Gaming's biggest bastards!

The above video pretty much nails my thoughts on Kratos, the star of the God of War series. Kratos is totally unsympathetic douchebag and, as "Yahtzee" points out: "it seems like the heroic thing to do would be to stop playing before Kratos completely fucks everything up!" About 3.45 in to this clip from 'Charlie Brooker's Gameswipe' you can see 'Father Ted' and 'IT Crowd' writer, Graham Linehan, talking about why he finds the characters in Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood to be among these great gaming arseholes:



Personally, I really can't stand everything about the atmosphere of Gears of War, as showcased in this clip that someone of YouTube has named "Funny Scene":



Yes, in Gears of War everyone is a giant jerk. When you're not chain-sawing people's faces off and curb-stoping their skulls with your abnormally huge boots, then you're threatening to kill harmless drunks. The distain shown for all non-military characters in both Gears of War games is utter. The game is set of a human colony where an evil-alien-raceTM has killed more or less everyone and left civilization in ruins. The human survivors you meet are referred to as stranded and are generally seen unfavorably by this black hearted game. The stranded are shown eating rats and living in filth, but this is shown completely unsympathetically with the tone being "look at these losers!" in a way that is disturbingly reminiscent of real life American attitudes to poverty and people on welfare (note the drunk in the video has the voice of a stereotypical Southern hick). It's actually making me a little angry. I guess I'll have to chainsaw something...

When I were a lad, I found the pc adventure game Simon the Sorcerer (voice by Red Dwarf's Chris Barrie) hilarious. There was a bit where you turned up at a lonely creature’s house, told him how ugly he was and ruined his birthday and the sarcastic, spiteful Wizard seemed really funny to me at that age. However, playing the game back a few years ago it occurred to me that he really is just a horrible little shit of a video game character. I think these sorts of character types are deployed in games because games are still aimed at children. Yes Gears of War and God of War are both '18'-rated by the BBFC, but they still have juvenile attitudes and are popular with young people (the only people who really find this sort of thing cool) and older people who still like WWE, for whatever reason.

'Mass Effect 2' review: Judgement Day

I’ve finally played my way through 30-odd hours of Mass Effect 2 and only just feel like I am ready to review the game. As anyone who read my article at the beginning of last week would know, my Mass Effect 2 experience has been dominated by an obsessive compulsion to mine every planet in the universe for mineral ore. However, alongside this peculiar industrial career mode there is also a Bioware RPG game. Well, I say RPG, but Mass Effect 2 has really done away with most of the traditional role-playing game elements popularised in games such as Baldur’s Gate and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. For instance, you are no longer asked to attribute skill points to stats like “strength” or “intelligence”, with the game instead simply asking you to select and upgrade abilities upon levelling up. This is hardly any more like an RPG than any game with basic customizable weapons.

I don’t think you need to have ever played an RPG to understand the combat system of ME2. Whereas in the first Mass Effect a sniper rifle was rubbish in the hands of a character without the required skill set, now the effectiveness of any given weapon is determined by your ability to aim it. In this respect the game now plays like any post-Gears of War third person action/shooter game: you glue yourself to a piece of cover (invariably a box or a wall) and pop out to take aim and shoot. However it’s not as full of wilfully unappealing brown environments as Gears of War, substituting them for pleasing, shiny sci-fi interiors and exotic alien locales... as well as a lot of warehouses filled with low walls and boxes. There are, incidentally, so many rooms and corridors filled with low walls and boxes in Mass Effect 2 that they quickly become mini plot spoilers indicating “there is going to be a fight in here”. And it’s a bad time for anyone with a warehouse, because their boxes are getting shot to bits in every system of the Milky Way.

Stripped of its RPG elements and played like a third person shooter, Mass Effect 2 is curiously easy. I had to switch its predecessor into ‘easy’ mode because I found the boss fights too tricky given the terrible combat mechanics. Yet I completed Mass Effect 2 on its default setting, only dying a handful of times. Even then it always felt as though I had been careless or over-zealous, rather than challenged. In the games defence it comes equipped with three difficulty settings harder than ‘normal’, which I imagine present much more of a challenge to players who place less faith in a games default settings.

