Poor Boy's Complaint — a video game memoir [Vol. 2]

It's not enough just to say I never got my own Nintendo. I mean, isn't it absurd, doctor, for a child of single-digit years to covet so badly something that will cost his struggling parents—I don't know—three days' wages? That's three days of stressful, perhaps backbreaking labor that will contribute neither to the family dinner nor the property taxes, not to any pending car repairs, back-to-school clothes or—God forbid—to something for their own happiness and pleasure. We're talking $200 for a glorified toy, and that's not including sales tax! What was I thinking being so selfish? And yet—what do you know?—other kids' parents saw fit to buy Nintendos for their families! That's right, I'm in school now. I can start complaining to my mom about how the other kids at school get to do this and that. No, it's not enough just to say I never got a Nintendo, because the reality of not having something does not diminish the desire for wanting it. Quite the opposite.

I was surrounded by Nintendo everywhere I looked! My first friend from kindergarten was an only child and—let me tell you, doctor—he had a Nintendo. I mean he had everything else in the world, too, but the Nintendo! I'd played Super Mario Bros. a few times but I don't think I had any idea there were so many other freaking games until I went to his house and beheld that glorious cartridge rack. The thing must have held close to 25 games in its five-by-five arrangement, and this kid was just 5-years-old!



In 1989 my mother took me to see The Wizard. Do you remember that one, the feature-length Nintendo advertisement with the kid from The Wonder Years? The “I love the Power Glove, it's so bad” movie with the autistic kid playing Super Mario Bros. 3 on a TV screen bigger than God? Did she have a clue what kind of torture this kind of indulgence put me through?

Nintendo in the late 1980s was like asbestos in the '50s. You couldn't not breath it if you tried. After Mouse Trap I'd learned to be a bit suspicious of commercials, sure, but I was still a kid. Do you understand what it did to my brain the first time I watched a TV spot for Marble Madness, doctor? There it was again, that magical land of chutes and hazards, only this time what you saw in video was pretty much what you got. This was too much! I needed an outlet for this stuff, and so one day in Mrs. Stanley's first-grade class I wrote a one-page short story about Marble Madness. For fun! Marble Madness fan fiction, doctor.



In fact, one might have thought school was a relatively safe haven, but would you have guessed our elementary library had a subscription to Nintendo Power magazine? On Monday mornings after the kooky librarian released us from the semi-circle story-time hostage zone, all of the boys would flock to the shelves to drool over the latest glitzy issue. I, of course, would content myself with some perfectly fine two-month-old edition and suckle unbothered upon the centerfold spread of, say, the entire Metroid level design. Hence I acclimated myself to what would become the pattern for the rest of my childhood and adult life, forever settling for the sloppy seconds of the greater video game culture, the flotsam and jetsam of all the seaward passengers who hopped from sinking ship to sinking ship like drivers changing freeway lanes.

Little did my innocent mind yet comprehend how fickle were the hearts and fingers of gamers. There’s a reason I have no memory of seeing Atari 2600 boxes on store shelves. That era had come and gone before I was old enough to form a coherent thought (Also, I happened to be born during the same year as—ahem—E.T.). Before I knew it the great Nintendo I never had was dead. Because in its place was something so new and so stupidly better than the Nintendo you wouldn't know why the hell you had ever even bothered to waste your time with that dumb machine's cramp-inducing rectangle of a controller in the first place. That's right. Nobody wants a Nintendo anymore, not when YOU CAN HAS … wait for it … SUPER NINTENDO? And actually, doctor, I did get a chance to play one of these bad boys hot off the factory line when my only-child friend from school got to rent one—from the grocery store of all places (I told you this stuff was inescapable). Would you believe it? And it really was like a million times cooler than the old Nintendo. I think I experienced some legitimate vertigo playing the third level of Contra III, our two characters blasting away at alien invaders above that magnificent 16-bit industrial landscape. What a trip! It seemed the sky was the limit.

BUT AS FOR ME AND MY HOUSE...

Let me pause here, however, and return to the subject of my household environment. In case you hadn't already gotten the impression, I grew up in a good Christian home. I'd say the most pagan thing we ever practiced as a family was to erect and decorate a Douglas fir tree in our living room each December to celebrate the birth of our savior. And we did dress up in costumes on October 31, but it wasn't for Halloween—no, no, no—and it certainly wasn't for trick-or-treating! My mom dressed me up like a cowboy so I could go to church and celebrate something totally different called the Autumn Festival or, better yet, All Saints Day!

Our household had its own version of the Hays production code—my dad. He was usually the one to either red-light or green-light whatever my sister and I watched on TV, but also the music we listened to and the types of items we got to take home from Toys-R-Us. In other words, whatever was going to be absorbed into our impressionable young brains better not have too much sex, violence or foul language. Understandable. But it also better not glorify witchcraft, magic or any business remotely demonic—meaning ghosts, goblins, gargoyles and I'm sure plenty of other things beginning with the letter G. Let's just say I never watched Beetlejuice as a kid—the cartoon or the film. We never had cable, so that excluded any of the smut on MTV. But we also weren't supposed to watch Scooby Doo because it had monsters? Well, dad, my sister and I watched Scooby Doo regardless (when you weren’t home), and let me tell you, none of the ghosts and monsters were ever actually ghosts or monsters. They were crooked masked adults trying to scare away those meddling kids! I mean, maybe the monster issue was just my dad’s excuse because he really didn't want to tell us what the crackpot sleuths were obviously smoking inside the Mystery Machine, or the real reason why Velma got off on getting into dangerous scrapes all the time with the Fred and Daphne (Hint: It wasn’t Fred). I’m sure my dad would have locked away the television if we'd grown up in the era of Harry Potter.

That’s all well and good, mom and dad. You’re the boss(es). But my first experience with your charismatic church was pretty traumatizing in its own right. I remember when I was five years old being dragged against my will to a series of evening family events at dad’s new church where the people put on some kind of good-versus-evil, God-versus-Satan puppet show. All I remember were these periodic noise contests where members of the audience, sometimes the boys and sometimes the girls, were supposed to scream at the top of their lungs in order to thwart evil and—ultimately—send puppet Satan back into the Lake of Fire. I was not a scream-in-public kind of kid, barely old enough to understand what was going on. That crap scared the hell out of me, which I suppose was the point to a certain extent. I don’t know, maybe it wasn’t quite as bad as I remember it.

