Live from Austin!

I was at Staple!: The Independent Media Expo at the weekend. As I browsed the stalls, I wandered into range of a conversation between (I think) a guy from Dreampunk Productions, and someone who mentioned that he was a video game developer. Nothing unusual so far, there are a lot of video game developers around Austin. They were talking about a comic strip I hadn’t heard of, and the artists’ interest in making a video game about it–also not unusual. Then, the man with his back to me mentioned which company he worked for: Retro Studios.

The comic book guy hadn’t heard of them. But I had, and couldn’t help myself. “You made Metroid Prime. The best first person action-adventure game ever.” And so it was that I found myself talking to Mike Wikan, senior game designer for the Metroid Prime series.

Returning home and searching my web site, I found that I had written very little about the Metroid series–surprising, given how impressed I was with the games.

Let’s get the obvious statements out of the way first: If you have a Nintendo Wii, you should go buy the <a href=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002ATY7JE?ie=UTF8&tag=a0ef8-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B002ATY7JE”>Metroid Prime Trilogy Collector’s Edition</a>. You should probably hurry to do so, as Mr Wikan tells me that it’s out of print, and no more will be produced; prices are already starting to climb.

If you have an old GameCube sitting around somewhere, you should go buy at least the first Metroid Prime, which is the all-time highest rated GameCube game on Metacritic. Yes, better than Legend of Zelda. Better than Resident Evil 4.

If you don’t think first person shooters can work on a console, then you particularly ought to at least buy Metroid Prime 3: Corruption for the Wii and try it out, for reasons I’ll get to later.

First, let’s go back to the mid 80s. Having achieved commercial success with classic arcade games like Donkey Kong and Super Mario Brothers, Nintendo wanted to branch out and prove that their NES console could do more. So 1986 saw two groundbreaking games: the original Legend of Zelda, and the original Metroid.

Metroid was designed to be approachable to players expecting arcade action. At first, it seems like a scrolling platform game with a heavily armed protagonist. As you continue to play, however, it emerges that there’s a more complex story going on, and that exploration and mapping are an important part of the game.

There were many details of the game which were brand new at the time: The player was given freedom to explore in any direction. The soundtrack was moody and ambient, giving a feeling of loneliness. Completing the game required revisiting already-explored areas. Power-ups were permanent, rather than timed. Most famously of all, the protagonist was revealed at the end of the game to be female.

Metroid II continued the franchise on the Game Boy, before Super Metroid moved it to the SNES and added an inventory and save points. Super Metroid was universally acclaimed, and amongst SNES games is perhaps second only to Super Mario World.

So when Nintendo decided to revive the Metroid franchise for the GameCube, there was some major skepticism expressed by fans. The announcement that the new Metroid would be in first-person 3D convinced many that it would be another dumb FPS, especially since a US development team was building the game.

Retro Studios defied expectations, however.

Metroid Prime started me off in a wrecked spaceship, where I quickly discovered I would have to scan objects for information if I was going to get very far. The screen used translucent graphics to provide a heads-up display with radar and rotating 3D short-range map, and I learned that I could switch visors to go into thermal imaging mode–a trick I often used to get the jump on enemies lurking in the darkness. Before long, I was following a trail of clues to the planet Tallon IV.

As I left my ship, I discovered that it was raining. Water droplets speckled the view through my visor. As I scouted further into the wet vegetation of this new alien world, I noticed condensation forming. Seconds later in a nearby cave, I fired my blaster at a threatening creature and caught a glimpse of my face reflected from the inside of the visor. That was it–I was captivated. Mimesis achieved.

This was also the moment I referred to back in 2006, when I said that I really didn’t need video game graphics to get any better. Metroid Prime is beautiful. Compare it to the other big console games from that year, like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City on the PS2, and it blows them away. Not only that, but the game runs at a rock solid 60 frames per second throughout, no matter how complicated the action on screen, and the controls feel responsive at all times.

By the time I acquired the ability to switch into the morph ball, I was so engrossed in exploring ancient alien ruins that I didn’t stop to worry about the physics of the transformation. Instead, I delighted as the Tron-like neon glow from the ball left subtle tracer effects.

