The Good, The Bad, The Jaffe

After nearly a month of sweat, dust and strong whiskey I can finally hang my boots up and call it a day with Rock Star San Diego's epic Wild Western Red Dead Redemption. It's been a long emotional journey across a dynamic and utterly spell binding landscape. The characters along the way have been just as memorable and the story has not only been exciting and deep in its own right but has also been a tale shot through with clever references and knowing nods to the dying West of Peckinpah and Leone. A thoughtful and exemplary videogame, but one which is also incredibly 'cinematic'. It's hard not to play this game without noticing the long shadow of cinema creeping across nearly every facet of Red Dead. This filmic quality is not a criticism and is partly the reason why this game is so successful, but it also points out the problems which the game faces.

It was interesting to listen to David Jaffe's speech at DICE 2012 whilst being in the midst of my romance with Red Dead. Jaffe's talk, whilst slightly meandering, seemed to come upon something important. What I understood from Jaffe's argument was that game developers - and publishers - were focusing too much upon telling stories through the medium and not enough on the mechanics of actual gameplay. So, while millions of dollars are being ploughed into developing the visual element of videogames the actual gameplay hasn't actually developed much since the nineties. While Jaffe's speech may have seemed (as it did to me at first) to deride videogame story altogether (his off the cuff comments about videogames being a rubbish story telling medium surely didn't help him), I don't think this was in fact the purpose of the talk. Instead he seemed to be saying that games need to focus on developing the gameplay rather than only focusing on the often non-interactive narrative and visual appearance.

Gaming Report: Feb and Beyond!

This month, in terms of videogames, has mostly been about completing Red Dead Redemption. It's been pretty epic and I'm feeling a bit lost now that it's over - but it had to be done. My mounting backlog is starting to feel a bit oppressive. Steam is particularly to blame for me buying unnecessary games. This month I picked up Braid, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, Freedom Force and its sequel, and Cthulhu Saves The World with Breath of Death IV. Along with this I reclaimed some old PC games which belonged to my brother when he was younger. I'm not sure whether they will all work on a Windows 7 laptop (I'm not sure I want to play them all to be honest - god knows why he bought Salt Lake Winter Olympics 2002) but there are some real classics here.

I booted up Deus Ex and that seems to work great - I've got right back into capping fools with the dart gun. The best of these games are probably: Homeworld: Cataclysm, SWAT3, Theme Hospital (I don't think this'll work), GTA3, Outcast and Star Trek: Elite Force. I'm quietly excited about  replaying Elite Force. This was a massive game for me as a kid. I was, to say the least, a little obsessed with Voyager and the promise of shooting Borg while cracking wise with Tom Paris was like a dream come true (in FPS form). If I remember rightly the game was actually pretty good - which is surprising for a Star Trek game. Working solely from memory I think there was a good variety of weapons and enemy types - and I think a half decent story. It was developed by Raven Software too which is promising. Anyway I'm hoping it'll install and run fine, then I'll report back on how it goes.

With the release of Mass Effect 3 coming up pretty soon I thought I'd play through the first two games in an attempt to hype myself up for the third game. I've said this a thousand times to my increasingly beleaguered friends, but I've never really connected to the ME series. This always seemed incongruous to my general interested - Sci-fi, Rpg, Bioware, etc.- so I'm determined to recap on the series and see whether I enjoy it more another time around. This is perhaps also an attempt to regain my grip on current game releases. Last year I found that I inextricably missed some great games when they were first released. Skyrim slipped past and I still haven't bought the game or even played a single hour of the 'Game of last year'. Similarly Portal 2 pasted without me picking it up, and only with coming of January did I finally buy and play the game (needless to say it was fantastic). Hopefully by forcing myself to enjoy Mass Effect I will be able to jump on Mass Effect 3 and subsequently feel more contemporary. Unfortunately I also realised that Freespace 1&2 are up on gog.com meaning that my I'm back to the old. As always too many games, too little spare time (too heavier a conscience).  

Freespace 2

Black Mesa Revisited - Re-reviewing Half-Life

Throughout my life as a man (previously a boy) interested in videogames I have invariably tried to come up with some form of Top Games list in my head. While this list tends to change with every interesting new game I play, or every forgotten gem I'm randomly reminded of,  one game in particular has tended to stay the course and has become my go-to answer if I am ever asked. Half-life is a game which I have cemented in my haphazard brain as a true great. Like Citizen Kane to the AFI, Half-Life is my inevitable answer to the question: what is your favourite game? But, the problem with this answer is that unlike several other personal favourites such as Monkey Island 2, Okami or Thief, I haven't actually played Half-Life in a very long time. So when I answer in a suspiciously robotic tone, I am also asking myself: Is this really the case or am I just avoiding a long period of silence while I rifle through all the games I've ever played?  

The thing is, while Half-Life is often brought up as an incredibly important game in the history of the FPS genre - making aesthetic and gameplay innovations which still have influence now - and is often placed high on published lists, it was also a game which genuinely had a huge affect on me as a youngster. I was 11 when it was released in 1998 and with a mind for violence and guns Half-Life struck me as something both visceral and sophisticated. From the instantly iconic opening I was hooked and became determined to traverse all the weird puzzles and scatty AI the game could throw at me. I found everything about it enthralling - the sound of changing weapons, the voice of the HEV suit, crow baring headcrabs, playing cat and mouse with the military and making jumps which seemed almost impossible - Half-Life was a game which enveloped me and many other gamers with its mysterious, labyrinthine trip through its crumbling research facility. For an awkward young boy Black Mesa was the place to be. But since my obsession with the game early on in life I haven't gone back to it for nearly 8 years. So, with the recent purchase of a working laptop I decided to throw nostalgia to the wind and re-play this 'favourite' game of mine.