Power is nothing without control

(Thanks for the killer headline, Pirelli!)

This weekend, Kim was gracious enough to let me have a go on her copy of Batman: Arkham City. It’s an astonishing game, although I did have some issues with the fight mechanics. I found myself a little frustrated with the way it played. A quick little vent on Facebook on Sunday morning led to a comment thread which went something like this:

Me: “Arkham City’s fight mechanics: frustrating.”
Others: “While you *are* the lord and master of all mankind Lee, we do feel that we must respectfully question your above comment.”

So, with this in mind I figured I’d put fingers to keyboard and explain myself.

However, before I continue with this opinion piece, I want to stress that Arkham City isn’t the only example of this behaviour in a game, so please don’t take this post as me having a go at what is probably one of the best games of 2011 (despite not being quite my cup of tea) – I’m not singling it out as the only culprit of this feeling of frustration – I’ve played plenty of games over the years which have frustrated me equally as much. With this in mind, please read on.

Videogames (and forgive me for paraphrasing The Matrix here) are a system of controls within an environment. Control of the charater is granted to the player via their (aptly named) controller – the player tells the character what to do. This is how it’s always been, right? So when I press a button, I want the character I’m controlling to carry out whatever action that corresponds with that button the instant I press it. By not allowing this to happen, the game is effectively removing control of that character from the player – in a cutscene this is fine, but in the middle of gameplay? That’s a big no-no. Forcing a player to effectively relinquish their control over their character mid-game goes completely against the grain of what a videogame is.

The jist of it is: If I tell the character to do something (with a button press), he/she should damn well do what I tell them to! I always figured that in a fight (judging by my extensive knowledge of fighting, with a grand total of zero fights under my belt…), that it was all to do with whoever was quicker off the mark – get in fast, and hit faster and harder than the other guy, so you’d think that hitting the punch button (known to some as ‘button-mashing’, which loosely translated means ‘The Way of the blazing punch button hyper turbo 3000′) faster than the other guy was the best way to win the fight (maybe throw in a kick, a jump and a couple of hadokens and you’re golden).

Now, you could argue that it’s more a limitation of the technology/coding of a game to now allow interruptions in animations/moves, and the arguement of videogames and realism is a weak one – yes, in the real world you can stop doing an action half way through if you want, but your world wasn’t created by a game studio with finite resources, but some games have allowed for cancellations/interruptions in animations/moves. I don’t want to get into the whole games/realism debate here, suffice it to say that putting realism into some games would just be wrong – imagine if Mario couldn’t jump as high as he could, for example – games are meant to be a form of escapism from reality, so there’s got to be a few unrealistic things happening, but getting ‘caught’ in an animation shouldn’t be one of those things, in my opinion). Perhaps all this is just a limitation of current technology that I’m not comfortable with, but I don’t like my games becoming glorified Quick Time Events (Henceforth, QTEs). As I said before, if I wanted rhythm and timing, I’d play Rock Band.

Speaking of QTEs, when did it become the trend to make all boss battles end with a QTE? Bulletstorm, Space Marine, Vanquish, The Force Unleashed and Bayonetta – I’m looking at you as some of the guilty parties. I don’t think I’ve ever heard any one of my friends tell me they enjoy QTEs (and I’d love to hear the reasons from anyone who does).

When a cutscene starts, I’ve always seen it as a reward for completing my previous task in the game – when one of these kicks in, I’ve put down my controller and I’m probably sipping on my cup of coffee. The last thing I want to do at this point is hammer the ‘A’ button – I’m trying to watch the cutscene unfold. At this point, not only am I covered in recently spilled coffee, I’m also not concentrating on the bloody cutscene because I’m having to keep a sharp eye out for another bloody button prompt, so all that effort making something cool on the screen is wasted because I’m hunting for that elusive little flashing ‘X’ button or whatever. The Force Unleashed and Bayonetta get a slight reprieve here because their QTEs didn’t punish you too much if you failed. I can’t say the same for the others as I’d not managed to fail any QTEs in the (because I’m awesome). Even so, FU, Quick Time Events.

The Summer drought is over

I’m currently writing this in somewhat of a zombified stupor, given the small amount of sleep I got last night after getting back so late, so I apologise if this post becomes a bit of a ramble.