I know I didn’t have it as bad as that kid James who lived in the tiny house right off the main bus route to school and whose sweetheart of a dad (who looked liked he was 90) waved like a parade Santa Claus to every God-forsaken driver speeding by. I’m pretty sure James had to wear bifocals in kindergarten, the poor kid. Unfortunately, it didn’t win him any makeup points coming to school in a neon orange Jesus hat (well before it was the ironic thing to do). Anyway, those nasty kids at school sure made fun of him for being the resident Bible Boy. One time in fifth grade our teacher had to stop reading to us a series of young-adult fiction books called the Witch Sister series because some undisclosed student’s religious parent complained to the school about it. Those post-recess reading sessions were like crack to us! Poor, poor James. The intimidation he withstood! Everyone knew who was to blame. I mean, who else’s parents lit up a Christmas-lights cross on the front of their house 365 days a year? Lord knows I always tried to be nice to James, but this kid was defenseless. Talk about having no sense of humor—I can still picture that blank stare! I’d love to read his memoir. Do these parents ever have any clue as to the backfiring effects of their insane interventionism? Anyway, I don’t think James played any Nintendo growing up either.

I guess you can't blame parents for trying. My dad went through a lot of different jobs growing up. He swept chimneys. He sold Amway products. He sold spas and stoves. He also did some freelance ad-design for local businesses, sometimes getting paid in traded goods and services (such as about 200 free skating sessions at the roller rink, one time). Around 1990 he got ahold of a lead to do some graphic layout for this startup company called Wizards of the Coast, basically a bunch of geeks who worked out of their basement—actually, maybe you've heard of them. I guess my dad went to one of those geek's house where they had just tons of Dungeons and Dragons type of memorabilia (surprise, surprise) and they dressed all gothy. “Some pretty dark stuff,” according to my dad. Well, dad did a little ad work for them, some kind of graphic with a dragon and a globe. Turns out the wizards liked it and wanted him to do some more work—although, here's the catch. They were a pretty new company so they kind of didn't have much actual money yet, and so maybe he would have to work for something else, like some company shares? I can only imagine what must have run through my dad's head. Could anyone in 1990 really have imagined what unbelievable global market share these passionate nerds would manage to dominate over the next 10 years and beyond. Who knew there was such profit to be had in spells and sorcery? Wizards of the Coast company shares, huh? Hmm. Sounds pretty good, but ... you know what, guys? I'm afraid I'm gonna have to pass. I've got a request for some ad work from the guy who runs that hotdog stand over there. He's offered to pay me in bratwursts. So … maybe some other time.

Poor Boy's Complaint — a video game memoir [Vol. 1]

THE MOST UNFORGETTABLE COMMERCIAL I'VE SEEN

So imbedded in my consciousness were those jaw-dropping images from the television commercial that when I secretly heard the news of how my older sister—and I, by extension—was to receive an honest-to-God Mouse Trap game for her eighth birthday, I literally lay awake at night in anticipation. My imagination gave way to our soon-to-be-shared adventures of being transported to that insane alternate reality, where boulder-sized marbles chased us down slippery red chutes and giant cages fell down to entrap us. It wasn't so far-fetched of an assumption, was it? I'd been to those McDonald's playgrounds and slid down their yellow plastic slides four times my toddler height. And yet when the birthday party came and my eyes actually beheld that medium-size cardboard box, I think my skepticism immediately set in. (Can we really call it skepticism? I suppose not. Skepticism is the inheritance I received as a result of that tragic episode, the unshakeable fetter I drag locked around my ankle to this very day—skepticism the bitter outcome of that disappointment and that which has never allowed me to embrace high hopes for anything truly spectacular in my life ever again!) It was simply a matter of drawing from my limited knowledge and perceptions of space and dimensions that caused me to mentally puzzle over how such a tiny box could physically contain the necessary components to the set piece I imagined from watching that dazzling commercial.



Well, doctor, you can bet my sister tore open that box, and after studying the plastic pieces and rules sheet the two of us ended up playing what ended up being a rather crappy board game. The makeshift mouse trap might have been amusing, I suppose, had it actually functioned successfully more than one out of ten times. It had some neat little moving parts, but nothing that spawned the same level of tension and excitement that would have resulted from shrinking to the size of a game mouse and trying to actually outrun or otherwise physically participate in that nefarious contraption.



It was my first encounter with false advertising, and I had been had. I knew from then on that the world was cruel, its promises empty. But there was another realization—a proto-realization, perhaps, which was this: The fantastical representations achieved through video special effects could be infinitely more fascinating than the world of reality. In other words, give me video or give me death!

THANK YOU, SIR, MAY I HAVE ANOTHER?

I can't say for certain what was the first video game I ever played. Maybe it was the Atari 2600 Frogger, or the arcade Pac-Man. I know that—miracle of miracles!—my parents actually had a four-player PONG system they would alternately conjure forth for our familial pleasure and whisk away to some dark nether place known as “storage” once it had served its purpose.

I think it's safe to assume, however, that upon laying my eyes for the first time on Nintendo's magical Mushroom Kingdom, I was obsessed with video games for life. Oh, Mario! Luigi! You ridiculous little men with your incessant running and superhuman jumping! Your Alice-in-Wonderland mushrooms and your totally non-hippy flower power! Secret plumbing passageways and warp zones galore. Your magnificent leaps over hellish pits of fire. And that music! No one who listened to those siren songs would ever be able to purge them from memory.

At some point during those waning years I remember going to other people's houses where these machines called Nintendos took their places at the right hand of television sets. Why these Nintendos were not constantly in use by their owners, I could not fathom. In fact, most people who kept these machines seemed extraordinarily stingy with them. I think my uncle had one. Was I ever offered the chance to play? No. There was even a Nintendo at my in-house day care (Curses, that place was terrifying, what with the caretaker's son constantly threatening to piss on me for no apparent reason, and the overweight caretaker in her commanding baritone threatening to take away my treats for the day for any potential bad behavior—except that I never received any treats to speak of regardless!). The caretaker's husband, who looked like a mean version of Shaggy from Scooby Doo, would on random days be at home, and on these days he would sometimes be playing what I later came to learn was The Legend of Zelda. I was supposed to be taking a nap in the living room, but how could I with that epic video journey being played on the television screen a mere ten feet away? At any rate, I never played that Nintendo either.

