“RPG elements” is sort of game designer’s code for “no skill required”. With the exception of World of Warcraft, most games that have players earning experience points and unlocking new abilities don’t require mastery so much as a willingness to sink the right amount of time.
In opposition to its single player campaign, which emphasizes gritty, quasi-cinematic realism, the multiplayer in Call of Duty 4 has a lot of numbers. Players get points for almost everything they do. Killing an enemy, killing an enemy while crouching, killing an enemy with a certain gun, etc. These points will then unlock new guns, attachments to guns, special abilities called ‘perks’, such as dropping a grenade as soon as you die.
All this creates a single player, meta-RPG that lies on top of the different games of Deathmatch and Capture the Flag and King of the Hill, and keeps Call of Duty 4’s multiplayer from being well made but ultimately average.
This meta-game acts as an opiate for the mass of players who will never play the game on a high level but because of the realities of sorting and matching players by skill level still have to roll with the big boys. No longer are you purely concerned with your kill to death ratio. For every person you bring down, you get just a couple of more points towards the next piece of kit that you want to try out.
The downside of this is of course that the difference between doing well and doing poorly is often having a laser sight. In the end though a skilled player will be able to overcome these types of disadvantages, and the rest of us will enjoy the consistent pleasure of playing with new toys.
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300 Words About Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare - Multiplayer
Published by June 6th, 2008 in 300 Words. 0 Comments300 Words About Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare - Single Player
Published by May 22nd, 2008 in 300 Words. 3 CommentsOne of my favorite things about Toshiro Mifune’s performance in Yojimbo is that its sheer physicality convinces you that his character would be more than a match for 30 armed warriors.
In the same way Call of Duty 4 convinces you that the technological edge and organization of the western military forces is what allows a relatively small group of soldiers to take on an entire city. At the same time the narrative of Call of Duty is about the helplessness of a single soldier in the face of borderless geo-political warfare.
Perhaps the most talked about moment in the game is when you watch a nuclear explosion go off in the city you just fought your way through. From the chopper that’s carrying you away you watch the blast tear apart the other helicopters before crashing yours. For the next several minutes the only thing you’ll be able to do is crawl out of the wreckage, past the dead bodies of your comrades, and watch the enormous mushroom cloud as you die.
More interesting however is the passage where you sneak silently through an abandoned Russian city, past the feet of armed guards and rolling tank treads. The whispers of the soldier who is escorting you and the quiet of the large, empty city contrasts with the climax of the level, which is loud, violent, and short. Probably the most affecting stage is when you become the gunner of a AC-130. Invulnerable, you calmly mow down fleeing soldiers on the ground far below you, following the advice of a disembodied, matter-of-fact voice overlooking the carnage with you.
They say that all war movies are anti-war movies. With it’s striking contrasts of power and impotence, courage and violence, Modern Warfare comes close to being the first anti-war FPS.
There are a lot of rhythm games out there, Guitar Hero, PaRappa the Rapper, and most of them are fun. Having all the combinatorial depth of Simon Says they are nonetheless incredibly compulsive. They are also though, very much rhythm games, and for anyone who has actually played an instrument they have about as much to do with music as a lightgun game has to do with firing a pistol. The motions are right, but the feeling isn’t quite there.
With all the grinding and equipping and sorting units Patapon doesn’t feel like a rhythm game. That’s because for the most part it’s a strategy game, with another game in place of clicking. Your army moves along a 2D, side-scrolling plane not because you’ve pressed a certain button but because you’ve tapped out the correct sequence of buttons along with a set beat. One sequence will move them forward, another will make them attack, etc. As you encounter enemies you have to string together these different sequences in order to repel and counter their attacks. You then go back to camp, create units, equip units, and maybe play a rhythm-based minigame for extra resources.
Patapon is a step in the right direction towards real music games. While you’re still limited to the game’s internal metronome you’re given some leeway in the notes, and at it’s best moments it’s your ability to improvise that allows you to succeed. Though the game eventually leans on boss fights that require nothing more that rote memorization, you can see in the core mechanic of Patapon another game where each battle would require more interesting and complicated improvisation. If any of the unique tunes created had a tenth of the personality of a StarCraft match, then that would start to feel right.
Uncharted is a game that doesn’t know what it wants to be. Its spiritual cousin, Assassin’s Creed, couldn’t decide whether it was an open-world game, a platformer, or finally, an ARG. Drake’s Fortune on the other hand veers between over-the-shoulder shooter and CG film.
As a shooter the game is competent but unimaginative, incorporating the controls and cover system from Gears of War. Unfortunately, it fails to realize that what made the firefights in Epic’s game interesting was the strategy that went into moving from cover to cover, slowly flanking your enemy. Shootouts in Uncharted are usually just a beautiful version of Hogan’s Alley, with your character, Nathan Drake, taking shelter behind a box or pillar on one side of an area, and the enemies, hiding behind their boxes and pillars, exchanging volleys until someone peeks out at the wrong time.
