It’s been a while since I’ve had a game I kept going back to as much as Splinter Cell : Conviction. In fact, I think the last one was GTA Vice City. It puzzles me that a lot of people keep saying that this installment is “more about action than infiltration.”

To me it’s the best by far, thanks to the The Mark & Execute system.

In the original recipe, the stealth gameplay was strictly enforced, to the point of absurdity: It was impossibly hard to shoot someone, and being discovered with your hand in the metaphorical cookie jar almost invariably resulted in Fisher bleeding out on the concrete – even when facing a single, isolated enemy.

I suppose the contrived difficulty was how the developers chose to force the players down a purely stealth path. In the end, it feels unnatural in terms of narrative (Fisher is a super-duper agent who… doesn’t seem to be able to dispatch a single enemy?), but also gameplay (the player feels incredibly potent in some situations, but utterly powerless in others). Also, I’ve never been a fan of stealth games where you can pick out guards one by one without their friends noticing anything. In my world, shit is bound to happen.

Now, fast-forward to SC: Conviction. Detractors have complained that the Mark & Execute ruins the spirit of the game. I can only agree to that if it’s used extensively. When used by a player willing to “play the game,” it makes perfect sense and fixes the aforementioned gameplay/narrative disconnect.

Specifically, I use it as a contingency plan: Say I intend to take down this one guard, but notice two others chatting not far from there. I mark both of them just in case, then perform a silent take-down of some kind on my primary target. If the pair doesn’t see me, then it’s onto the next one and I’m playing the way I would have in SC1. If I get spotted, I don’t die in an utterly absurd way. This strategic approach is (to me) just as important when playing a stealth game than say, creeping in the shadows.

In the end, I think designers always try to create a focused experience – and they should. But sometimes, giving the players some leeway instead of building strict constraints right into the game mechanics can add to the mix. A lot of players are willing to “work” to step into their character’s shoes, which results in a greater involvement.

Which is why I’ve always thought the whole our-protagonist-doesn’t-talk-so-the-player-can-relate-better was bullshit.

Found on Gamasutra:

Conscience Is But A Word: Why videogames need better villains, by Xander Markham.

Great article. Plenty of valid points are also made in the comment, but I’ll specifically second Jeffrey Wilson’s opinion: bad guys who do evil stuff just for the sake of being bad guys are flat out uninteresting  (and I’ll add, those who do it simply for their own good can get boring pretty quickly).

The audience needs to know enough in order to connect with them: understand what they want and why they want it, and then reject it.

Still waiting for my Splinter Cell: Conviction copy to arrive, so what do you think I should be doing? Well, I think I definitely should be playing the shit out of the demo. First time I went through it, I was a bit pissed it lasted only 20 minutes. Now that I’ve finished it 50 times over, I just don’t care: who would have thought it’d be so much fun killing the same 6 guys 50 times over?

One thing I noticed though, is that Sam Fisher seems to randomly comment on your actions “Not bad”, “I see the training paid off”, etc. If I simply grab a guy and pull him over a ledge (an action that only requires me to press a single button), Sam just might comment on that.

I think it would be better if Sam only spoke out when the player’s actions deserve it: say, if the player takes down 3 enemies in less than 3 seconds and without anyone noticing, for instance. These comments could also be modulated by the level of difficulty, and possibly on how well the player has been doing so far.

The tools needed to estimate how well the player is doing aren’t that complicated: a timer, and simple frustum, alert and kill checks. And in return, players would have the satisfaction of having a skilled assassin commenting on their actions; a formidable form of reward that seems underutilized in SC: Conviction.

That said, I’m itching for my copy to arrive: switching from pure gameplay to cinematic moves and back with variable granularity simply feels so great; the re-playability of this game must be insane.

Oh, and while I’m at it, I just witnessed the freakiest thing I ever thought I would in a game: after I finished cleaning up a room, I noticed movement on my latest victim. “Wow, they even added the nervous twitch of a guy who took a bullet in the head”, I thought, impressed. But as I got close, I watched in horror the dead guy – bloody bullet hole in the forehead, dead eyes to the ceiling – move his lips in a silent and never-ending litany. Pretty please, fix those facial animations: it’s just too spooky for a Splinter Cell game.

Wow, long time since I posted here! It’s also been a long time since I’ve talked about video games. Now is as good a time as ever to comment on FEAR 2. After all, I won’t finish the game anyway, so, let’s see.