More beautiful still was the scene that greeted me once I managed to make my way through the old transport tunnels to the snow-covered Phendrana Drifts. That was where I learned that different alien creatures would require different tactics to defeat them, with my scanner providing hints.

Yes, there were boss fights–something I personally dislike–but they were mostly fair, and required some intelligence to get past rather than simple twitch reflexes. When the game was finally over, I was genuinely sad that it had to end.

I wasn’t as happy with Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. The first and most obvious annoyance was that I suddenly had to worry about ammunition. Coming to the new episode straight from the freedom of the first game, this was an unwelcome development.

The second annoyance was that Prime 2 had me travel to a dark energy world where the atmosphere continuously ate away at my suit’s shielding. This effectively introduced an arbitrary time limit to exploration, and I hate arbitrary time limits almost as much as I hate random mazes.

The third annoyance was the level design. I’m not a big fan of bottomless pits, and I started falling into them with annoying frequency towards the end of the game. So overall, a disappointing outing compared to the first Metroid Prime, but still worth playing.

Third time was the charm, though. Metroid Prime 3: Corruption made the jump to the Wii, and that allowed a whole new control scheme. Now I could move around in any direction at any speed using the analog control stick on the nunchuk, while simultaneously aiming and firing at any part of the screen using the Wii remote. (This is called “expert mode”, and isn’t on by default.)

As IGN put it, this new control scheme “simulates the accuracy of PC first-person shooters almost perfectly”. In fact, I’d go further–when I try playing games with keyboard and mouse, I find the lack of precision achievable with WASD movement keys extremely frustrating.

The nunchuck was also used for the grapple hook and for ripping armor off of enemies, giving battles a very visceral and physical feeling. The switch to 16:9 format for the graphics also helped improve my feeling of immersion in the game.

The annoyances from the previous game were mostly gone. I fell into infinity a few times in the cloud city, but it never felt as frustrating as leaping over chasms in the dark in Prime 2. Also gone was most of the annoying backtracking, as I could now call up my spaceship to travel between distant parts of the world, an innovation so welcome that I remember saying “Aww, yeah” when it was revealed to me.

I don’t really understand some of the negative reviews the final installment received. Perhaps those reviewers didn’t find Expert Mode, or were expecting an FPS? I had a wonderful time, and resolved to replay the entire game some day.

So with that in mind, I’ve ordered a copy of the now-discontinued <a href=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002ATY7JE?ie=UTF8&tag=a0ef8-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B002ATY7JE”>Metroid Prime Trilogy</a> for the Wii. If you are any kind of video game fan, I strongly suggest that you do likewise. If nothing else, you’ll get the chance to play the greatest GameCube game ever, with the added bonus of precision aiming via Wii controls and widescreen graphics.

LittleBigPlanet

(PS3 only)

If you’re looking for a kid-friendly game for the PS3, this should be top of your list. Rated E, it provides classic 2D platform game action rendered with state-of-the-art 3D graphics. The ragdoll physics and ability to grab objects are interesting game tweaks, though the automatic switching between layers on the Z axis can be a little frustrating at times. Mostly it’s not a problem with the story levels, because of careful level design.

The plot is like a fairy tale, and unfolds gradually. You catch glimpses of what’s going on while playing the levels, and then when it’s revealed that someone is abducting characters and imprisoning them, it’s up to you to free them. Even the bad guy turns out just to have been lonely and desperate for friends.

One great thing about LittleBigPlanet is that it has a full level editor, capable of building levels as good as the ones in the game. The artwork is fabulous, a real visual feast with levels inspired by (amongst other things) Day of the Dead, Indian art, and African crafts. Levels can be shared online with friends, or publically; there are over 1,000,000 user-created levels out there. Sony and MediaMolecule seem to be doing a pretty good job of making sure they’re kid-safe.

Burnout Paradise

(PS3, Xbox 360, Windows)

My experience is that all young boys love cars. The only thing better than playing at racing cars, is playing at crashing cars. The Burnout games understand this–unlike serious racing simulations like Gran Turismo, Burnout rewards you for dangerous driving, and rewards you with detailed action replays of your crashes. Glass smashes, sparks fly, bodywork crumples.