Was I too young to be entrusted with such things? Was I supposed to ask someone? Heavens, no! I was raised to be the politest, most submissive little boy imaginable. And was I polite! You couldn't put a piece of mud in my tiny little hand without me giving you a deserved “Thank you” in return. I couldn't ask you to desist from punching me in the face without including a token “please, sir.” I remember one day after my parents had hosted a large church party, my dad pulled me aside behind the house and told me he had something to say to me. Good lord in heaven, what had I done? “I just wanted you to know how proud I was of you today,” he told me. “All of your 'pleases,' and 'thank yous,' and your 'you're welcomes.'” Boy was I proud! Is that the kind of boy who goes to other people's living rooms asking if he can play their Nintendo? I think not!

The first time I was offered the chance to play was at the house of my parents' friends from church (hell, all of their friends were from church!). These people were awesome. There I sat with the controller in my little hands. World 1-1. Okay. This black pad moves me around. There's one of those little angry Goomba dudes. I've seen other people do this before a hundred times. Push this button to jump and … what? I died? Within the first five seconds? How humiliating! But wait. I get to try again? I think by the end of that night my sister and I learned how to get through those first few levels pretty well. There was always that nagging decision to be made regarding whether to skip the bulk of that first level altogether by going down that second or third pipe or to stay above ground and try to collect that hidden 1-up mushroom before the first bottomless pit.



Remember, these people were cool, and they left me alone to play, even if I completely sucked. And I did. They were adults who understood they could play Nintendo to their heart's content just as soon as we left for the evening. They were not the spoiled, adolescent assholes who let you go into their bedroom (seriously, what kid was so lucky to be allowed to have their own Nintendo in their bedroom?) to play Super Mario Bros. with them—but only on two-player. This was the biggest scam of a multiplayer mode ever invented, a trick for bratty rich boys who had Nintendos to play on the visiting poor boys who did not. Invariably, this punk kid (he doesn't deserve for me to remember his name, and I don't) and later others would say something like, “Hey, why don't you go first?” Snicker, snicker, snicker! I would launch from the starting gates of World 1-1 and—being totally out of practice since my last time playing—die at the non-hands of the first Goomba. Oh yeah, laugh it up, buddy! Laugh at the poor boy's expense. Player 2 is next, and—guess what?—this piece of shit has to plow through the whole game in one life while I get to sit and watch. And you know what? I was so starved for Nintendo since my last meal I would do it almost gladly!

Oh, father, do you realize what this punk kid is probably doing today? He's probably a coked-out corporate executive somewhere, trying to decide whether to spend his holiday bonus on a jet-ski or a 72-inch plasma TV. And what am I doing now, father, your polite little boy? I'm reminiscing with the good doctor here, maintaining a pathetic blog and wondering where it all went wrong. So thank you, father! Thank you, mother! Thank you and you're welcome!

Borderlands — Loot me plenty!

(NOTE: I started writing this post a few weeks ago and never quite finished. I was going to segue into a larger discussion about the way 3D game worlds identify the interactive elements of the environment. Then I decided against that and sort of left this post hanging to write about KOTOR. Anyway, I went back and tried to wrap this piece up and ... well, here it is.)

I've been playing a bit of split-screen Borderlands on the Xbox 360 with my wife for the past few days (make that a few weeks ago), mostly going through the first two downloadable content (DLC) add ons. We each went solo through the main game back in early 2010, although a few times I went in cooperatively with some friends over Xbox LIVE. I liked it then, and I'm still intrigued by it now—even if I'm getting anxious to move on to new horizons altogether.

The thing that really clicks with me is the game's setting—a pastiche of post-apocalyptic art direction and pop culture sensibilities but without the apocalypse. The story actually takes place in the future on a distant planet called Pandora, which some time not long ago was colonized, raped for precious minerals and then abandoned by one of several reigning mega industrial-military corporations. As to be expected, the corporations essentially treated the planet like a giant toilet, leaving behind several civilization's worth of scrap metal and derelict cities, as well as heaps of discarded high-tech firearms and, worst of all, a free-to-roam-and-pillage population of imported convict laborers now left to their own recognizance.

The player enters this fictional setting basically as a treasure hunter, stepping off a bus into a barren landscape and a run-down town without any real resources to speak of. It reminds me a little bit of Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear (one of the greatest films of all time), in that the players similarly find themselves trapped in a bleak purgatory just as soon as they have arrived. (I admit, this particular comparison may be a bit of a stretch. I might, however, come back to this film in the future as an exhibit for talking about the use of tension in storytelling.)



The art direction is very Mad Max (specifically, the latter two films with the bigger budgets). It's also highly stylized with bright cel-shaded graphics. By "bright" I don't necessarily mean colorful, because the landscape itself is pretty much all manner of scorched-earth browns, oranges, some reds and grays. The sky, however, is a magnificent clear baby blue, which is what really gives everything else its added character. It's that rich, bright blue that lightens not only the scenery but the mood of the entire playing experience and compliments the over-the-top violent humor within the game.

Borderlands is partly famous just for the story of how developer Gearbox Software actually went through and completely changed the game's visual style about three-fourths of the way through the development cycle, up to which point the game had been built with more of an aim toward photo-realism. The decision to scrap that previous work was so drastic and caused the art director so much personal stress that she quit the team and changed careers entirely. And yet I think most would agree it was the right decision.



The game, of course, does have its detractors, some of whom deride the game for being just plain boring. It's a position I think I can understand, because the game starts off pretty slowly and even deeper into the game the overall simplicity of the experience doesn't really change. I remember almost giving up on it myself. What propelled me to continue, however, was the visual world of Pandora itself. I guess I just find the chaotic, ramshackle architecture of Pandora more interesting than other people.

The game became more enjoyable when new and larger environments became available to explore. I've listened to the opinion of several people who talk about how the game should be played cooperatively with three other friends. That can make for a good time, for sure, but doing so is like playing the game on steroids. There's a quality to the experience that's otherwise lost, the slow and rewarding discovery of stepping into a new environment for the first time. Borderlands actually earned a spot on ign's recently-blogged-about 100 Greatest Video Game Moments, I think for a similar reason.

At several points in the game the player has to venture through various bandit encampments, usually to go assassinate some quirky bandit leader. These various fortresses, like RPG dungeons, become more elaborate as the game progresses. Charging through with friends is one way to tackle these scenarios, but going solo can be fantastic. I, for one, like to stop and listen to the desperado music. I chose to play through the game as a hunter, which makes my character proficient with sniper rifles. As I progress through the environment and waves of bandits come out charging from their confines, I like to play it cool and pick as many off from a distance as possible. Then, when the action dies down, I heed the words of Christopher Walken as Bruce Dickinson: I "explore the space." One thing Gearbox got right with Borderlands was giving the player incentive to explore. It's pretty simple. They just made the game a loot-fest.