After a fairly uneventful summer for videogames, it’s a big relief to see the release schedule pick up the pace – the recent release of Space Marine kept some of the crew happy (except maybe for our own Adapt-”It’s-a-2-for-£30-game”-UK0). Last night saw a few of us head to our local branch of Game for the launch of Gears of War 3, which meant I got to grin like an idiot while carrying this:

Not pictured: The slightly more irate version of me 5 minutes before when I thought people were pushing into the queue "to buy my bloody Epic Edition which I've already bloody paid for"

I know I was going a bit stir-crazy over the summer months, especially as the weather this year has been less than stellar, and so the usual antics of pub-gardens, beaches and other such niceties didn’t really happen, which meant the usual quiet summer for videogames was felt more keenly than in past years (at least from my perspective). It does annoy me a little, having a few months with very few games being released. I know it’s all to do with the whole Christmas rush and companies want to maximise their profits, it’s just a real shame that in ‘sunny old England’ (and I use the term ‘sunny’ in it’s loosest possible terms) we have very little to look forward to in the summer months in terms of games.

At least now, for the next few months leading up to Christmas, we’ve got quite a lot of big releases to look forward to, in no particular order:

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Batman: Arkham City
Ace Combat: Assault Horizon
Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary
Battlefield 3
Modern Warfare 3
Forza 4
Ghost Recon: Future Soldier

And that’s just on the Xbox – I’ve not mentioned much about other systems (mainly because they get relatively little of my gaming time, which I do find to be a shame sometimes, but the releases there rarely fail to grab me as much as the Xbox release schedule). I do however want Mario Kart 7 and Super Mario 3D Land (although I do need to get a 3DS first…)

The best thing about the above releases? We’ll get to try out nearly all of them at the Eurogamer Expo this weekend! I’ll see if we can’t write some sort of collaborative report after the weekend for those of you not attending.

Spoilers (Warning: No spoilers)

There was an article posted on /Film last night detailing a study on spoilers and how they’re good for an audience. I won’t go into a blow-by-blow analysis of the study (I’ll just let you read it for yourself).

Now, I know that some people go to painstaking lengths to avoid spoilers for upcoming movies and games. I have to say that for the most part, I’m not one of them.

Mrs LeemanRuss (aka: Kim) once said to me: “Lee, you over-hype yourself on games by reading too much about them before they’re released.” (I’m probably paraphrasing somewhat here – she most likely also commented on my stunning physique and supreme intellect too). This was during one of my usual internet-scouring sessions watching videos of the upcoming Battlefield 3 and Space Marine games.

Not quite the spoiler I was thinking of

She did make a very good point though – I’d been hyping up Brink to myself and Team Gash ever since I’d first read about it just before the Eurogamer Expo in 2009.

Eighteen months later, after watching video after video and poring over many pre-release articles and hands-on tests, it was released, to much disappointment for us all. Now, it’s not strictly a ‘spoiler’ in terms of storyline, but I’d definitely over-hyped it to myself.
That and the fact that (and I’ve said this many times before to people) Splash Damage concentrated too much on ‘dress-up’ for the characters which nobody really pays any attention to anyway (other than to determine if they’re friend or foe), the awful AI of your team-mates and god-like accuracy of the enemy bots, plus the rage-inducing lack of a FUCKING LOBBY SYSTEM (Yes, I’m never letting this one go…).

I do find that I don’t really mind hearing major plot twists beforehand – I’m not a huge fan of surprises – and while I won’t necessarily read spoilers to the point of knowing exactly when Character A gets killed and by whom, I do tend to like to know a little of the over-arching storyline beforehand, ie: Will they save the world/defeat the evil genius/find their car? (MASSIVE HINT: Yes, in 99% of cases). A good example, if slightly off our chosen topic of videogames, will be when Kim and I started watching Dexter and before we were even halfway through the second season, I hit Wikipedia and read ahead all the way to the end of Season 5 (but with a memory like mine I’d forgotten most of what I’d read by the time it came around!)

In terms of gaming, any Halo fan worth their salt will have known the outcome of Halo Reach long before the game came out, and yet somehow this didn’t deter $200million being spent on day 1 of it’s release. I certainly enjoyed the single player campaign, and seeing exactly how it tied in with the original Halo (and yes, smartypants, I know a lot more people bought it for the multiplayer than the campaign).

However, (and that’s a big ‘however’, er, however); there are certain films/games where I don’t want to be spoiled. Film-wise, it was Inception – I deliberately kept my nose out of any spoilers for that one. Game-wise, Portal 2 was a game that I made sure I didn’t hear anything of the plot beforehand. I can’t quite put my finger on why, out of all the games I play (spanning genres from First-person Shooters all the way to Third-person Shooters) that I didn’t want to know what happens in this one. Of course, now I’m going to completely contradict myself and that study by naming Portal 2 as my Game of the Year (so far). I thoroughly enjoyed the experience from start to finish, and I had zero clue about the storyline, other than the premise of it being set after the original Portal (and that Stephen Merchant was providing the voice of Wheatley). That still hasn’t deterred me from reading any and all details I can find about Battlefield 3, Modern Warfare 3, Gears 3 and Space Marine, however.