Of course, the major selling point of all Bioware games, including Mass Effect 2, is the promise that your individual choices will dynamically change the game with actions always followed by consequences. This is made even more potentially interesting by the fact that in Mass Effect 2 you can continue your character from the first game (and into the third), with any meaningful decisions you made having further repercussions in the sequel. The problem with this is (and has always been) twofold in Bioware games. Firstly, the choices you make are never really difficult if you know how you want your character to turn out: all dialogue options fall into three categories: you can be saintly, Swiss or Hitler. This has the effect that I never end up making any natural decisions, but rather I think “this is my good character, so I will say all the “good” things”. There aren’t really shades of grey. You can either be narcissistic bore, high on the smell of their own farts, or a total jerk, being unnecessarily rude to everyone you meet - at every turn.

The second problem is that the decisions you make have only cosmetic impact on the game. It is never the case that taking one course of action sends the game to a different world or into a different mission to any other that could be taken. The game is always broadly the same for everyone who plays it. Take this example of a big decision you make in the first game which is carried over into ME2 (some may consider this a SPOILER): in ME1 you are forced to choose whether to sacrifice one crewman or another on a particular mission. In ME2 the character you saved turns up at one key plot moment and basically tells you to how you’ve let them down badly, then departs never to be seen again. This happens on the same world, at the same point, whichever character you chose to save. In other words they are completely interchangeable. Ultimately this made me feel like it made a bit of difference which character I chose to save, other than the fact that I saw a different character model and heard a different voice actor. You could argue that it adds an extra layer of reply value in that you can play through hearing different dialogue play out, but in practice I probably won’t want to spend another 15-20 hours (even when you cut out mining) running through what is mostly going to be the exact same game, with a handful of small differences to look forward to.

Having said that, it is worth pointing out that ME2 is supposed to run straight into ME3 (scheduled to be released in about two years time), with some of the decisions you make at the end of this second instalment really seeming to set up something very different depending on the games climatic final choices. I won’t spoil it, but the ending (laugh-out-loud-ridiculous boss fight aside) is really quite impactful. In fact this highlights the major strength of this series: the story. Bioware really create an interesting world of creatures, races and places, and considering just how many sci-fi films/TV shows/books have existed prior to the Mass Effect world, it is an achievement that it has a distinct atmosphere of its own.

Overall, Mass Effect 2 is a spectacular improvement on the original in every way, most notably in terms of its combat system and the comparative strength of its side quests (in that they don’t all take place in the same room, transposed onto a differently textured planet as in the first game). It has really fun shooter elements, a great atmosphere and an above average story. It isn't, in my view, as satisfying as Knights of the Old Republic, which had richer RPG elements, but it's far more polished than the recent Dragon Age: Origins. The best compliment I can play the game is that, after so many hours, I was sad to have completed it and am eagerly awaiting the next instalment.

Why are games still embarrassing me?

A while back on an edition of BBC 2’s ‘The Culture Show’ UK film critic Mark Kermode was asked to look at video games. After a spot of Wii Tennis, he was asked to give his thoughts on the subject. He said “I’ve never played a video game before, and I hope I never do again.” Ok, now that is a snooty thing to say (not to mention pretentious) but it is interesting to look at exactly why somebody like Mark Kermode would want to distance himself from the whole medium so fully. It isn’t because of the violence inherent in modern games and the surrounding moral panic. On his blog he recently posted a video where he likens the media furore over recent violent games to the video nasties coverage of certain horror films, so I don’t think that’s his problem here, because Kermode loves his video nasties. No, I think it has rather more to do with a major image problem games seem to have. Despite the fact that unprecedented numbers of girls and people at both extremes of the age spectrum seem to be playing video games now (mainly thanks to Nintendo) and despite the fact that they rival films as a form of mainstream entertainment (certainly in commercial terms) video games are continually marketed towards fifteen year-old boys. Yes, I know, fifteen year-old boys aren’t supposed to be playing Gears of War 2, it’s an ‘18’ rated game: but in terms of its attitude toward violence, its character designs and its dialogue, Gears of War is at least trying to appeal to the fifteen year-old boy inside of the 18-25 year-old audience. The machismo of it. The blood splatter on the ‘camera’. The great big gun with a chainsaw on the end (above seen in the arms of a "booth babe" from a game expo). There are only two kinds of people you find who seriously love Gears of War (I mean the kind of people who buy the hoodie and the action figures etc): teenage boys and slightly older boys with the personalities of teenage boys. This ties in a little with my previous topic, on games as art, in which I suggested that labelling a game as ‘adult’ is really only a way of saying the game contains violence and sex. These things are not in themselves adult. There isn’t really anything adult in the themes or ideas of Gears of War. It doesn’t demand any great level of intellectual development to understand.