It's interesting to look back and see how the early first-person shooters dealt with environmental interaction. In games like Doom the player would go around looking for doors, switches, keys and supplies. The supplies—meaning ammo, guns and health packs—were sprites and later three-dimensional icons scattered in particular locations throughout the levels and stages. The player character just had to walk over them to pick them up. Then some games like Duke Nukem 3D came along and started to emphasize different kinds of interactivity. Pressing a button in front of a toilet made it flush. Sink faucets spewed tap water. And pixelated strippers stripped ... sort of.

I think people eventually started to get tired of these things. Some games started changing the formula more drastically. Halo made the player hold no more than two guns at a time and its sequel did away with health packs altogether.

In general, I think first-person shooters abandoned the notion of exploration in favor of more straight-forward—think one giant corridor after another—level design. Games became more about the challenge of getting from one checkpoint to the next and overcoming specific placement of enemies or enemy spawn points in each section of the level. Don't get me wrong, for the most part I think these changes made shooters better games. Did anyone back in the 1990s ever actually finish Wolfenstein 3D or Doom 2 or even Duke Nukem 3D? Without cheat codes? Not me. After a while, looking for door keys got pretty tiresome (those games also used to give me motion sickness).

With Borderlands the loot gathering acts as a reward for exploration. And the loot isn't difficult to find. There are cash boxes, lockers, toilets, dung piles, mailboxes, trash bins and other "containers" scattered about every nook of the map that yield random contents of cash, ammo and weapons. Each one of these containers is in some way color coded green for easy recognition. It's a similar green to the little light that shines from the caps lock button on an Apple key board.

While it may not be the perfect solution, I think it gets closer to answering the question of what to do with some of these incredible open game worlds that are interesting to look at but serve little other purpose. Collecting a few virtual bucks here and there can go a long way. At the same time, the idea of loot as "reward" for the player enters the dangerous territory of the literal "Skinner Box" that I talked about in my first blog post. Push a lever. Get a candy. Push lever again. Get another candy. So who knows?

The above pictures were borrowed from www.giantbomb.com and borderlands.wikia.com.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic review - "I have a bad feeling about this."

I remember a time in my life when I relished all things Star Wars—Star Wars toys, Star Wars computer games, Star Wars Monopoly. It was a romantic period when Episodes I, II and III had yet to be made, before George Lucas himself had to finally tarnish our once gilded perceptions of his brilliant creation. It wasn’t some monumental event or epiphany that dulled my Star Wars fervor. I think I just grew up and became a more cynical—I mean, critical—person.

Anyway, I finally finished the Xbox version of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and I suppose it’s time I try and write up my review. So here goes.

KOTOR is supposed to be a game about saving or conquering the galaxy. It’s supposed to be about traveling to remote planets and participating in a fantasy adventure with a ragtag band of allies. Whether or not it succeeds along these lines is sometimes up to the player and depends upon how well they are either able or willing to suspend their disbelief.

The game is also supposed to be about following a moral path and slowly crafting the story of a hero or villain based on one’s choice of available words and actions. The game I played, however, was like taking, constantly failing and constantly re-taking a fifty-hour series of multiple-choice personality tests prepared by an emotionally challenged computer programmer—or SmarterChild. It’s like playing Apples to Apples, an otherwise fantastic game, with a group of strangers who you come to find out have no sense of irony or sarcasm.

I suppose my first clue that things would be weird was early on in the game when I found my character, Roq Bandai (I’m so awesome at naming characters), agreeing to stand in as a dance audition partner for some random alien babe in a bar—er … sorry, cantina. The dialogue cut away to a ridiculously awkward animation segment, during which my character was tasked with selecting what kind of corresponding motion to make. The girl had sort of prepped me and I think warned me not to risk attempting any complex moves too early lest I trip up and make her look stupid in front of the talent agent. So I tried my best to lay down the best selection of dance options, but on my third input prompt—thinking it might just be the dazzling finale this so far tame-looking audition needed—I told my character to move in circles around my partner. It didn’t quite dazzle anybody. The girl accused me of purposely sabotaging her performance, and I guess the game did the same because it immediately let me know it had given me an undisclosed number of Dark Side points. And here I was just trying to help. Mind you, this whole encounter happened while I was supposed to be figuring out how to rescue a captive Jedi master so that we could get off the planet and resume the task of winning the war against the evil Sith empire. So I reloaded my previous saved game and I don’t remember if it took one or two more tries, but I eventually got the sequence of inputs right and moved on.



I found this same basic scenario repeated ad nauseam throughout the entire game. The game would present me with some kind of increasingly complex challenge whereby I would either fail or succeed based on my selection of dialogue options. This wouldn’t be so bad, perhaps, if the game ever gave me an understandable clue as to why I had failed or succeeded. One time I was trying to help a guy in the desert get disentangled from a series of rigged-to-explode droids by hacking into a robot and performing honest-to-God text-based math puzzles. There is absolutely nothing in the game that helps the player learn how to, out of the blue, identify complex number sequences, some of which I could not figure out. I felt like an idiot. Thanks, KOTOR.

During a side quest much later in the game I found myself acting as a lawyer for some old man who was on trial for murdering his lover. I must have gone through that entire trial about 20 times before I got the judges to find the guy innocent, which is the outcome I wanted. I’ll admit I’ve thrown my controller down in games. If I die for the umpteenth time on some blasted Super Mario World castle level, I might get angry. But I don’t think I’ve ever gotten genuinely pissed off at a game due to frustrating dialogue navigation.

Unfortunately, the game’s combat proved just as unintuitive. I wanted to understand the game’s mechanics. I really did. I read the manual and tried to wrap my head around its interconnected systems of skills, attributes, saving throws and the almighty random-number generation. In my research I came to discover that just about everything in the game—every blaster fire, every lightsaber swing and every force-manipulated lightning bolt—was determined by a virtual 20-sided die roll. I guess it’s a Dungeons and Dragons thing, except the game doesn't actually let the player participate in any of this. I never got to see what numbers were rolled, only whether or not something landed or missed. There's sometimes too much happening on screen at once to keep track of it all.