I think, for me, as long as I know the outcome of the story, I can concentrate on enjoying the actual journey of the characters (or in a games case, my journey) from the start to the end.

And if I’d known you’d have to play as that long-haired emo fop Raiden for over half of MGS2, I’d have saved myself £30…

Videogames are bad for you?

Tonight at 8:30 GMT on BBC1, Panorama have a programme about videogames and addiction (yes, that old, long-dead, desiccated equine-corpse).

Now, forgive me if I’m repeating myself, but given how it’s stirred up the gaming community today, I figured I should mention it here.

Suffice it to say that the games industry aren’t overly happy about the programme and its agenda, as you’d expect.

Eurogamer posted this article which collated various viewpoints from across our beloved industry.

"Think of my kill/death ratio, dad!"

Edge spoke to one of the reporters on the show who revealed they didn’t even look at games like Farmville (yes, Farmville. FARMVILLE for fuck’s sake – that ever-present, news-feed spamming, time devouring boring ‘social’ click-grind where people constantly badger their Facebook friends for those extra pieces they need to build a bloody virtual barn), where developers Zynga have openly admitted they designed it to be addictive. Instead the BBC concentrated on the easier targets like World of Warcraft, presumably Black Ops (“we were hoping to go out in November to coincide with the release of Call Of Duty: Black Ops” says Raphael Rowe) and other more mainstream titles – not that you’d consider Farmville a ‘niche’ title, given it’s the most played game in the history of, well, ever, (apparently). I guess most of Panorama’s researchers have been playing it too much to notice…

One thing that did make me chuckle was when user ‘dadredster’ on Eurogamer pointed out that the BBC have their own games division, but don’t consider theirs to be the stuff of addiction (read: actually any good).

On a lighter note, GamesRadar decided to take a more mocking stance with regards to the BBC’s promo for the show.

Many have said that anything can be addictive if it’s done to excess – in terms of children being addicted, it’s about controlling them – if parents use the PC or console as a cheap babysitter then the child is bound to become addicted.

Eurogamer’s follow-up article (presented here) quotes some of the kids who have experienced this addiction, in order to give more insight into the issue. The one quote that stood out for me was this:

Take Joe. Having quit gaming, he suggests people should “go out and get smashed” instead.

This guy is a fucking genius (yes, that was sarcasm). Rather than keep kids off the streets (and risk their ‘addiction’ to a harmless substance), send ‘em out with a bottle of White Lightning and see what damage is done then… It’s no wonder the Videogames Industry gets a bad-rep with morons like this giving advice on how to avoid addiction.

I can see myself watching tonight and becoming more and more annoyed at the wild claims the programme is sure to make about our favourite past-time. I’d like to be pleasantly surprised, but I’m sure I won’t. Well done to the BBC for pushing the envelope.

Rumble – is it needed?

I’ve been saving this article for a rainy day, and since the weather was pretty cruddy yesterday, here it is, er, now, on this gloriously sunny day… Yeah yeah, be quiet.

A while ago Kotaku published this short opinion piece on rumble/force feedback in games, which in turn was a reaction to a piece from Edge.
Go and take a look at Kotaku and see what you make of it: Kotaku article.

Wrong Rumble. Just don't let Michael Bay get his hands on this one...

All done? Good. I found myself agreeing with the Kotaku writer – and it doesn’t do anything to increase my (already low) enthusiasm for Kinect. I like having rumble. Feeling the ‘kick’ of a gun as you pull the trigger, feeling the impact of every punch and kick in Street Fighter, feeling the clunk of a gear change in GRiD and everything else the rumble motors in a controller have been used for (the Psycho Mantis encounter in Metal Gear Solid being my personal favourite).

Playing certain Wii games with the classic controller or a Wavebird Gamecube controller often feel strange to me now – hitting a wall at top speed in Mario Kart just doesn’t feel right (literally).

Of course, both articles quote Kudo Tsunoda (general manager of Microsoft Game Studios) as saying that “rumble is such a rudimentary form of haptic feedback” – he then goes on to extol the virtues of Kinect and the world peace changes to the way we play games that it’s going to bring – all marketing and PR spin, I would assume (well, he’s hardly going to talk down his company’s latest product, is he?).

I for one, lament the day that rumble is phased out of our controllers. Here’s hoping Kinect is merely used as an add-on and not a replacement for the controller.