Nothing big to add here – I’m still working on a blog entry on Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky in my mind (these things take time, and it’s not as if the film’s already years old), but since I’ve posted the odd entry on Ebert’s big “Video games cannot be art” shtik, I wanted to post this link: The Observer has two gamers and their regular film critic Philip French give Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption a whirl. French is obviously not a gamer, but he knows his films, and it’s good to read a critic who’s at least willing to take the artistic potential of games seriously. He doesn’t use the A word, but that’s fine – any discussion of art that circles around what art is tends to vanish up its own backside anyway.
And now for some heavy-duty shilling of the game, because it does look quite good – western fans take note, and don’t be put off by the sucky stills below:
What is it about pixels that makes Original Gamers like me all gooey and nostalgic? Show us mid-90s polygons and we’ll go, “Ugly! Get it outta my sight!” Show us one of the original Space Invaders, or Inky, Blinky, Pinky or Clyde, and we get teary-eyed as if we’d just seen the first glimpse of our PC after having been held hostage by computer-hating luddites for six months. Mix it with those bleepy sounds of yesteryear (or, more accurately, yestercentury), and we’re back in the past, back at school where we consider ourselves much cooler than the Chess Club set but are just as incapable of getting a date… but at least we’ve got a firm grip on our joysticks, haven’t we?
There’s an entire branch of computer-based painting called Pixel Art (and if anyone goes Ebert on the term, I’ll make sure that they wake up gnawed at by an army of rabid hamsters) that is all about using the limitations of pixels to nostalgic effect. Pixel art isn’t necessarily as rough and basic as the original Donkey Kong – higher resolutions mean more pixels – but it tends to have a similar style as those Where’s Waldo? books. Check out this Pixel Art London (click on the pic for the full effect):
What is it about pixels that has that effect, at least on those of us who’ve been playing games since the heady days of the C-64, NES or Spectrum ZX? Is it the Lego-combined-with-OCD look? Is it a hankering for simpler, better times when we didn’t need to upgrade our computers every year to make games run well, when we didn’t need to download half-a-gig patches just to make the games work that we’ve just bought? What makes a good instance of pixel art much more charming than 90% of current-gen polygons (other than the fact that all too many current games cater to frat-boy, jock-straps-and-boobies tastes that never did much for me)?
I don’t know, but I want to leave you with this video – one month later than the rest of the internet, mind you:
Warning: if you’re not interested in my video game musings, you may want to skip to the end of this post. And now on with the regular programme…
Who doesn’t like a good post-apocalypse? There’s something about nuclear wastelands peopled with desperate survivors and mutated wildlife that brings a radioactive glow to the most hardened geek’s heart. And The Day After has been a topic dear to computer gamers ever since the heady old days of Wasteland, and it’s produced one of the most memorable games of the last five years.
In the ’90s, two spiritual successors of Wasteland, the original (and highly pixellated) post-apocalyptic CRPG (computer role-playing games, for those of you who aren’t fluent in nerd), came out, called Fallout and (somewhat uninventively) Fallout 2. They were ugly beasts at first, with a forbidding user interface and graphics the colour and consistency of irradiated cow dung. However, they were crafted with a wicked sense of humour and created an atmospheric world that was basically the mutant offspring of ’50s sci-fi, the “Duck and Cover” lies of the early Cold War and Mad Max, with Robbie-the-Robots and cathode ray computers sitting side by side with two-headed cattle, wasteland scavengers and slavers. And Fallout 2 had one of my favourite ever ironic uses of music – Louis Armstrong’s A Kiss to Build a Dream On.
Fallout also introduced one of video gaming’s most iconic phrases, delivered by none other than “Stupido Salavtore”, Hellboy, Beast: Ron Perlman himself. If I think of the world after the nuclear bombs have fallen, what comes to my mind isn’t a very young Mel Gibson pulling a Rorschach on the men who killed his wife, or even a touchingly naive elderly couple drawn by Raymond Briggs. No, what comes to my mind is this: War. War never changes. (Do it in a Ron Perlman voice and it suddenly changes from a trite phrase to- Well, listen for yourselves.)
So what’s brought on this attack of love for Fallout? It’s this: I’ve recently started playing Fallout 3, a monster of a computer game. I’m probably a dozen hours into the game and I’ve barely scratched the parched surface of the wasteland. I’ve already disarmed an unexploded nuke in the charming scrapmetal town of Megaton, I’ve ended a plague of firebreathing ants, I’ve faced mutants and feral dogs and giant scorpions. And I’ve lost my dad, as voiced by Liam Neeson, which makes me think that I must be some nucular Leo DiCaprio scouring the irradiated desert in search of a post-apocalyptic Bill the Butcher. It’s weird, but I haven’t enjoyed myself this much in a game in a long time. (Oh, and if you want an explanation of the title of this post, this video should help.)
Ahem. If you skipped all the rest of this post because you’re not interested in video games, I hope that you’re at least a fan of Rube Goldberg machines. If not, I’m afraid I haven’t got the slightest clue why you’d be reading this blog… Anyway, here’s the video of OK Go’s “This Too Shall Pass” – enjoy!