That's because all of the combat happens in real time. As soon as someone gets hostile, it’s on. The player could theoretically just put the controller down and watch the game randomly generate attack and defense sequences for each member in the player’s party. The player might even win the battle. What the player is supposed to do, on the other hand, is micro-manage these inputs by constantly pausing and un-pausing and switching characters and monitoring everybody’s status. While the battle itself might take 20 seconds in real time, the act of pausing and managing the combat might stretch it to about a minute-and-a-half affair. It’s clunky but it works. There’s an amusing delay between input and action that I suppose is necessary for synchronizing all those turn-based actions. It can be like throwing a bunch of quarters around the carpet, one at a time, and watching your cat react in astonishment at each new phenomenon.

It’s amazing they got a tabletop simulator to look so much like an action game, but I can see why BioWare ditched the turn-based stuff altogether in their next game, Jade Empire. This game wanted to have to have its Tarisian ale and drink it too. I actually thought the combat was kind of fun until the end of the game, which was one giant dungeon crawl with fight after fight after tiresome fight, and I realized the combat had just been a welcome distraction from wandering around such a drab, boring environment.

Maybe I should segue here into my petty gripe, which is that the graphics, by today’s standards, are pretty crappy. I’d say they’ve aged about as well as Mark Hamill’s skin. Navigating through most of the game world felt about as exciting as wandering through the corridors in Wolfenstein 3D. And the Star Wars art style just didn’t make for a very aesthetically appealing world.

I imagine there are benefits to working within an established franchise universe. People like to see things that are recognizable and referential to their pop-culture interests. A Star Wars RPG does have some neat things going for it, even little things like customizing one’s lightsaber. But after a while, a stingily guarded franchise such as Star Wars can get pretty stale and repetitive pretty quickly. Just because the first Star Wars movie had a memorable scene introducing the inconic Mos Eisley cantina, why does every location in the Star Wars universe have to have an identical looking cantina and why can’t they call it something besides a cantina? It’s called the Star Wars “universe” for crying out loud! Why does it have to be stuck in 1977?

It wasn’t a completely bad experience. I mean, the Star Wars franchise has certainly seen worse spinoff attempts than this. After waffling for the first quarter of the game regarding whether or not I wanted to be good, bad or ugly, I decided to try and walk the straight and narrow. My first playthrough as Roq Bandai—a purple lightsaber wielder—was ultimately a story of (clumsy) love and redemption, also one of a giant amnesia-related plot twist. I even got the girl. Then I replayed the last chapter as a total psychopath to get a taste of the dark side outcome. The fact that BioWare was able to craft a singular game story based on these wildly different moral choices is an interesting achievement, and I wonder very much how that approach will inform their soon-to-launch MMO endeavor. But I think I might be done with BioWare games.

(Final Recommendation: If anyone still happens to be interested in original Xbox games, I would recommend they skip KOTOR and go straight to Jade Empire, which was a stronger game set in a more interesting universe. It also takes half the time to finish, and I personally think that’s a good thing.)

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic gets two out of four stars. I don't have a graphic, so use your imagination.

Signature moments

This is interesting. The Internet lords over at ign.com have seen fit to unveil a new list of the top 100 video game moments. It's ... interesting, especially the first 40 percent of the list, which includes some relatively obscure titles—Deadly Premonition, OutRun 2, Wild ARMs, 3D Monster Maze. Not quite what I was expecting. Which is fine.

Personally, I love lists. Can't get enough of them. They can be a great instigator for conversations and voicing disagreements. I learned long ago that you can't take these things very seriously. Except when you do, and it's great. In 1998, right before I turned 16, I watched a special CBS presentation of the American Film Institute's 100 Years 100 Films. I then spent the next 10 years tracking down and watching copies of each film on the list I'd never seen. By the time time I finished, of course, I was older and better able to appreciate that the esteemed connoisuers of celluloid over at the AFI offices were neither the be-all nor the end-all of critical opinion. Even a list 100 titles long can have some crucial missing components. Still, it creates a way to celebrate whatever it is we love about whatever it is we're listing.

So the idea of talking about video game moments seems like a fitting idea. Isn't that what all these different games look to provide—memorable moments? I would like to think so. But then I actually browse through the list, and suddenly I'm not so sure.

Some of the items on the list commemorate particular game levels or locations—or seeing a particular game world for the first time and getting that wow factor. Other items mark the first time the player performs a particular game mechanic, like drifting in Ridge Racer or rocket jumping in Quake. And then there are the plot spoilers, such as ... Aerith dies. So sad.

I think part of the problem is the list makers felt compelled to represent certain seminal games, and in doing so either boiled their overall greatness into one big vague moment or simply plucked out one of many interconnected game elements—usually the wrong one.

Anyway, I don't intend to dig too deeply into the final list, only to contend one particular choice.

I'm talking about greatest moment #76, "Billie Jean" from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

"Grand Theft Auto has always been the cool video game, the one that reached out and appealed to a mass audience. But GTA has never been cooler than when you first cruised the streets of Vice City at night, tuned into Flash FM, and heard the opening bars of Michael Jackson's Billie Jean. It pulled you back in time to the eighties, when Jackson was still the King of Pop and neon-pastels were still fashionable. It underscored your first experiences of the environment: the garishly-lit beach-front hotels and discos, the insistent dealers and prostitutes, and the squalor hidden down backstreets. This was Vice City, and it was yours for the taking."

"Billie Jean," is that really your musical selection? Nice attempt, ign, but no. That song is still on the damn radio. You might just as well be driving down the streets of present-day Spokane, Washington, listening to Michael Jackson. That song is so ubiquitous it doesn't transport anyone to anywhere. No, the greatest moment of that classic GTA game is cruising the streets of Vice City in a stolen Ferrari imitation car, on a clear sunny day, and ramming your vehicle at full speed into an oncoming motorcyclist. Watch the rider go flying (it's so wrong and yet it feels so right) as the in-game car stereo blasts into the chorus of this song.



The title says it all. If there's any standout track from the Vice City soundtrack that crystalizes the wild 80s, it's this signature single from mascaraed hair band Autograph. You will feel the need for speed and you will bang your head all the way to your drug-deal destination on the other side of the Starfish Island bridge. Or you'll listen to those lyrics, "For every minute I have to work, I need a minute of play," and you'll suddenly ask yourself—why the rush? This cocaine empire can wait while I go throw some hand grenades into a random busy intersection. Turn it up!


