Often enough, you don’t measure how important something was until it’s not there anymore; case in point with the radio chatter in FEAR2 (as I have just started playing it, I won’t pass any judgment on the game itself at this point).

In the original FEAR, you could hear the enemies’ radio chatter. This had several uses:

• They provided information regarding the opposition you were facing: when a squad had been decimated, the comm chatter of the survivors would tell you just that: “No way!”, “I got 2 men down!”, “I need reinforcements!”
• They increased tension: “Flank him”, “I have him in my sights”

The last one I realized while playing to FEAR2:

• They signaled someone’s presence in the area: what keeps happening to me in FEAR 2 is, I’d kill everyone in a room, then start looking around for some ammo or intel… and I’d get shot at point-blank by an unsuspected enemy that was sitting right next door; as this would never happen in the real world – the noise of a heavily armed soldier moving around would be enough to reveal his presence -  I found it a bit frustrating.

And in my understanding, it really fit the philosophy of the first game: it’s not about straight up surprise, but about the anticipation build-up: paranormal activities were always “announced” through cracking static in the headset, and replica soldiers attacking where similarly “announced” through these audio cues.

Some other noises would go in the same section: an elevator beeping when stopping on your floor or a door slamming open would suggest an imminent assault, whereas most of the time in FEAR2, the player would be the first one to get shot if he had not seen the enemy (and they can see you very well).

So now that the last drop of 2008 has dried up, I think it’s time to separate the winners from the losers:

• And the Game of the Year goes to Dead Space!

Here you can find the quick review I did. After having played the game a second time around, I’m not taking anything back. I, however, want to look beyond the game itself:

For one, let’s have a look at the sales figures: according to Gamasutra’s NPD analysis, Dead Space sold 421 000 units across all platforms. As the commercial lifespan for this game seems to be over, can we – we, developers and fans of the game altogether – be satisfied with less than half million copies sold? I somewhat feel the game isn’t recognized to its true value. The timing might help, though: Dead Space being at the forefront of the “quality over quantity” motto EA seems to be abiding by nowadays, the franchise probably has enough inside support for the 421 000 copies to be good enough to keep it going. Indeed, a sequel has been more or less confirmed.

Moreover, let’s not let the global marketing approach go unnoticed: on top of the game, there’s a comic book, there’s an animated movie, and there’s an story-rich website. Only after you’ve read/watched/browsed all of these, can you really realize the coherent universe that’s been created, the team tapping each media to deliver different aspects of the story, keeping it all interesting and deep. Now I don’t have any kind of figures on the revenue these have generated, but surely one can admire what the developers have offered to their fans. And surely a fanboy I have become. When’s Dead Space 2 due?

• And the Shame of the Year goes to Left 4 Dead!

I already expressed my discontent after playing the demo. Now that I had the opportunity to play for a couple hours with some colleagues, I can confirm it: this game is just not fun. Spraying bullets like a madman is just not fun. Coerced teamwork is just NOT FUN.

I’ve already discussed gameplay and immersion, I’ll just add that the atmosphere a lot of reviewer seem to be raving about is absolutely not worth mentioning; the only effort I notied were the cries of the Witch that you can hear from afar. Wanna see an atmosphere? Try Dead Space, they know how to set one up (hint: it resides more in the audio than in the post-processing effects).

Edit: The 421 000 figure for Dead Space only took the PC plateform into account; EA has announced just over 1 million units sold across all plateforms. The point remains, though: it’s still too little for such a great game.

Long before Dead Space was available, my few encounters with news regarding the game left me with the impression that this one stole its gameplay from Resident Evil, its look from Doom III and its backstory from Event Horizon (this film).

I wasn’t utterly wrong, of course, but that’s where Dead Space surprised me: for every inspiration source the game takes from, it will be the source of inspiration for games to come; Dead Space leverages on what’s good in other games in the genre, and innovates on so many other levels.

So let’s focus on the high points:

• There is some actual depth in the core gameplay (furious dismemberment…). I realized how much when I showed the 1st chapter to my coworkers as a demo; they were actually turned down, for it looked repetitive. That’s how I realized the first hour or so only touched the surface of the game mechanics: the zero-g and vacuum moments break the monotony. Especially with the fact that vacuum can come down on you at anytime (hull breaches, etc).

The use of stasis and kinesis is also a game-changer, whether it’s during pure combat moments or during puzzle ones. The use of a recurrent unkillable enemy is also used to great effect, as you are forced to run away, which changes the rules of the game.

What’s great about these points is that they are seamlessly integrated into the setting; Isaac Clark is an engineer/mechanic, and his abilities don’t appear like some kind of magic trick that conveniently showed up to explain the game mechanics,

• All the work that’s been put into interfaces wasn’t a lost cause: coupled with the fact that inventory browsing and log exploration doesn’t pause the game, it weights a great deal when it comes to immersion. Nothing is more stressing than running away from a couple of baddies, fumbling into your inventory to take this damn medkit. Throw in the air that’s hissing away from your oxygen tank and appreciate how stressed you can be,

• Additional points for the whole inventory management/shop system, as well as the equipment upgrading thing: there are entire moments during the game where your main concern isn’t to find the fastest, most efficient way to dismember enemies, but to make the best use of your inventory space and money. This offers a well-deserved pause.