In case anyone’s interested, Rock Paper Shotgun has a “Wot I Think” on Prince of Persia. They say much of what I think about the game, putting it much more succinctly. I guess that’s why they are professional games journalists who get paid for this sort of thing, and I’m a lowly fan with a big mouth.
Also, after seven games and two reboots, the Prince of Persia series gets a movie version, which will make any film afficionado rejoice. Or regurgitate. It’s one of the two. In any case, it’s got proper actors and even a director who’s made good films – which is more than most video game movies can say for themselves. It even features good ol’ Satipo:
Could this be an actual video game movie that is worth the admission? Or will we be wishing afterwards that we could use the Sands of Time to rewind the previous two hours?
What makes a video game enjoyable? It’s obviously different things for different gamers: some like non-stop action, while others prefer games to be slower, more cerebral experiences. Some are graphics fetishists, while others say that gameplay complexity trumps visuals every time. Myself, I like a good narrative in a game, but I also want the gameplay and storytelling to be intertwined.
In the end, however, what it boils down to for most people, and in the most circular fashion at that, is that most people want games to be fun. They want to be taken out of their everyday lives for a while. Obviously that’s one of the reasons why so-called ‘casual games’ have been a major success in the last few years. Whether it’s Peggle or Plants vs. Zombies, or indeed one of the gazillion variations on the theme of Mah Jong, they’re all making money compared to what they cost that make most ‘non-casual’ games cry into their DVD boxes.
Now, old-school gamers like myself, who remember the times when a pixel was bigger than your head and the height of gaming was yellow pill addicts running through mazes and frogs crossing the street… Many of those gamers have nothing but disdain for casual games. Why? Because they’re easy. There’s little to no challenge in Puzzle Quest, they claim, so even your grandmother can play them and succeed. The most embarrassing examples of such old-school gamers will then go on a rant about the evils of instant gratification and those horrible people who feel entitled to winning a game every now and then without serious training.
Myself, I like a challenge every now and then – but to be honest, next to working 100% and having a relationship, I definitely see the appeal of games that are not punishingly hard. I see the fun in games that you can pick up, play for 15 minutes and drop again feeling that you’ve had a good time and cleared your mind.
However, there is such a thing as a game being too easy. I’m currently playing Prince of Persia, a reboot of a reboot of a classic gaming series back from the days when computers were big as houses and joysticks had one button. It’s a beautifully crafted game: it looks and sounds gorgeous, and it tells a nice story to boot. But, honestly: if I wanted a game that practically plays itself, I’d watch a DVD.
It’s a real shame, because the game could easily have been as much fun or more while still providing a bit of a challenge. As it is, you never feel like you’re controlling your character – and for me, that’s one of the big things when it comes to good games. If it’s there, you never think about it, but the moment that control is taken from you, you can’t help noticing. In previous incarnations of the Prince of Persia series, your character performed the most amazing free-running acrobatics, but the controls were tight enough to make you feel that you were the one making the Prince run along walls, parkouring his way through Arabian Nights-inspired worlds. In this game, however, it’s enough to run roughly in the right direction and press a button at roughly the right time, and hey presto! you’re running along walls as if gravity was completely optional.
Without a bit of a challenge, without the feeling that you’re actually controlling your character, the gameplay actually becomes a bit of an annoyance much of the time. It’s like watching a film on DVD (or Blu-ray, of course!), and every time you get to a new scene you have to play Tic Tac Toe against an idiot. You’re sure to win, but it breaks the flow of the game. At what point does a game become so easy that it might as well consist of one button: “Press X to watch the next cutscene?”
But yeah… the game is oh so pretty. Behold (and if you’re a fan of the final episode of Six Feet Under, you may want to brace yourself for a tune you know very well – once you’ve accepted this as something other than utter blasphemy, it actually works quite well):
… and a stomach bug brought home from Egypt. All in glorious HD.
So why have I, a stalwart PC gamer (with a PS2 obtained originally for entirely academic purposes, I swear!), got myself one of those newfangled PS3 Slims? Two reasons, really: 1) Blu-rays and 2) The Last Guardian. ObviouslyI had morereasons than that, but they’re the main ones.
1) When we originally got digital TV, I was told that our connection was fast enough for HD channels. And yes, it was pretty glorious (in a nerdy way) to be able to record and watch both volumes of Kill Bill in high-def. Even boring old football (that’s “soccer” for y’all yanks out there) just popped off the screen in a way that made it watchable. For five minutes. At most. But you could see every blade of grass, and every pore on people’s faces! (Makes you feel all Walt Whitmanesque…)
But then our digital connection was downgraded. Why? They couldn’t tell; in fact, they were pretty mystified why I’d been told to begin with that the connection was fast enough. Guess I imagined all those red pixels in Kill Bill…
In any case, yesterday we watched our first complete Blu-ray disk, Sunshine. To paraphrase another brainy sci-fi flick, “My god, it is full of details.” While I still have problems with the film’s ending, this visually stunning film becomes doubly so in HD. Almost makes you want to dive into the sun yourself… in a good way.
