The Games I Play – January 09 – Falling Out

Games Purchased This Month:
Bioshock (Steam)
Race 07 (Steam)
Unreal Tournament 3 (Steam)
Team Fortress 2 (Steam)
Portal (Steam)
Supreme Commander PC

Games Played This Month:
X3 Terran Conflict
Dead Space (Xbox 360)
Portal (Steam)
STALKER: Clear Sky
Fallout 3 (Xbox 360)
Interpol Demo Xbox Live Arcade
Left 4 Dead (Xbox 360)
Wii Sports (Wii) Bowling Multiplayer
Mario Karts (Wii) Multiplayer
Team Fortress 2 (Steam)
FEAR 2 (Demo)
Unreal Tournament 3 (Steam)
Resident Evil 5 Demo (Xbox 360)
Diablo 2

Games Finished This Month:
Fallout 3

Mr Cynical has given me the job of bringing some life back to this blog. I wouldn't say that he has lost interest in gaming, he still loves playing games. In fact, he spends all of his time playing games. He has just lost his faith in the gaming industry. He won't communicate with anyone face-to-face any more. He prefers to send short text messages via Xbox Live. You can imagine the interview process took quite some time. He often gets confused with who he is talking to and breaks out in to random “Pwn u noob” for no apparent reason. I don't believe these random outbursts are aimed at me. It is possible that, in the end, he forgot why I was talking to him and just handed over the keys to the website, as you might say.

After reading Nick Hornby's The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, which I highly recommend and given that you are reading this blog I believe that you are capable of reading and not just playing games, I found some inspiration for the new format. I have been sick of gaming news for some time. Most game comment is confined to reviews, rants on forums, and poor editorial content. Gaming is an experience beyond those pieces of marketing spin which now define the industry. It is no longer just an activity that we do just to pass the time either. Rather, it is something that we do because it engages us on more than just the level of being entertainment. Sure, we can play games to pass the time. We can even play games because it is fun and is now an accepted social activity. But gaming can also engage us on a level that makes the journey of playing the game a deep and rewarding personal experience. An experience that can talk to us on multiple levels and contribute to other forms of media as well. While the paths we travel may differ the endings are always the same.

The Games I Play will outline my gaming experience from month to month. There are really no hard and fast rules to these posts. I don't have to play new release or current games. I don't have to finish games. I just have to take the journey and then relate it at the end of each month. That journey may take the form of websites I have visited related to gaming, or forums I have read, but ultimately it will be about the games that I play. I will also post what games I have purchased, played and finished during the month. Fortunately, as opposed to The Spree, my posts won't be governed by a band of 90 odd brothers and sisters wearing white robes who partake in regular sport and are vehemently opposed to criticism. Instead, my posts are read over by Mr Cynical. He is just a crusty old gamer who believes that those employed in the advertising industry are the anti-Christ. The last time I heard from Mr Cynical he was ranting on about how the Commodore Amiga was the greatest gaming machine ever made. He may have been drunk. It's hard to tell.

This will no longer be a blog about reviews, or news. It is just one person's journey through gaming one month at a time.

January is my biggest gaming month of the year. I have four weeks off work from late December to mid January where I can relax at home. It is an opportunity to catch up on reading, walk the dog, ride the motorbike, and play games. Sometimes in that order. I am not in to travel and had no plans this year. This meant plenty of time for gaming.

Although my list of games played is long the three main games that I played over the break have been Fallout 3, Portal and Dead Space. I should state that these are the games that I set out to finish and this, by that definition, makes them different from the others. It means that I was primarily more involved in the pursuit of playing these games with a particular objective. I will say that I don't binge game. I won't play for ten hour straight. I may play the same game twice in one day but I don't do abnormally long stretches as in binge gaming. It maybe because I am getting old, or I don't find the narrative in games as engaging. I don't know why, but generally an hour or two at a time is enough for me. Other games I do pick up and play to fill in the time, or, because I enjoy the fictitious place created by the developers. Where games differ intrinsically from most other forms of fiction is that games maintain the appearance that the consumer is in control of what they are doing in that place. The worlds created by developers mean that some games enable the consumer to go back to that place on demand and to enjoy the environment that has been created. I may go to Liberty City just to discover the location of every dirty rat in the game. This enables me to pick up and play. A novel doesn't really allow the same kind of interaction. The good thing is that you can go back to these places without any great commitment of time. X3 is a game along these lines for me. Egosoft have created a vast environment that you can easily pick up and play at any time.

