SD/Games – Violence, Maths & Strategies
I’ve been playing a lot of games when I should have been writing, this week.I don’t always write about the games I’ve been playing, but my PC activities are about to complete a mini loop, as a recent re-install of Windows utterly wiped my several hours of “Empire Total War” saves, and so I’ve fired it up again.
Half Life 2 – Episodes 1 and 2
Speaking of closing a loop on some video gaming, I must have been one of only a handful of people who loved “Half Life 2”, and never played the subsequent Episodes 1 and 2 that Valve followed it up with. I finally addressed that this week – The Orange Box has been sitting there waiting for months, now, and it was about time.
And they’re good… the same good, solid, addictive gameplay that we saw in the exemplary main game, with some truly awesome set-pieces in each.
Episode 2 has more scenario variation than it’s predecessor, and a final running battle with some hardcore opponents that’s a lot of fun, but both progress the story of Gordon Freeman and the invasion of earth from another dimension in a way that feels like it covers a lot of ground, for such short installments.
However, there are two problems with these episodes. The first is probably largely a matter of timing – when each was originally released, “Half Life 2” was still, graphically and technically, the first person shooter by which all others were measured. But I’m playing it a few years after release, and since then everybody else has been learning from Valve’s excellent design work. So the games still look and play brilliantly, but now they feel to me like just another great FPS, when I’m fairly certain they were outstanding on release.
The second problem is a fairly niggly one, but impacts heavily on these two releases. The Half Life games have always delivered some pretty great storytelling – I still remember that long tracking credit sequence at the beginning of “Half Life” as a formative piece of video gaming, and the narrative expectations set by that game, and “Half Life 2”, are the metric by which all similar games are now measured.
The assumption that the player is invested enough to remember the plot details of what happened at Black Mesa made some of the nuances of “Half Life 2” a little surreal for me. Characters made apparently dramatic reappearances and story elements were referred to that I didn’t quite make a connection with, and whereas in a film or TV series, where engagement is passive, this sort of thing happens but the viewer is moved on to the next moment too quickly to care, in a game like HL2, that demands immersion from the player, there were moments when these things lost me a little.
It’s not particularly important in “Half Life 2”. The impression one gets is that the landscape has changed a lot, and a lot of story details between the first and second game are suggested and assumed, rather than explicitly discussed.
But a huge part of Episodes 1 and 2 is that they are all about moving the broader Half Life storyline along, and that means lots of sections of exposition, revealing bits of an ever expanding game universe that means that if you haven’t been paying enough attention – which I think might be a fair assessment of my situation – you’re suddenly excluded fr om really engaging with large parts of the game.
Still, the shooting of things, the gravity gun, and the sometimes epic action make up for the relatively common and disarming act of waiting for scripted moments to pass. And after being almost perpetually annoyed by Alyx Vance in “Half Life 2”, I have to admit I’m getting quite attached now.
Team Fortress 2
If the Half Life 2 episodes bothered me with a little too much story, that certainly isn’t a problem with “Team Fortress 2”. The game is all about the squad-based killing, and though a lot of effort has gone into creating some instantly recognisable and cute character-types for the player to choose from, beyond the game-mode defined motives, there really is no effort put in to explain who these characters are, or why they are in these scenarios.
It’s all good, though – Valve have ignored superficial story and concentrated on making the workflow for getting into online games stupidly easy to do. I’m a bit dumb when it comes to online gaming – on account of how I tend to not do it – but Valve have built it into their user interface since Half Life, and it shows. From installation to joining a game, the process is so streamlined, it’s actually harder to get up from your computer and go do almost anything else that it is to start playing.
And the game doesn’t make the actual playing too complicated, either. Each character set has three weapons to choose from, and though achievements in the game unlock better versions of those weapons, the load-out for each character stays at three, so there’s not much fidgetting in game. The control system and mechanic is stripped-down FPS classic, without an abundance of object physics beyond the weapons themselves, and with an immediately counter-intuitive – but ultimately vital – immunity to your own team’s weapons.
The only problem with the game is the constant problem with online gaming – the balance between hard-boiled expert and fun-seeking casual beginner is handled better here than with other games, but it’s still prevalent, and while I saw some truly excellent collaborative squad-play during the sessions I sat in on, for the most part the games were dominated by a few elite snipers and map-veterans that kept wiping out the less experienced of us.
This is a difficult egg to crack, though, especially when effort has gone in to make the process of running games fairly democratic and straightforward, and it’s worth noting that the groups I played with were for the most part asshole-free. I’ll definitely be going back for the odd dose of carnage – at least until another Half-Life comes along.
(“Team Fortress 2”, Half-Life 2: Episodes 1 & 2, as well as the awesome “Portal” are all available as part of The Orange Box, which is a perfectly nifty £15 on Amazon at the moment, if you like having your stuff in hard-copy, or on Steam if you’ve embraced the future.)