As a CG film it does admirably, creating likable characters and a story that feels like a loving homage to the pulp comics of the ’30s and ’40s. However, it’s the mix of the movie and the game that makes Uncharted a little unsettling.
There’s a reason that Indiana Jones uses a whip: it is very hard to feel for the plucky, underdog hero if he spends most of his time mowing people down with an automatic weapon. With each successive cutscene featuring a wry remark from our hero after narrowly escaping death, or flirting with his female sidekick, I became more aware that in my time playing him I had killed literally hundreds of people. As a rule I’m not against killing people in video games, but in the end it was the incongruity between my character’s portrayal and what I was allowed to do with him that left a bad taste in my mouth.
Passage is a perfect game.
Not perfect in the sense that it is better than all other games. It’s perfect in the sense that it has nothing extraneous. Every element seems to have the incredible weight of necessity.
Beyond its elegance, the brilliance of Passage is that it uses the language of video games to subtly reinterpret familiar situations, giving the player a new perspective on games they’ve already played. The maze that is always below you is a stand in for the confounding gauntlet of professional choices we all have to navigate. Points and treasure chests represent the material riches of life that don’t always come easy. Life-long companionship is the thing that we irrationally desire even though it doesn’t seem to tangibly benefit us.
The graphics of Passage were made to fit within the constraints of Kokoromi’s Gamma256 show. However, they work on an additional level. The themes of the game, the choices between love and riches and adventure, are just the sort of choices that are now being grappled with by those who have grown up playing video games. Passage’s visuals are poignantly ironic, a nostalgic throwback to a time when its player’s worries were more superficial, but used to speak to their contemporary concerns.
Eric-Jon Rossel Waugh once wrote that in Silent Hill 2 you almost always get the ending you deserve. No more accurate thing can be said about Passage, and that aspect is simultaneously what makes it so much a game and so much like life.
You can’t win in Passage, you and your companion will always die, alone or beside each other. The game’s final moments lay bare how much of our sense of meaning and value are wrapped up in time and death. No moment is extraneous in the face of oblivion.
For a about a month and half in late 2007 Bioshock was the future of video games. It’s dense and macabre story combined with a unique and disturbing setting made it feel adult and mature compared to the space marine infested machismo of most other first-person shooters.
Then came Portal.
Portal’s light touch in all things, from it’s humorous storyline to it’s simple but surprising central mechanic, made Bioshock seem over the top at best and in it’s worst moments simply maudlin. Bioshock was a throw-back in everything, from it’s 1940’s setting and plot to it’s nearly decade old PC shooter mechanics. However, Bioshock was updated in the last month and so it deserves another chance.
The most important part of the new update is that it has un-broken the game. Whereas formerly death meant nothing, with you simply popping out of the nearest “Vita Chamber”, you can now turn the Chambers off along with the ‘goal arrows’ and ‘text tips’ and everything else that was meant to coddle the game’s non-existent casual audience.
The ‘field of view’ has also been expanded and you get the feeling that it’s the way it was always supposed to be. Your eye is now more naturally drawn to the monumental architecture of Rapture (the game’s locale). Fights with the Big Daddies are even more thrilling as their size is still screen-filling without being blinding.
Playing through again also makes you notice the little things, such as the wry way you’re forced to search every nook and corpse, scrounging for ammo and junk food, becoming the very “parasite” the game’s antagonist rails against. This and other touches make you realize that Bioshock was easily one of the best games of 2007. Unfortunately it’s still not nearly as good as Portal.
Assassin’s Creed is the new game from the development team that brought us Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.
The gameplay is generally a muddled experience. Your assassin, who has the agility enough to fly across rooftops and climb the faces of buildings, somehow loses his acrobatic skills in combat, where he stands in the center of his assailants and slowly exchanges blows with them. On top of this, you’re presented huge, detailed cities that call out to be explored, but have large portions of them blocked off for most of the game for no particular reason (other than to hide the fact that there’s nothing to do in them).
The story of Assassin’s Creed is similarly schizophrenic, featuring what could have been a unique period piece wrapped in a silly and predictable sci-fi plot. After a while you begin to wonder if the sci-fi conceit is there just to justify the fact that this middle-eastern assassin has the accent and appearance of a modern-day American. After all, it probably wouldn’t have done to have a game where the player took on the role of a Muslim warrior stealthily murdering political figures in an occupied Middle Eastern city.
At it’s high points Assassin’s Creed shows the elegance and possibilities of what context-sensitive controls can be when they are done well. Assassin’s Creed is at it’s worst when it seems confused about what it wants to be, compromised in what it could have been, or, as is sometimes the case, quite simply empty.
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