Having said all of that each of these games I have wanted to play for different reasons. Fallout 2 is one of my all time favourite games. So, that explains the choice of Fallout 3. Portal I have had sitting on my shelf for ages on Xbox 360 but have not played. I thought the controls were better suited to PC. The Steam new years sale allowed me to pick the game up on PC for virtually nothing. Also, a wannabe game developer type friend of my brother said that Portal was “the best game ever made”. I found this to be a bold statement. Has he not played Fallout 2? I thought that was the greatest game ever made. I guess a bean counter would say that World of Warcraft is the greatest game ever made just because of how much money it has made. The opinions people hold about gaming are just as diverse as any other media. I should say that in the same conversation the wannabe developer said that open world games were only about killing old ladies with baseball bats. Needless to say, that I took his enthusiasm for Portal with a small serving of skepticism. It was with these words of wisdom from the future of the gaming industry that I set about and played Portal. Dead Space I had read about last year and thought would be interesting to play even though it was developed by EA.

I must say that my youth was shaped by post apocalyptic fiction of some sort. The movie which made the cold war a reality to me was The Day After. A film which featured Steve Guttenberg (...you'll remember him from films such as Police Academy 1 & 2 and the memorable Cocoon … he was a real up and coming talent at one time or another as you can tell from his list of quality movies). At the time of this movie's release on television it was a hyper real portrayal of a thermo nuclear engagement in the US. I must have been ten or eleven when I saw this film. Having miss-spent my youth reading too much, thinking too much and imagining too much, the horrors of nuclear war became all too real. This kind of life represented living hell to me. What I got from this movie was that radiation sickness was not a good thing. You lose your hair. Lose your teeth. Lose your will to live. To die in this way was not a good way to go. Of all the ways to go dying in my sleep is at the top of my list. Dying by radiation sickness is down the bottom. Along with shark attack, dying while climaxing, and choking to death (not simultaneously). You would think that dying while having sex would be at the top of the list, but it just seems like another thing that I would leave unfinished. There would be the gardening. That decking you never finished and, of course, the sex that you decided to leave mid-thrust. It would just be another thing that I could disappoint someone in. Think about if that was the last thing you did with your partner and that was the worst sex they ever had. You wouldn't be leaving her with a lasting positive memory of your life. Not only would she think that she was responsible for killing you but you were the worst root she had. What a way to be remembered. Anyway. One of the books which I read around the same time was Z for Zacharia. There is no other book that I have read which has scared me as much. A girl lives alone in a valley after a nuclear war. The valley where she lives is an oasis which has not been touched by the radiation. The valley forms its own weather systems. However, her life changes when a mysterious stranger comes along in a radiation suit. I am sure that another reading of the book would put things in to perspective, but these illogical fears of my childhood are what they are. I don't know whether I really want to change them.

These two works defined post nuclear living for me. It was not a pleasant place. Not the place where you wanted to wake up one morning and spend some time. It's funny that the things which scare us also attract us in some way. I love a good horror or survival story. The Day of the Triffids is another novel which I loved as a kid. It has its own type of apocalyptic scenario however the end of the world comes in the form of killer plants. John Wyndham was a master of this type of novel. 28 Days Later is a virtual clone of the events in The Day of the Triffids just sans plants (plus zombies). There are many other forms of post apocalyptic fiction that we are presented with. (V (80s TV Show). Resident Evil (Game & Movie). Mad Max & Mad Max 2 (not Beyond Thunderdome … Hollywood can't cope with the gritty reality required for post nuclear drama it must not make them hear the sounds of cha-ching … Waterworld is a good case in point … maybe Kevin Costner should go back to making porn … that is a gritty world that Hollywood does a little too well). Dawn of the Dead (… and all the “of the Dead” movies by George Romero). Jericho. The Stand (Steven King). Tomorrow When The War Began (John Marsden). These are just the ones I can list off the top of my head. Someone would be able to come up with a far more comprehensive list, but their list won't necessarily contain titles that I have experienced.) However, none of those listed have influenced my own perceptions of this type of world more than The Day After and Z for Zacharia. These two titles created the emotional media baggage that I take to a post apocalyptic game. They both created ultra realistic worlds that gave me childhood nightmares and was not a world that I wanted to experience.

Then along came Fallout 2.