(Final Fun Fact: I admit I might be a little biased in my opinion. Go ahead and watch that video again. While you're enjoying the music, make note of the band's bass player, Randy Rand. That's my mom's cousin.)

Paperboy 2 review - "Right in the mailbox!"

After reflecting on my two previous posts that had a high word count and very little in the way of simply talking about video games, I decided to switch gears (bicycle reference there) for this post and write a game review. One of my friends recently reminded me of an excellent video game review site, Action Button Dot Net, which since I last visited seems to have been given an absolutely horrid but somehow appropriate visual overhaul (appropriate in the sense that humor is an understandable coping mechanism for someone trying to look like they’re not really taking their work seriously, when in fact that someone probably takes what they are doing extremely seriously). Basically, the funky background—which comes off like an inside joke—makes the text purposefully difficult to read. It’s kind of funny and kind of unfortunate, because the articles on the site are worth reading.

One thing I really like about the site is its incorporation of the Roger Ebert four-star rating system for reviewing games. It really is the best rating system (I give it four stars), hands-down superior to the 10-point score employed by most game journalism publications, as well as that troublesome thing we call Metacritic. Why do I like it? It’s more intuitive. A four-star rating system (with the allowance of half-stars) seems to better acknowledge the subjective nature of critical exposition. We’re expressing our opinions and observations of wildly different artifacts, not grading term papers. Anyway, that’s the system I’m using and if you don’t like it I don’t care. No stars for you!

Now, about that review.

"Hey, Mr. Wilson!"

Ever have one of those chaotic days at work where it feels like everything that can go wrong goes wrong and nobody will just let you do your stinking job? Try getting through a week of Paperboy 2, a game I’ve been fondly revisiting the past few days on my Sega Genesis. (From looking at some YouTube videos I can say the Genesis version is quite distinct from its SNES and NES counterparts—and there were several other versions still. I would wager to use the word “superior,” but I wouldn’t be speaking from experience. I will say the Genesis version appears to play much faster and has speech sound clips that are ... just ... awesome.)

This early 1990s sequel didn’t deviate too much from the Atari arcade original, a game I never played, partly because it came out in 1984 (the same year I turned two). In the game the player assumes control of a bicycle-riding newspaper delivery boy or girl. The primary objective of the game is to guide the avatar through a suburban neighborhood and successfully deliver The Daily Sun newspaper to all subscribing residences, hopefully making it in one piece to the bonus obstacle training course at the end of the last block. This seemingly simple task is made astoundingly difficult due to all manner of hazards, including but by no means limited to punk skateboarders, runaway baby carriages and random swarms of bees that will knock the biker on his or her ass and cost the player a valuable life. Even running into a curb will crash the bike.



The secondary goal is to cause as much mischief as possible, à la Dennis the Menace. In other words, feel free to knock that cute elderly couple off their porch swing with a spare newspaper. Try aiming for that jacked-up automobile in the driveway so that it falls on the dude’s face underneath, and break one of his house windows while you’re at it—assuming he’s a non-subscriber. One could also use their throwing skills to try and stop said runaway baby carriage or thwart the occasional convenience store robbery, good deeds that might end up on the front page of tomorrow’s morning edition.

Don’t get the wrong idea, however. This game, unlike another game I’m still trudging through, has nothing to do with morality. It’s all about the points, and hitting one target—be it that guy taking out the trash or his charging Dalmatian—registers the same 100 point score as any other. But the player cannot just toss and toss without consequence due to the limited number of papers on hand, tallied nicely at the top of the screen. To replenish the supply the player will need to be on the lookout for extra paper bundles around the block, sometimes situated in dangerous-to-navigate places. It creates an excellent little risk-reward dynamic. The player can try and play it safe in the street, but the lure of points, thrills and sometimes sheer necessity will draw the player closer to the dangers of people’s front yards.



"Every day, it's a gettin' closer..."

What I love about this game is how much different it feels after maybe an hour or so of play. Stepping cold into this game isn’t easy—it’s like, learning to ride a bike? Actually, it’s rather like learning to ride a bike. I can still remember when I was probably five or six years old and I first learned how to ride my bicycle sans training wheels. There’s a definite learning curve in terms of trusting one’s balance and the instincts of when to turn the handlebars and by how much. Some time not long after I thought I had figured it all out—meaning I was perfectly willing to take off on my bike without having dad spot me for the first few feet (that Kodac moment probably does get old for the proud parents after a little while)—my grandmother came over to our house to visit, and my mom told me to show off my riding skills. This will be a piece of cake, I thought. And so I took off down the driveway, maybe beamed at my grandma over on the sidelines and for some reason got mentally tripped up at the prospect of that driveway fence about ten feet in front of me. I’d avoided it probably tens of times already but this time the proper kinetic response didn’t quite register and, at any rate, I didn’t have the wherewithal to stop myself from slamming into that fence.

This is basically the same thing that will happen to a first-time player of Paperboy 2. Inevitably they’ll be trying to avoid a monster pickup truck barreling down the street and swerve right into a picket fence, or a sunbather, or a house. There’s some finesse to the controlling of the bike that is probably never mastered but definitely better subjugated over time. And just when the player thinks they are improving—smash! One thing the player quickly realizes is that there is no way to stop, only to slow down and move at a snail’s pace. This is accomplished, intuitively, by pressing down on the directional pad. Pressing up, of course, accelerates the paperboy to a maximum velocity, which when played at with some level of skill rewards the speedy player with the equivalent gratification of a Mario speed run (also, hitting ramps sends the player avatar on a wondrous moon-gravity journey that never quite loses its excitement). Braking, on the other hand, is necessary, and also satisfying. The friction of slowing is near perfect, as is the accompanying rubber-skidding sound effect. The timid player might actually be able to get through the first couple of days on the easy setting with his or her finger jammed down on the brake button (I can’t imagine how boring this would be), but the developers countered this by programming a swarm of bees that will essentially chase the player who moves too slowly for too long. It’s the only hazard that sneaks up from behind the player, a phenomenon that kicks in more quickly as the week progresses.

Staying alive is still only half the challenge, the other being to carry out the actual task of delivering newspapers. Each subscribing house essentially has two targets, one being a doormat that earns the regular 100 points, the other being a tiny mailbox that nets a bonus 150 for each one hit (Seriously, I don’t even bother with the doormats). The act of throwing is kept thankfully simple with the press of a button. The A button throws left and the B button throws right (the C button, by the way, performs a bunny hop, useful for clearing hedges, curbsides and whatnot). There is no variation in the speed or trajectory of throws. Each thrown newspaper flies from the deliverer’s hand exactly the same. Because the neighborhood blocks are shown from an isometric perspective, it’s all about learning the invisible diagonal line that will hit the target. With so many other potential objects moving, it can sometimes be like threading a needle to hit that mailbox.