Prototype
This is basically the game that “Spider-Man 2” would have been had it been produced by a group of sociopaths. The best bits about the game are all about basically jumping, climbing, gliding and running around a lovingly recreated Manhattan, and killing things in a variety of gloriously violent, Thing-inspired way. That’s John Carpenter’s “Thing”. Not Ben Grimm.
I’d like to say that the game falls down in the same way that the Spidey movie tie-in did, but that would be a terrible lie – the novelty and variance in the extreme ultra-violence is more than enough to counter the repetition of the missions, and the occasional ludicrous moments of storytelling that are inevitable in a game that wants to claim sandbox status while still tied to an ultimately linear plot.
What it does lack is any real heart, which does start to get to the player after a while – once you realise that there’s no real negative or positive payback to doling out bloody and horrible deaths to enemies and civilians alike, the process becomes curiously mechanical – still fun, but the lack of motivation or feedback to temper the behaviour feels oddly like sticking a battery on one’s tongue – you feel some metallic stimulation, but it’s coming from and going nowhere.
I got the impression that this was actually a function of the game’s plot – with it becoming apparent that the menacing nihilistic hoody that you play in the game is both more and much less than he seems – but the previously mentioned PC meltdown lost my save-games, and there were a lot of hours of merciless killing to catch up on.
It probably says a bit about the game that despite the incredible fun it provides, I’m not entirely sure when I’ll get round to picking it up again. Mind you, though it’s impressive on a PC, it feels like a game built for console, and if you can get some hands-on time with it, it’s certainly worth a play.
Anno 1404/Demigod
Both “Anno 1404” and “Demigod” are not quite what they seem. In each case, they give the superficial impression of being strategy games – a real-time troop-management strategy with “Demigod”, and a resource management game with “Anno 1404” – but while enjoyably addictive, and beautifully presented, each game has a far more simple game-mechanic than we’ve come to expect from either genre.
“Demigod” is essentially just a rolling tower-defense/attack game, albeit with a limited number of maps and characters the player can control, each with their special attributes. The wallpaper over this straightforward game is in the Warhammer style, but too small in scope to really impress, and because, in common with gameplay in most “tower” games, the game is more about creating opportunities for your repetitive waves of soldiers than actually controlling them, the choice of a playable character feels oddly arbitrary. Yes, each has unique skills, which will definitely be more or less suited to an individuals playing style, but which character you’re playing takes a massive back-seat to what their power-set is, here.
This probably sounds a bit redundant, actually – a gamer always chooses the character set that gives them the best chance of succeeding with their particular playing style, with coolness or affinity with the avatar a more peripheral factor – but in such a slim game, the lack of purpose to the character classes that are present is just more glaringly obvious.
The worst thing about “Demigod” was that it made me feel lazy as a gamer. I could tell that somehow, there was a more nuanced level of playability to the game – like backgammon, the board of play and rules are so simple that they allow for whole vistas of variation to open up in front of you – but I just couldn’t get engaged enough in it to take more than a dozen passes. Which is odd, because with more basic graphics, a totally top-down view, and a few less features, it’s the sort of free Flash-run browser-based game that it’s easy to burn a few hours on.
“Anno 1404”, on the other hand, is far more addictive, and much broader in scope.
The game involves the exploration of islands on a randomized map – at least, if you aren’t playing the story campaign, which I seldom do in such games – and the settling, harvesting and trading of these islands. And as such, it’s a perfectly pretty, engaging and challenging game.
But what initially feels like a nice example of a “Civilisation” or “Sim City” style game, after a few hours of play quickly reveals itself as little more than a particularly circuitous maths test, albeit a terribly addictive one.
The key here is the trade and harvesting mechanisms within the game. Though it feels as if the player has complete autonomy on where to harvest, and what to harvest and build, there is a very rigid structure to what items can be farmed, in what quantities, and exactly how much of each item is needed to perform particular tasks and develop your culture further. It’s a complicated ecosystem, granted, but after the first iteration on a particular map, a game can feel like a convoluted algebra problem – one that provides it’s own regular distractions in the form of near unnecessary side-missions.
There’s an argument for the idea that this particular kind of maths is a key element in most resource management games, as well as the need for the player to learn the systems and perform the balancing act, and that’s a valid point of view – in some ways, that’s the purest definition of “resource management”.
However, where “Anno 1404” starts to feel like a grind is that it doesn’t do an awful lot to mask that aspect of the game from the player – there’s a lack of randomness to the game if the intention is to create a colonisation game. The flipside to this is that there isn’t enough depth to the elements of the game that benefit from this cold, quantifiable side – the trading system is fun, and there’s a lot of different resources to be dealt in, but there’s never any feeling of being able to roll your sleeves up and get your hands dirty in that side of the game, and there are very few options for picking and choosing what you want to trade in – almost every resource has a specific and vital place in the ecosystem, rather than an adaptable role.
None of these things detract from “Anno 1404” as a viable time-waster – there are a lot of potential hours of play present in the package I’ve described. But after a few hours, one realises that it’s more like a puzzle to be solved than a game to be beaten, and at that point your mileage may vary.
“Demigod” is available for £25 at Amazon, as is “Anno 1404”.