(If you’re interested in seeing a good comparison of DVD vs. Blu-ray, check out this YouTube video. Make sure to watch it in HQ though.)
2) This one is a bit more esoteric, perhaps. Two of my favourite games on the PS2 are called ICO and Shadow of the Colossus, and they may just be the main reasons why I got the PS2 to begin with. I was writing a paper on games as art (Et tu, Roger?), and both of these seemed to fit the bill, combining subtle storytelling, beautiful art direction and gameplay in ways that few other games have managed. The developer’s new project is called The Last Colossus, and the trailers definitely have left me more than curious:
Don’t worry – I’m not going to write another boring essay on whether games can be art. Instead I wanted to leave you with two videos; I’ll be away on holiday for a week, with no internet access or indeed computers. So, to make sure you don’t get completely bored, here’s a plug for a new adventure game called Machinarium. I don’t know much about the game, but the art direction is absolutely gorgeous. Check out the trailer:
Also worth having a look at are the developer Amanita Design’s earlier games, Samorost and the creatively named Samorost 2, both playable online.
You may already have gathered this, but in case you haven’t I have a confession to make. It’s one of my dirty little secrets.
I re-read books. And not only that: I also re-watch films. And, horror of horrors, I re-play games. Old games that have fewer pixels than Dick Cheney has had ethical thoughts. Games that require an hour or two of fiddling with Windows, downloading fan patches and editing game code in order to work on a 21st century operating system.
Of course I don’t replay any and every game I’ve ever played. Your run-of-the-mill first-person shooter is unlikely to get much of a repeat performance with me, unless it’s got that certain je ne sais quoi and is called Half-Life 2, I guess. (Or No One Lives Forever, or Call of Duty 2. For some reason, though, I didn’t even properly finish Doom 3 once.) Just like the films and books I enjoy more than once, some games are so good at telling a story and pulling you into their world, whether this is because of the gameplay or the writing, that I can’t resist revisiting them.
Psychonauts is definitely one of those games. It’s one of the most inventive, best written video games I know, and funny to boot. It’s also one of those rare cases where the gameplay itself is fun but not all that special – but once you combine it with everything else, the game becomes that oldest of chestnuts: more than the sum of its parts.
It’s the sheer exuberant imagination of the minds the game visualises: the paranoid delusions of the Milkman Conspiracy (and its wonderfully off-the-wall G-Men), the monster-movie inspired Lungfishopolis, the many other minds that form the basis for the game’s level. And the often inspired voice work is still among the most perfect in the videogame industry.
Differently from many of the other classic games I replay (or hope to, if I ever find the time), Psychonauts is still available (there’s no need to get it for lots of dough on eBay), namely on Steam. I don’t often do such blatant plugs on my blog, but this game is worth it.
Yup, I’m back. You may not have known that I was gone… but I was. Two weeks of holidays, baby, and sorely needed ones as well.
What’s happened in the meantime? Well… I saw and enjoyed a play by Beckett. In spite of a major in English Literature, I always felt that Beckett’s plays were too long by half – and I still think so. Yes, the length (and resulting tedium) are part of the point, but I’ve always prefered his short plays to Endgame, or Waiting for Godot for that matter. What can make the latter much more enjoyable, though? Good actors, or to be more precise, Magneto and Professor X. Or Jean-Luc Picard and Gandalf. Those two godfathers of the English stage made the play more than worthwhile.
Less enjoyable, though, was the current London production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. Yes, I compound my iconoclasm as a Beckett-disliking EngLit major by prefering the derivative Stoppard to the originator. Take that, SDH! Arcadia is one of my favourite plays, a wonderful blend of wit, intellect and heart. I fell in love with the play when I saw a fantastic amateur production done by a German student drama group.
So, with a play like this and a professional cast and crew, what could go wrong?
Well, mainly one thing: whether it’s the director’s fault or the actors’, they got the one central relationship of the play – between Thomasina, precocious 19th century teenage genious and Septimus, her tutor – wrong with a spectacularly wrong-headed interpretation of Thomasina (and a very mediocre Septimus). As a result, the production didn’t even begin to have the heart it needs to balance its cerebral qualities. If there is no ongoing flirtation and attraction between the two, one that Septimus is hardly aware of, then the final scene between them falls flat.
And fall flat it did. Having taught the play, I was constantly aware of what it could be and what the production failed to make of it. It had some strengths, mainly in the present-day comedy of academia and in a fairly strong Bernard Nightingale. (Oh, I wish though that I’d been around for the play’s original production, with actors such as Felicity Kendall, Bill Nighy and Rufus Sewell.) But without the heart, Arcadia is rendered flat and unengaging, rayless and pathless.
Okay, that’s enough for now. One thing, though, before I’m off: thanks to Rock Paper Shotgun, a computer game blog, I stumbled upon this story which has nothing to do with computer games and everything with sweetness and sadness and John Hughes. Well worth reading, unless anything even approaching sentimentality makes you come out in a rash.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 