm not even going to talk about Bioshock Infinite, since it's so new (don't want spoil things!), but that moves the needle so far further the original in terms of ambitious achievement.

Demon's Souls swings in totally the other direction. As I mentioned above, the plot is 'paper thin'. I think there's a whole lore behind the game - there's certainly a cut-scene at the beginning which tries to explain this, but it really. Doesn't. Matter. From what I've seen of it and the characters, it's a little odd and rather weak. The sole reason I play Demon's Souls is because it is a really, really challenging, in a way in which video games don't tend to be now. This has been a bit of a trend in the last few years - some games ramping up the difficulty - a bit of a throwback to the earlier days of gaming.

Demon's Souls is punishing, but fair. It does not babysit you (at all - there's so little in the way of explanation or tutorial!), but what it does reward is honing your skill as a player. Even when you've improved your character and their equipment to a reasonably competent level, you can still be taken down by relatively low-level enemies if you let your guard down and get overconfident. Death is not permanent, but will set you back significantly, respawning all enemies and putting you back at the start of the level. The bosses are epically difficult, and you will often have to die to them multiple times to figure out a strategy - requiring you to replay most of the level each time. 

For someone like me (and I know it's not for everyone - the amount of cursing I come out with while playing is testament to this) that is appealing and addictive. Sometimes. 

So, there concludes my thoughts on video games, and, for now, on gaming. I shall be following up with some specific, more review-like posts in the near future.

The Game-ut of Gaming

It's been a relief to find that, lack of blog updates aside, I'm really not as far behind on GRaBaW as I had thought I was. By the time I get to posting this, there's a good chance I may actually have caught up [edit - I'm not, quite] - I yet again refer you to the beauty of a long-haul flight for actually getting things done. I certainly don't get to fly any distance very often, but I increasingly regard is as a magnificently distraction-free block of time in which to get things done. Or perhaps it's more a sign that I'm too easily distracted when the internet is available. 

I actually want to talk now about something other than books and reading, something which I've talked about on the blog before in some measure. It's one topic that gets me excited in a way that most others just don't, often to an obsessive degree, and while many don't share my fanatic love for it, I  sincerely believe it to be a fundamental aspect of human nature. If you hadn't guessed already, I'm taking about gaming.

I'm not limiting this to video games, though for many, these are synonymous with the term 'gaming'. I'm talking about games of nearly every form - card games, dice games, tabletop games, role-playing games, yes - video games, social games; games of skill, games of chance, games of skill with added variance. 

The tools of the trade

I'm actually stopping short of including sports because I really feel that they fall beyond my remit. It's not that I think they 'don't count' in some sort of definition-snobbery. You could easily argue for each of 'games' or 'sports' to be a subset of the other, and there would be those in both camps who would disagree with such vehemency that you'd quickly find running to be neither a game nor particularly sporting at that moment.

I mentioned above that I consider games to be a fundamental human activity - something that we're  wired to do. I'll talk about why I think that is in a minute (though I'm sure there are many more learned and scientific discourses on the topic). I have on my shelf a copy of 'The Royal Game of Ur', an ancient Sumerian board game. 

Ancient treasures - The Royal Game of UR (British Museum)

First, since I know that the majority of people do not share my overwhelming passion for games, at least consciously, I want to try and back up this contention. Gaming is an ancient pastime that does not appear to have been confined to any particular social class. Plenty of dice have been unearthed which date back to before recorded history. We have literally been playing games for longer than we have been writing. This may be why so many of us today fail to achieve our dreams of authorial fame as we spend some much time playing on the Playstation. Or something. 

The ancient Greeks and Romans had a healthy penchant for games, and many ancient games are still being played today. Surviving examples from China alone include Mah Jong, I-Ching, Chess, Cluedo (okay, perhaps not that last one). If you want to get a sense of the history of social games, check out this  infographic from Jon Radoff (his blog link appears to be dead, so I can't link to the true original source).

A further consideration which occurred to me today - have you ever encountered anyone who truly, completely doesn't like games, in any form? Okay, so this is entirely anecdotal, but I cannot think of anyone. Not everyone is as much of a gibbering fanatic as me (and, thankfully, some of my friends!). Some people don't enjoy playing epic big-box tabletop games which take 5 hours to finish, some people don't see the point in a simple game that comes down entirely to the chance roll of a dice (personally I'm not such a fan of up-chance gambling for this reason); some people love playing casual games on their phone, but wouldn't never dream of picking a fully-fledged console controller. But everyone has some sort of game that they enjoy. 

There are few things I this world that I enjoy as much as sitting down to play a game - but why exactly is that? Why do people take part in these activities which are essentially sideshows from the real world, and, arguably, have no point in and of themselves? I've heard many people disparage gaming in some form or other as a waste of time, one in which they don't understand why people would invest themselves. On one level, I find this a pretty fatuous argument, because you could apply the same thing to quite a significant portion of modern culture (why watch a movie, or read a book? At least part of it comes in deriving enjoyment from media for its own sake), but I do understand where this comes from. There is a difference between spending two hours watching a film and pouring hundreds of hours into living in a massive online world (but one which remains, conspicuously, not the real one), or the aforementioned five hour epic session round a gaming table. 

Generally speaking, I can see a few more obvious reasons that people enjoy gaming. The first is classic escapism - many games involve taking part in an activity which represents something of the real world while being largely divorced from it. This applies notably to video games, roleplaying games and many tabletop games. They can represent entire different worlds, the chance to play at being different people in a different situation which can be a million miles away from our own experiences or comfort zones. This can be so LIBERATING. It can be such a thrilling experience to step outside of your own life for a while. 

This doesn't mean that we're all so sick of their own lives that we're desperately searching for the chance to break free from them - I think instead that this is an impulse which comes from the same place as our love of stories and narratives - the same feeling you go through when you get so lost in a great book or film that it dominates your entire world for a short time. 

Games provide a way for us to make sense of things, and can act as social facilitators, giving people a guaranteed point of shared ground or a framework for an interaction. There are plenty of arguments to be made against this, and again, it's not to say that games should be a go-to substitute for genuine human interaction, but they give us a chance to explore social situations and learn things about each other that we wouldn't necessarily find otherwise. 

This also gives us the chance to act out different social roles. Those that have played group games with me will probably know that my behaviour can be very different depending on what we're playing (for better or worse…). I can be that sneaky, double-crossing, untrustworthy so-and-so if the situation calls for it, which (I hope!) is a long way from my everyday personality. 

On this last point, I'm touching on something that I want to cover in more depth in a future post. Simply put: games teach us things. About each other, as I've alluded to above, but you also just pick things up, as you would from fiction - facts and pieces of information, but also analogous experiences and ways of thinking that can surprisingly often be applied to everyday life.

Big boxes, small sneak preview

So there you have it, a wild flurry of my thoughts around gaming, and why I think it's such a big deal. I want to do a couple more, hopefully shorter, posts, where I can get into some specifics, and pick out some of the things I love about different types and styles of games, as well as some of the games I love and why. Hopefully some of my crazy passion for this has come across, and revealed something about myself.

If you've got your own counterpoints on games, happen to know someone who hates gaming in all forms, or just want to share your favourite games or gaming stories, post in the comments below.