If there was ever a creation that made the poisoned after effects of nuclear destruction the place to live then Fallout 2 was the one. It was a place that wasn't politically correct but unoffensive as well. I mean in what other game could you become a porn star known throughout the land for your on screen prowess. It was a world torn between factions where even the smallest mistakes could cause ongoing problems for your character. One time I played one of my party killed an NPC child in The Den during an intense fire fight. I didn't think much of it at the time. What I didn't know was that my character had been labeled as a child killer. It didn't take long before bounty hunters were hunting me down in a frenzy of randomly generated combat. Even though I hadn't performed the act the action of my party had managed to tar us. This was a unique environment with replay potential unlike any other game at the time and even to this day. The game was implemented with turn based combat. For all of you younger gamers turn based combat was the way real Role Playing Games were played. Unfortunately, game styles have been homogenized by developers. Where we once had many soon there will be only one. Turn based gameplay was not considered to be good for a quick gaming fix. A shooter is better for this.

So, what does all of this have to do with Fallout 3? Not any game in recent memory has there been such a massive canon of work in which it instantly became a part of. Star Wars may come close and you would have to admit that the narrative drive of these games is extremely hit and miss. The Bible has several moments which you may have heard about which have a very post apocalyptic feel. Heard of Sodom and Gomorrah? Or even the book of Revelation. Then you have classic literature such as The War of the Worlds by HG Wells. This book has actually been turned in to several films. One of them quite recent. Here is a history of work which stems back thousands of years. Yet none of these things seem to be mentioned in connection to the games which contribute to the same canon of work. There is a deep seated cultural cringe within gaming. Even those within the gaming industry help to perpetuate this cringe. Maybe this is why we see so many clichéd storylines created in games. Because developers don't consider themselves to be contributing to a body of work that has existed before them.

Reviewers of Fallout 3 also have managed to politely ignore this fact. The worst review that I read of the game was in Atomic magazine and the reviewer virtually started the review by saying that he had not played the other Fallout games. This then gave him carte blanch to ignore that they even existed. I think most of the other reviewers did this. They just didn't make the mistake of stating that it was their intention to do so. Reviewers also ignored that Bethesda took the politically incorrect Fallout 1 & 2 and turned it in to the politically correct Fallout 3. Maybe their youth or ignorance of the previous versions of the game are their excuse for this. It seems that while the average age of a gamer may be somewhere between 28 and 33 they still write for a 12 year old audience that hasn't experienced life.

When I play a game I bring layers of media context with me. They are an active part of the creation of my suspension of disbelief. I carry these things with me when I watch a post apocalyptic television show or movie. This body of work gives me the ability to create a point of comparison. It creates layers of context that provide meaning beyond the story which is presented to me. When I played Fallout 3 I couldn't live in denial of the fact that I had played Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics. Yet, the gaming industry lives in a place where there is no past, present or future. The only thing that exists is the game which sits in front of you. When you start the game you become an idiot. An imbecile who has forgotten everything they have learned up until that point in time when they start playing the game. This was the expectation behind Fallout 3. That we were meant to forget every single piece of work that had been created before it and to just consume that piece of media as it was. You were not meant to know that in previous releases of Fallout that vault dwellers were inbred morons. Vault dwellers were the butt of jokes and disrespect from the rest of the fallout universe. However, this was not to be because in Fallout 3 it was the exact opposite. The vault dwellers were well educated and everyone else in the world were considered to be, somewhat, stupid. This is a fundamental change in the environment that has been created. A complete change to the world which existed before. Yet, I made a mistake when I played the game because I wasn't meant to bring this baggage with me. It was a secret. I wasn't really meant to know about the fact that there had been changes made to the world as it existed before.

There is no denying that if Fallout 3 was the very first piece of post apocalyptic fiction ever created that people would consider it to possibly be the best because they had no other point of reference. Maybe those who review suffer from an unbelievably short memory.

Dead Space is a game that is the complete opposite. The game makes reference to those different genres and creators that have gone before it. The game even acknowledges and borrows from them as it sees fit. The story and the action may be familiar but the game is so polished that the time you spend there feels new. This, to me, is the fundamental difference between these two games. For all intents and purposes you could say that Dead Space is a cumulative work that borrows as it needs from other pieces in order to create something that feels new. Sometimes the references are a little too obvious. The character you play is named Isaac Clarke. (I wonder who this is a reference to? - Cynical) This is, of course, the post modern way of pumping out something that is perfectly consumable. It is, after all, just entertainment. I mean we shouldn't get too hung up on these things, should we? I wouldn't want to offend any of the fan base.