A few random points:

• The little pathfinder thingy. It’s both useful and well integrated: given the context, it would be weird to be lost in the USG Ishimura, and this is a very elegant way to solve it,
• The way levels are set up. On almost each map, there’s some sort of basecamp where the player can save its game, shop for equipment and upgrade its weapons; some people found this boring, as you’d often come back to the same spot. I personnaly found that it would be a very natural way to react in real life: clean an entranched area and fall back to it regularily.

Finally, I’ll go with my one complain – because there should always be one: the distribution of ammo and equipment.

The distribution of ammo is entirely dynamic. What it means is, when you sell a weapon, you stop finding ammo for it. I think it undermines the economy/inventory side of things, as you find yourself juggling with ammo for only the weapons you have.

As for the distribution of weapons, I thought it lacked context: for instance, when you’re on the bridge or in the crew’s living quarters, there’s no reason to find mining tools or equipment, but it would be appropriate to find ammunition for the assault rifle for instance.
Additionally, having weapons depending on context would make some things harder: the assault rifle is pretty inefficient if you want to cut out limbs, but if that’s the only thing that’s around, you’ll have to make do. This could have given different flavors (weapon-wise) to different chapters.

Finally, you can get any weapon as soon as the 4rth chapter, which means that you won’t discover anything new during the rest of the game.

Even though I could go on and on about how the left 4 dead demo did a poor job at demoing the game, I’m not going to. Indeed, something more important came up while I was playing the demo: L4D felt like a huge let-down.

When reading about the game months ago, I had a dream; this is roughly how I imagined the game:

My sniper pal would get to rooftops and heights in order to scout the surroundings and find the proper route to take – the ones with the less flesh-eating zombies. The one carrying all the medpacks would come with, shotgun in hand, to make sure he doesn’t get disturbed by flesh-eating zombies. The safest route selected – a dark back-alley behind a hangar, we’d regroup and advance carefully, sneaking peeks around corners to make sure we don’t get ourselves into some place we can’t get out of.

In the back-alley, we’d rush the flesh-eating zombies with melee attacks to clear the street in silence. Someone would screw up somehow, offing one of them with a shotgun blast; a horde of flesh-eating zombies would come down on us, compelling us to a prompt retreat.

That’s how I imagined it. And flesh-eating zombies there are. But not much else.
The list of complaints starts with

• The arcade controls, that deprives the game from feeling you’re actually running or shooting. No ability to sprint when all Hell breaks loose. No sneak peek around corners, which doesn’t really matter,

• As there are close to no alternate path. Sure, the AI director does a good job at adding variety from one play to the other, but if I have do go down the same avenue over and over again, that’s just doing half the job!

• The gameplay also lacks variety and depth. There’s only one, actually: shooting. Except when you’re around a Witch, you don’t seem to have the opportunity to play it stealthy. And don’t think you can add depth to the gameplay yourself, as

• You can’t develop tactics on the side: for instance, you can only pack one medkit. So no medic guy. And you can’t carry more than one Molotov cocktail OR pipe bomb? How credible is that? If I were stranded in a zombified city – knock wood, about the first thing I’d do would be to find a bag to store anything that might give me the slightest edge in staying alive. Counterintuitively, those limits don’t apply to ammo as

• There’s virtually no ammo shortage. A zombie flick where you can pick up rounds of shotgun by the hundred? How many zombie film characters would have survived if given 100 rounds of ammo? There’s something patently wrong about those pseudo-infinite ammo sources. No ammo scarcity = no tension.
  

My guess is that Valve went on an over-simplification frenzy on this one; their FPS controls have always had an arcade-like feeling, and after the success of Portal – which can’t be any easier to handle, they might have thought simplicity was the answer to everything (I read a lot of ‘More is Less’ in different reviews). The truth is Left 4 Dead could have used some more depth.

Thank God, there’s still the possibility to develop mods. Given the amount of buzz the game has generated, chances are unhappy gamers will seize the opportunity to make things right. Larger maps with alternate paths, we will see for sure.

So ok, I only played the demo and only for an hour or so. Maybe I’m being a bit harsh; but by targeting casual gamers and arcade aficionados, Left 4 Dead is just miles away from what I expected/wanted.

I’m not so thrilled with the way Valve is demonstrating its upcoming game Left 4 Dead:

• Demo release date for those who preordered the game: Nov 6, 2008,
• Demo release date for the rest of the world: Nov 11, 2008.
• Game release date: Nov 18, 2008. From this day on, the demo won’t be playable anymore.