Again, delivering actual papers is vitally important, part of the game’s integral system of reward and punishment. As long as the player delivers to the subscriber’s mailbox or doormat—and doesn’t smash any of its windows or other property—those residents will remain complacent, loyal customers. In other words, the newspaper employee can unleash total havoc on the surrounding neighborhood, have their unscrupulous exploits printed in bold headlines on the very product being delivered. No worries. Not until they are the ones replacing a broken porch vase will they cancel their subscription—and if that isn’t a spot-on parable for consumer complacency, I don’t know what is.

The finer points

While playing I made a deliberate effort to test the point system when smashing house windows. This is great. If the player smashes the window of a non-subscribing residence, that’s 100 points. If the player smashes the window of a subscriber’s house, that residence automatically becomes a nonsubscriber and no points are awarded for hitting that particular object. But, if one second later the player throws another paper and breaks another window on the same house—now an unsubscribing residence, that throw is worth 100 points. I love it! The player can regain subscribers by making a perfect delivery to all current subscribers on a later day, but only one residence will re-subscribe at a time. If a player loses all subscribers the game is over (although most players will lose by crashing too many times).



Another thing this game does remarkably well is to create a balance of challenging gameplay and casual entertainment. The game’s three selectable modes of difficulty are three different paper routes: Easy Street, Medium Way and Hard Road. Each successive route is longer, more elaborate and more immediately chaotic. Each route begins on a Monday, and each new day until Sunday—like the New York Times crossword puzzle—presents increasing challenge. New obstacles like fire hydrants and flamingo ornaments materialize on sidewalks and lawns overnight (and I assume all of the extra Sunday drivers are on their way to church).

Basically, playing Paperboy 2 is like playing pinball. The player starts with three lives—like three pinballs, if you will. The goal is to make those lives last as long as possible, ideally from Monday through Sunday. Getting to the bonus training course at the end of each delivery day is like getting the pinball machine’s multiball round, and making it to the course finish line—one of the best ways to rack up points—is hitting the jackpot. Also like pinball, there is a way to collect an extra life (ball), but this requires making a perfect delivery to all original subscribers. The drawback is that this is usually next to impossible after the first couple days, or whenever the attrition of lost subscribers becomes too sizable to recover. The ultimate playthrough would be to start on Monday of Easy Street and survive through Sunday of Hard Road. I don’t even know what happens when you finish a week on Hard Road, because if there is one recurring obstacle more (cheaply) difficult to avoid than any other, it's the damn cars that run crosswise at the intersections between blocks! Sometimes, too, I simply end up losing a life on the first block of the very first day on easy, which in pinball is like losing your first ball within seconds. It happens. It sucks. Oh well.



The stuff of dreams

Aesthetically, Paperboy 2 presents the suburbs as the one of the scariest, most threatening environments imaginable, with some macabre elements—sewer monsters, ghosts, ravens—thrown in for good measure (I’m almost convinced there was some cross influence going on between the Paperboy games and the brilliant, short-lived television series Eerie, Indiana). George A. Romero did something similar with the Night of the Living Dead—using zombies as a vehicle to capture that latent fear that one’s next-door neighbors are the true dangers of the world. I never had a paper route growing up but my best friend did, and I remember he had his own horror story of being chased down the street one morning by some angry or perhaps mentally-disturbed transient with a Jimmy Hendrix afro.

For me, however, this game does bear resemblance to the theme of a long-recurring nightmare, in which I’m essentially panicked behind the wheel of a speeding automobile, unable for whatever reason to stop or slow down and about to crash into something right when I wake up in a cold sweat. I’m beginning to wonder if that early embarrassing bicycle spill in front of my grandmother did a bigger number on my psyche than I thought. In that case, I think Paperboy 2 might be a great means of therapy, both for myself and traumatized paper route veterans everywhere.

(Final Note: I at least hope that after the last print newspaper has disappeared we will still be able to play paper-delivery simulation applications on our iPads.)



Paperboy 2 gets three-and-a-half out of four stars.

The Bludgeoning Effect

So apparently some new game recently came out, the very name of which, when uttered, summons forth champagne supernovas in the trousers of otherwise impassive adult male subjects.

That game, of course, is The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.



You think I’m exaggerating. It’s actually a well-documented fact, however, that beginning in the early 1990s a small software development company by the name of Bethesda Game Studios—in conjunction with Planned Parenthood and startup funding through DARPA—began development on a series of fantasy role-playing computer games called The Elder Scrolls. T.E.S. is really a double acronym for an ongoing government program called Tactical Eugenics Systems, which basically tests and implements various methods of population reduction, primarily involving mass subjugation of the male sex drive.

In these games the player creates a custom character based on a selection of species/races, skill sets and other considerations. The game then sets the player loose in a huge fantasy environment where they wander around, explore dungeons, perform quests and basically kill things for hours and hours … and hours, to the point where the urge to eat and/or woo members of the opposite sex is nullified by the need to just keep playing more.

(To be fair, I’m sure the actual history of The Elder Scrolls development is quite fascinating. In fact, for the low price of only $149.99 you can buy the limited collectors edition of Skyrim and learn all about it! How can you not afford that?)

Back in the early part of the last decade, for my twenty-second or some odd birthday, my friend bought me a copy of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. I don’t even know how many hours I ended up sinking into that game. My character was a dark elf with a ponytail on the top of his head that I named Nigh Crowder … the elf, not the ponytail. Anyway, awesome, I know.

It seems most of my time was spent running all around this huge island half-heartedly trying to complete missions but usually getting sidetracked by some cave or ancient ruins to explore. I also spent a lot of time trying to find creative new places to stash the heaps of loot I was collecting during my travels (I admit. I’m a virtual hoarder).

Well, that was then. Bethesda released Oblivion, the fourth game in the series, in 2006. I haven’t played it. And now … Skyrim. Unfortunately, I haven’t played this new adventure yet either.

However!