I feel robbed. Last time it happened was when I bought Deus Ex 2. In the end, the story sort of made up to the dumbed up gameplay, and I manage to enjoy the game (like, 3 times). No such luck this time.

Hardcore fan of the first FEAR installment – that I wouldn’t hesitate to dub the best FPS I’ve ever played – I was expecting the same brutal gunfights, ruthless opponents and nerve-screeching downtimes from the sequel. If I was to only buy one game this year, then FEAR 2 it would be. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the FEAR formula had fell into the same grinder the Deus Ex franchise had. If by ‘fell’, I mean ‘intentionally dumped’.

From the horrible controls, I can only take away that maybe connecting a mouse where there was a gamepad is not enough to make it a PC game. You end up walking too slow, turning around too fast, disoriented and bumping into objects (including a mural tableau that prevented me  from moving along its supporting wall). Who needs virtual reality when FEAR 2 feels so close to the real deal (being drunk)?

The interface is also exactly what you’d expect on a console game: the gigantic icons reminding you what key/button to press to perform an action, just in case all players have Alzheimer’s. The savegame system is identical to the one in Gears of War, and I remember making a mental note of how appropriate it was in Gears, so that must be a good point, right? Nope. Because you and me don’t don’t play on console the same way we play on PC. When we play Gears, we just blast through levels, while FPS PC gamers tend to want to be ‘stylish’ when playing: I personally want to look like a ballet dancer with an assault rifle. True story. I want my moves and kills to be efficient. Oh, and flashing a huge text in my face to tell me a door is locked before I even tried to open it isn’t helping me out, it’s just pulling me out of immersion.

Of course, all of this could have been prevented by Monolith pretty quickly/easily. To add insult to injury, this wasn’t even fixed in the first patch. Nor the second. Or the third. Historical fan bases don’t take to kindly to being ignored.

The final blow was delivered to me somewhere mid-campaign (I think): as I was quickly going through the game, fairly annoyed, but trying to find out more about the story, I got stuck at the I’m-a-console-game-so-here’s-a-mandatory-quicktime-event face-off. I went back and forth a couple of times during a hand-to-hand combat session that made me want to pull out my teeth. And gave up. Because it’s just NOT what I had payed for.

I feel relief, however, to have uncovered the truth about Alma’s screaming, crying and general tearing people in half: it is my understanding that in events smacked in between both installments, Alma discovered that she’s been adopted and that, not only was her adoptive father a bastard sick enough to induce his 8-year old daughter into labor for simple means of experimentation, but that her real progenitors were of an even worst kind: the kind that would steal her soul and trap it into a console Hell, where her distress will be mocked over and over again through eternity. Everyone will agree that it’s a pretty sucky way to start in life. Nothing short of burning the flesh off of such people’s bones would be considered a fair retribution.

Game developer Infinity Ward has got to be running out of storage space for all the awards Call of Duty 4 has brought home! More than a year after its release, the game has just been awarded in  3 different categories at the UK-based BAFTA video-game ceremony, including Story and Character. Even though some might find surprising to reward a FPS with this distinction, I think it is some well-deserved recognition: writing in video games is still at its infancy and people are debating back and forth on what influence storytelling should have on the development of a game.

And in comes COD4, first and foremost a competitive shooter targeted at hardcore gamers; 10 years from now, most people will remember it for the dozens (or hundreds) of hours they spent playing online, and all those war stories they used to tell their buddies.

And yet , the solo campaign was a note-taking exercise for me, as it is a reference of what storytelling should be in shooters: it strikes a perfect balance between gameplay and story. Indeed, the later is remarkably non-intrusive: most of the story is unveiled either through briefings during load times or with in-game dialogs during combat downtimes; at no time is the player pulled out of the action to be briefed on something he might not care about – the Holy Grail of videogame storytelling.

When it comes to characters, a lot of work has been done on each member of the ensemble cast (5+ recurring characters): each of them has a tone, a personality and some quality voice acting to support them; with their destiny tied to the larger events at play, tension and drama remains very present until the end. I’ll take for example the chopper pilot that gets shot down at some point: I barely know her (in game space), but the urgency in her voice urges me to haul ass to the crash site.

Congratulation to writer Jesse Stern, as well as to the Infinity Ward team!

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.

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.