Should gaming be the medium where we check our baggage at the door? If this is so then the industry is destined to make the same mistakes over and over again. It will not be able to learn and grow and offer old things in a new light.

I made a fundamental mistake when playing Fallout 3. I played the game as though it was Fallout 2. At the start of the game I took a perk that was the essential perk to have in the original games. Increased XP. I took this perk having forgotten that there was a level cap only to discover later that this Role Playing Game really wasn't much of a role playing game. It was just another shooter. I capped my level prior to finishing the story. I don't think that gamers should be punished in this way when they play long games. Or, for a game to suddenly change from what it is supposed to be, which is a role playing game, to just an outright shooter.

Oh … I nearly forgot about Portal. The so-called greatest game ever made. How could I forget about that? Well, if jumping through hoops is your thing then Portal will be right up your alley. It is the game that teaches you how to jump through hoops. The puzzles are not overly complicated. In fact, valve will have you go through 15 levels or so before you actually have to think about the game. There is not really much else to it. I have to clarify that Portal is more enjoyable than the hula hoop mini-game in Wii Fit. Only slightly. Maybe this could be a new genre in gaming. Hoops. Could we include basketball in that genre?

I did enjoy Fallout 3 far more than Portal. The world which Bethesda has created is engaging. The game provides the player with real choice that has ramifications. Some of the choices that you make may, at the time, seem to be the right thing. When you discover Tenpenny Tower you also find out that there are local mutants who would like to join those humans who live at Tenpenny. It appears that they are not allowed to live their due to the xenophobia of the inhabitants. By allowing the mutants in to Tenpenny Tower you believe that you have created an enforced equality for them. When you back there later you find those very same mutants have killed the other human inhabitants due to a “misunderstanding”. This is excellent sublime scripting. And this is the way it is with Fallout 3. The side missions are what makes the game. The main story is a distraction and ultimately poorly told. Morrowind is still the ultimate modern day role playing game. It was massive on a scale that has not really been attempted since. The freedom that was provided to the character through the use of magic has not been repeated. Oblivion was a watered down Morrowind. Just as Fallout 3 was a watered down Oblivion. Look at the limited and annoying use of the radio station in Fallout 3. It was a horrible game mechanic. When you look at Rockstar have created in GTA IV. They have not held back on content when it comes to creating a believable in game world. Their radio stations are one of the most entertaining elements of the game. GTA IVs mission structure is repetitive and boring. Imagine if they could combine the talents of both teams and make the ultimate open world game if time and money were no limits. I must dream the dreams of gaming geeks. Unfortunately this will never happen and it may be fair to expect that given the large cost of game creation and the extended development times that games may in the next four to five years get shorter rather than longer.

I played through two game demos of up-coming releases which were on my list of games to buy. However, after playing the demos I have quickly removed them. FEAR 2 and Resident Evil 5. My wallet is thankful that they have been taken off the list as this year will definitely see a reduction in my game purchases. What happened to the gritty combat of FEAR? And Resident Evil 5 has some of the worst controls of any game that I have played. Rather than work with you they fight against you. I understand that this is a technique that is used to slow down the action within the game. Make it more challenging. Ultimately it feels forced and unnatural. I wish that I had played the demo of Alone in the Dark prior to actually making the mistake of paying for it. Another case of excellent marketing backed up with poor game execution.

There are still some new games on my radar for the following month. Dawn of War 2 on the PC and Race Pro for the Xbox 360 are probably on my highly anticipated list. I don't believe that I can argue that a car racing game will allow a gamer to bring their emotional baggage to the game prior to play. Unfortunately there are no real hidden contexts to a Mini Cooper S racing around a circuit against other cars of the same type. Just mindless enjoyment. Gaming is about that too sometimes.

I decided to do the right thing and give Mr Cynical a copy of this month's The Games I Play before posting it. He grunted a few times while reading. At least I think he was reading. His eyes scanned the lines and as they moved he mouthed words with his lips but I am not sure if he understood. In the end he said, “No one will understand what you are saying if you don't rate it out of ten. Gamers don't read. They just go straight for the score and then move on to the next one.” I was not going to add a star rating just to make an effort to please Mr Cynical. What would I be rating anyway? Surely, everyone now thinks that these things are redundant.