Called Out!: The Blog Post

So, as you can see by my wall, I’ve had some questions brought up to me. Rather than record another podcast answering them, I’m going to use my blog! Plus, I think I can express the Prince of Persia thing better with words.

Issue 1: Prince of Persia.

My issue with the game isn’t realism at all. Rather, it goes back to listening to a lecture from Jonathan Blow. I can’t quote verbatim, but one of the arguments he made was in the respect of games, and what they’re saying outside of what the creator wants to say. Some games say more with what the mechanics are, and what you have control over, than they do with their narrative and art style. Animal Crossing is a good example of this, where the game is a second form of society. What is that society, though? It’s disingenuine, it’s full of people that want things from you, and material goods that you need to pay exorbitant amounts for. And at the end of the day, after all those impersonal letters, everyone you know could just as easily be replaced. The player slaves day after day, endlessly, in order to meet some material need without any ultimate reward, and certainly without release. This isn’t what the designers intended the game to say, and I don’t have an answer as to what they could do to make the situation less awkward than it is. City Folk just enflames it by demonstrating limited contact with a few intimate friends, and placing services you need in larger, even less personal and more bureaucratic cities.

I’m getting off the point. My point is, I do not like the things that Prince of Persia is portraying about failure, self-reliance, and independence.  Now, this complaint could be leveled at Braid, since the time rewind function prevents all losses, but the difference is that the narrative, disturbing as it is, justifies it. He doesn’t rewind time because he’s magic, or whatever. He rewinds time because of his crippling fear of mistakes, of risks, and because of his problems with taking risks. When you’re rewinding time, you are undoing your mistakes. Now, since the player experiences time as we know it to exist, we remember what has been done in the past, and one would assume Tim has. The idea, though, of someone who does everything perfectly the first time only after making absolutely sure all other avenues are exhausted is a key part of the narrative. In Sands of Time, it was a cool dagger, and they didn’t pay any attention to what it really means to be able to reshape time as you see it, and the horrifying, devastating things that brings.

What Braid said of making mistakes, or more specifically the fear of making mistakes and taking risks, PoP embodies. You literally cannot fail. To my knowledge, there is no way to die in that game, whatsoever.  And the way that you are kept from failing is from another person. This communicates the idea that your failures don’t count for anything, and that there’ll always be someone for you to rely on, and you should never rely on yourself to do better, to get better at what you’re doing. Someone will be there to push the offenders back, to pick you up when you fall. This is a horrifying thing to say, on every possible level. It flies in the face of reality, and teaches lessons- and if you, dear reader, do not think the media you consume doesn’t teach you anything, think of how your manner of speech changes the more phrases you learn from TV, or how your way of interacting with the world changes based on playing video games. Those are warning signs, not charming reminders of how life is this toy or this moving picture- that are incredibly destructive to people who shouldn’t be hearing this sort of thing.

The things it says of independence are just as bad. Unfortunately, that part of my case involves massive spoilers involving the narrative of the game- particularly the ending- and it’s within the 90 day limit. Suffice to say, the ending is as appalling as anything in the game.

Issue 2: Resistance 2

Jastaz was here, and he played the multiplayer, so, I quoted him- and paraphrased a little bit here and there.

“The multiplayer varies. The competitive modes are, well, competitive modes, and they have a large variety of modes. However, the co-op is developed very well. The classes are well developed and varied, and you need a balance of all of them to do well. It’s a lot of fun.”

This is in direct contradiction to the Singleplayer. We covered it on a previous episode of the BLC, back when we put everything up on Sendspace. The short version is twofold: First, that the story is basically a bore, and the way they tell the story irritated the hell out of the both of us. lots of first person talking, and what I refer to as Hook-In-Mouth Cutscenes, where you’re guided a specific path to see something very specific that they want you to see. It speaks to me of a total lack in confidence in their own ability to tell their story, that they have to FORCE me to see what they want to show me. It also doesn’t help that the Vision bob is completely different in the cutscenes than it is in the game. They make a lot of assumptions about the characters- mainly that they’re interesting- and then undermine this with

Second, the gameplay itself. They’ve changed a lot of the mechanics for no good reason that either of us can determine. The weapons and tech have been changed to an incredibly far out Sci Fi vision contrary to most of the point of Resistance 1, the battles- which were closely contested indoor, or close quarter battles- have been switched out for huge open fields with slow progression, the level design is unintuitive, and there are a lot- a LOT- of one hit kills, which is never, ever fun. Especially if they’re jump scares at the same time, which many of them are.

So, our abbreviated position on Resistance 2 is this: Singleplayer is a buggy horror show and plays like an afterthought, and the multiplayer is great and well defined. They had a lot of confidence in their multiplayer suite, and NONE in their singleplayer campaign, and it’s transparent.

I’m not sure if this is something I would want to do again in the future, since I would like to think we’ll be able to express ourselves well. That last podcast, though, wasn’t done on a lot of sleep.

And if you were planning to play MGS4, you should have Big Boss Is Alive done it by now.