After months and months of development and hype-building around this supposedly mind-blowingly innovative title, Valve thought it’d be a good idea to limit the tryout period to a measly 6 days. Surely if the game is so good, it can speak for itself.

What are you doing, Valve, trying to get me to buy something I can’t try?

Saying I haven’t finished the game yet is already saying much – I bought it right when it came out on Xbox 360. Even though I was extremely enthused at first, I let go of the game twice and forced myself to pick it up again.

The quick post-game analysis is, it was too long. Had the game been shorter, I wouldn’t have stumbled upon the slightly broken mechanics, and I wouldn’t have started this post in a very frustrated state. Don’t worry, I finished it with a clear mind.

So what was my first clue? The story was; it went off track in the middle, making me loose complete interest in the main plot. Now maybe this was partially intentional – as the “moral” of the game seems to be that it’s pointless to get obsessed about revenge. Ok, maybe.

After a couple of hours riding Liberty City, though, I learned a precious lesson: dying is no fun. No kidding, I never thought death could be this long and boring.

• Anything that’s related to saving/loading in this game is flat out scandalous. After playing for a couple of hours, you’re fairly proficient with the controls, you know the city well enough and you want nothing more than getting rid of the save/load moments so you can keep on playing. Not so fast, it turns out you can’t save your game in less than a minute. Who wants this? I just want the save screen to pop out instantly (NOT a painful one line at a time) when my car comes to a halt on my parking spot and be done with it! Since when is it fun to watch your character look for a comfortable way to settle on his bed?

• Not being able to skip the death sequence animation can also be painful. Ok it’s really nice, with the black and white effect and the slow motion, but I don’t really want to spend 8 seconds watching it, especially when I know

• How painful it is to restart some missions. I have one of them in mind, where you have to get from your safe house to an accomplice’s, then go get a truck, then drive around for some time before you finally arrive to the place where the mission finally starts – 7 minutes later.

All this seems to point out, this is the kind of game where you’re supposed to be extra-careful. Fine, except this option is sometimes taken out of my hands:

• Being an open world with an open gameplay, you can die out of sheer bad luck. There are times where the emergent gamplay makes something fun happen: you drive your cousin around completely drunk, and the cops see you; maybe you’ll do fine and escape, or maybe you’ll hit a bridge pillar at full speed, fly through the windshield and leave your cousin to burn to death – ‘true’ story. This is fun. And there are other times where something not fun happens: somebody cut you off while you were speeding, you’ve hit the curb at a weird angle, the physical world somehow collapsed and your car ends up as a chunk of metal – with you still inside.

• And the worst offender is, in my opinion, when arbitrary difficulty is forced on you: there’s this mission when you have to make a frontal attack on some docks (that’s the one with a 7-minute restart time, by the way. This is also this mission that made me stop playing for a few weeks); there’s this other one where you have to drive a car with shitty handling in those small streets (even though you took the car from a ganster – you might think he’d want a good car for a speedy getaway).

Now, I remember a time – Vice City time – where I would pick up my GTA game hours after the scenario was finished, just to run hammock on the city and have fun. I think this time is over; all those things I’ve pointed out might seem like details; but details piled up and left me irritated, especially when most of them could have been fixed easily.

On a related topic, Randy Smith has some interesting thoughts on how long games should be.

Now, nobody in particular said it was – that I know of – but with the increasing number of talks regarding emergent gameplay and freedom in games, I thought you might think so.

Just let me point out two of the best games I’ve ever played: Call of Duty 4 and Portal. Both were critically acclaimed, receiving numerous and various amounts of “Game of the Year”, “Most Innovative Design”, “Best Writing”, and “Best New Game Mechanic” awards (I’m probably even missing some). And yet, you can’t tell me of game that’s more linear than these two. So what have we there?

Historically, games were made by programmers and artists: they had an idea, tried it out and got it out the door if it worked for their friends. But of course, no matter how skilled they are at what they do, they’re not necessarily skilled at the craft of making games.

So what ways are there to expand the world of possible in a game? I see two of them:

• The cheap one: you write a game based on smart interoperable modules; an AI that’s responsive to the environment, a well-integrated physic system, a set of user inputs that lets the player free enough, etc. That’s how you get a sandbox-typed game, from which comes emergent gameplay. Deus Ex, GTA, there are plenty of other examples, as it is the easiest way to increase the quality of your game, because it uses the resources companies already have at hand: programmers (hence the “cheap”, which wasn’t meant to be pejorative).

• The elaborated one: you elevate the craft of making games to an art. You have people that are aware of the narrative technics specific to games; you integrate your linear storyline with your game mechanics. You might end up with something incredibly scripted and linear, but if it’s as immersive as COD4, how is that a bad thing?

I think this more elaborated way of making games is still a very young one, but let’s get ready for more: the game industry is maturing, and this is a sign of it.

PS: On a side note, if you’d ask me to name a company that’s doing this well, I’d have to go with Valve; they have a lots of interesting publications on this topic over here, notably Stylization With a Purpose and Integrating Narrative and Design.