This immaturity in games extends itself to the depiction of female characters. Have you ever used a character creation tool in a fighting game, sports sim or an RPG? If you have ever used one to create a female you’ll know that generally they can’t sport a healthy weight around the hips and the minimum bust size is usually at some kind of post-op proportion. Games like Dead or Alive or Ninja Gaiden (both by the same studio, Team Ninja) exploit their big breasted female characters to the maximum, with the former title boasting customizable amounts of breast jiggle (and providing the basis for a series of spin-off games involving collecting bikini’s and playing beach volleyball, as pictured above). The latter title, in its most recent PS3 incarnation, has the gameplay “function” of tilting the motion sensitive PS3 controller to manually manipulate the onscreen bosoms. But surely this is a joke, right? I mean, it isn’t a major selling point; it’s just a little bit of fun, yeah? Well, no. In Japan the game was trailed on television with an ad exclusively focussed on this groundbreaking feature. Is it any wonder that Mark Kermode doesn’t want anything to do with us game playing sad cases? I feel like blowing off my own head in mock disgust.

Yeah, I know, the truth is he’d hate games whatever they were like, just because he needs to show us how serious he is. This much is probably obvious. But games like these don’t half provide an excuse to pour scorn on games and the people who play them.

It’s not just the hyper- crass examples above that support those who’d happily see games dismissed out of hand as the preserve of those without social skills. Take a recent and critically lauded game like Bayonetta (Edge Magazine gave it 10/10) as an example of a superb, technically polished and well made game with its own burgeoning acne problem. It stars a sultry lady with a pistol extending from her high-heels and a colossal bust, whose magical powers make her very clothes disappear (pictured). Let me make this clear: I’m not being a prude. Of course games can handle sex and feature sexy characters (something that, with varying degrees of success, BioWare have been trying to do for years). But these images seem regressive to me. They seem to be blind to the fact that so many more people are open to playing games now. It seems like video games have a lack of self-confidence, either that or a lack of faith in their audience, who, in the main, are prepared for something genuinely mature by now (I’d like to think).

Granted, Bayonetta has sold really well, and I don’t begrudge it that. By all accounts it’s a decent game. And I know at least two women who love it, so I don’t think it’s upsetting lady-gamers or anything. Nor do I put myself above the likes of Gears of War or Dead or Alive: I have played and enjoyed both titles over the years. But games have come a long way in a short space of time in terms of technology and in terms of the demographics they appeal to. So why are they so behind in terms of their gender politics or just in terms of “good taste”? Why are they still marketed towards this fictional, Nuts-subscribing fifteen year-old boy?

It’s a shame Kermode and his BBC chums didn’t give their Wii a bit more of a chance. After all, with a range of “games” to do with fitness, numeracy, learning a foreign language, as well as the more traditional likes of Mario (Brothers/Galaxy/Kart), Zak and Wiki and Metroid, the Wii is arguably closer than any of its rivals in fulfilling the BBC’s own brief: to inform, educate and entertain. Too bad the critics focus on all the fat, sweary kids salivating over a chainsaw kill on Gears of War, calling somebody a "faggot" online, and generally making the rest of us look bad.