A couple days ago I did watch a little bit of some live streaming footage from the game. For the most part, it looked pretty familiar to Morrowind, but a lot prettier. The game can be played in the first- or third-person perspective. The former, I think, is the preferred playing mode for immersing one’s self into the game’s setting and getting that sense of stepping into the player character’s skin, so to speak. It’s like a first-person shooter, except the shooting of guns gets replaced by the swinging of melee weapons or the casting of magic snowballs and stuff.

While watching this footage, I think it suddenly occurred to me how incredibly violent this game was. Let me clarify that. The ideas represented in the game are violent—the act of going around and cutting people and creatures down with swords, scorching them in flames. That’s violent stuff.

If you’re reading this and saying something aloud like, “Well, duh,” I agree with you. Almost all of the games I play are violent! But as someone who has played games for just about the entirety of my life, I think I can speak with some authority that most of us who do play these games tend to be pretty desensitized. We aren’t actually going around and slaughtering everything. We’re just … pretending. Now, I don’t want to go too far in this direction, because I think to do so properly would require greater eloquence than I feel capable of expressing at the moment.

I will say that when I started playing video games as a young child, although we may have been participating in roughly the same ideas of violence in those games, the graphical capabilities of the available technology were woefully inadequate for achieving what we now refer to in some games as photorealism. Sure, the premise of the original Contra may largely have involved the idea of shooting people to death, but it sure didn’t look like actually shooting people to death.

Although these graphical capabilities gradually improved over time with new generations of hardware, each step in getting to where we are today has been just that … one step at a time. It’s made the evolution toward photorealism somewhat less shocking, to the point that we can look at a game like Call of Duty and not necessarily be all that disturbed by the fact that its graphical representation of shooting people is starting to look quite a bit more like actually shooting people. As a side note, it’s important to emphasize that all games are not going in the direction of photorealism. Far from it.

But getting back to Skyrim … I’m sorry, what was I talking about? Oh yeah. I was watching the live footage and the player character in the game was dual wielding two maces. They looked like black, spiky maracas of death. It appeared as if the player had just stumbled upon some kind of bandit camp, because he suddenly found himself being attacked by a bunch of elves or other humanoid creatures. In retrospect, I don’t think the video quality of the live feed was very good. Nevertheless, when the player character first started swinging one of those burly maces at one of the female enemies, I admit I was slightly taken aback. As relatively realistic as everything appeared, it seemed only logical there was about to be a pulpy, bloody mess of an elf woman’s face on the screen. I mean, these were some serious-looking maces!



That didn’t quite happen. The elf woman did get banged around a bit and fell over dead. I’m sure there were the obligatory spurts of digital blood but—as far as I could see—no bits of shredded flesh on the player’s mace, no mangled, unrecognizable face lying in the snow. If we want to get into a discussion about the mathematical systems behind the proverbial curtain of these animations—I’m talking about things like hit points and computerized dice rolls—then this probably makes a lot more sense. Still, more than it typically happens, that footage triggered a mental connection between the game’s abstract representation of violence and real violence. It made me rethink what I had been doing all those hours in the previous Elder Scrolls game, and by extension other games in general. I don’t want to make it sound like I’ve never pondered and considered the violence in video games. Believe me, I have. But I don’t think I’ve thought too much about the idea of photorealistic violence.

Imagine if the next generation of game engines achieved the ability to render the level of gory detail my mind was anticipating. Would I want to play a game where I’m watching the realistic-looking effect of a medieval mace bludgeoning the face of another human being? From the first-person, no less? I'm sure there are plenty of people who would probably answer with an unhesitating yes!

Video games are by no means the first expressive medium to face these questions of represented violence and how far is too far. I think film provides a good point of comparison.

Have you ever noticed how most films, even modern violent films, often do not actually show things like blades penetrating human flesh? If they do, then the film sequence is usually edited in such a way that there are only quick flashes of it, or maybe just the immediate after effects. It was probably Psycho that made this technique famous. But think of just about any modern epic like Gladiator or Braveheart. This type of editing makes the violence a little more palatable. It softens or at least scrambles the mental impact.

I can think of a few counter examples, film scenes in which the camera does not cut away. These are usually the images that haunt me well after the film—not in a good way. A scene of the killer in David Fincher’s Zodiac stabbing a random victim at a roadside park comes to mind.

Has anyone ever seen the 1970 film The Honeymoon Killers? In that film there is a famous scene where the titular couple rubs out one of their old lady victims. The overweight nurse Martha, pretending to be her ex-con husband’s sister, comes up behind the poor frightened Janet and knocks her over the head with a hammer. Twice. There’s no exaggerated sound effect. It isn’t shot in close-up or any sort of deliberate framing. It isn’t stylized. And it isn’t funny—quite the opposite. Just a poor frightened woman getting pounded on the skull with a regular old hammer.



Most video games don’t have the easy option of being able to just cut away from the violence. The player is providing the input, and the game responds with a digital swinging limb or a firing weapon. Even when violent games have been at their bloodiest, still what has saved them from being taken very seriously by most gamers is probably some combination of repetition and limited graphical capability.

I would guess that, as with film, the video game industry will continue to find its own methods of sterilizing and softening the implied violence. The interesting thing to consider, however, is the idea that, more and more, this might be a deliberate choice on the part of game developers as opposed to a technological necessity.

I suppose I can’t end this diatribe without mentioning one other game in particular, and that is 2007’s BioShock. If you haven’t played the game and don’t want it spoiled, I’ll try not to actually spoil anything … but you might just as well want to avoid reading this further regardless.

As far as bludgeoning goes, this game has a pretty intense moment of it (if you’ve played the game already you can refer to this YouTube video for a quick refresher). It involves an otherwise harmless sporting instrument as a killing device, and maybe it was my shallowly buried memory of this particular moment in this particular game that caused me to expect a more brutal outcome from the fighting I saw in Skyrim. It’s interesting to notice, however, how this scene plays out without character input, basically as a first-person cutscene. As with the hammer scene from The Honeymoon Killers, this moment can be a bit unsettling to watch. There is not just blood but bruising. The victim responds in dramatic agony.

For a game where pretty much all the player does—besides playing a Pipe Dreams clone of a hacking minigame—is run around killing people (sometimes with a wrench, no less), it’s interesting the developers decided and managed to imbue this one isolated killing with so much emotional weight. I have no idea what the authorial intentions were behind this moment or the game itself, for that matter. To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure I really get BioShock. But I see the potential of using photorealistic violence as a real gut check for the player. Sadly, I also see the possibility that this also will be just another small step in our continually devolving progress toward total desensitization.

But enough rambling, back to more not playing Skyrim.