The open world design lets you drive around and explore the city; each intersection of streets has some kind of challenge you can choose to start by pulling up and hitting a button. There are straight races, stunt jump challenges, stock car style survival modes, and contests where you have to cause as much vehicular carnage as possible in the time limit.

The online mode allows for contests between players, but also has social modes where you join up with friends to compete challenges together, or just hang out driving around and chatting and doing whatever you want.

Rated E, as there’s no blood–it’s all A-Team crashes. Obviously, online modes may expose your offspring to rude words spoken by other players, if you allow play with unknown strangers.

It’s also available as a downloadable from PlayStation Network.

Katamari Forever

(PS3 only, but earlier Katamari games are available for Xbox 360 and PS2)

When the original Katamari Damacy was launched on the PS2, the game mechanic was something completely new to video games–roll a ball of stuff (the “katamari”) using tank-like controls, making it larger and larger as more and more stuff sticks to it. As the katamari grows, it can roll over larger objects–but it also has more momentum, and becomes harder to maneuver.

The game consists of variations on that basic theme. The King of the Cosmos tasks you with making a nice big katamari, sets you a time limit before he’ll lose patience, places you somewhere on earth, and off you go. Sometimes the challenge is a little different–for example, maybe the katamari is on fire, and you need to roll up hot and burning stuff, and avoid cold or wet things.

It’s all very cute. If your katamari is big enough, you can roll over people–but although they scream, they just stick into the katamari, they’re not killed. The game therefore gets an E rating.

Katamari Forever basically gives you all the levels from all the previous Katamari games. Graphically, it’s not a whole lot better than the PS2 versions, but it’s such a charming game that the graphics don’t really matter. However, the lack of anything really new meant that it suffered in review scores.

Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction

(PS3 only)

If you don’t mind guns and epic battles of cartoon violence, the Ratchet and Clank series offers E10-rated action adventure platformers that I personally think are the best around. In Tools of Destruction, it’s insectoid monsters who are on the receiving end of the violence this time: they’re an invading army ruled by a crazy emperor who has ordered them to lay seige to the galaxy. It might not be the most socially conscious message, but at least it’s anti-imperialist, right?

The genius of the Ratchet and Clank games is that their difficulty level is self-adjusting. Smashing enemies and scenery releases metal in the form of bolts, which are apparently the currency of engineers. You can spend the bolts to get ever more powerful (and ridiculous and fun) weapon upgrades. Hence, if a particular part of the game keeps defeating you, each time you try you gain more bolts. Before long you can afford a better weapon that’ll give you the edge against the enemy and let you succeed.

The weapons are varied, and allow for different styles of game play. You can stand back and pick off roachlike enemies from a safe distance, or you can (say) launch the Groovitron to make them all break out in disco dancing, and then whack them with a wrench while they’re occupied.

This long-running game series had numerous outings on the PS2 as well. My personal favorite was Ratchet & Clank Going Commando.

A friend recently commented on the imperialist narrative of most video games: travel to exotic places, meet interesting people, kill them, and exploit their resources.

Well, yes, there are a lot of video games like that, ranging from the hundreds of first-person shooters that only an enthusiast could tell apart, to the cerebrally imperialist Civilization series. However, there are also video games which manage to have a more progressive message. I thought I’d write about a few of them.

(Note that there are a few mild spoilers below; this is a guide for parents, rather than necessarily for players. If you’re a video game enthusiast you should have played these all by now…)

Beyond Good and Evil

(PS2, Xbox, Gamecube (or Wii), Windows)

This game is something of a cult classic, though it sold badly on initial release. Designed by French software house Ubisoft, it’s a 3D third-person action-adventure in a mostly open world, with some puzzle solving. The protagonist, Jade, is a female journalist investigating the activities of a military dictatorship which has emerged to defend the planet Hillys from an apparent alien invasion. Jade mostly relies on sneaking around and collecting photographic evidence, though she does resort to martial arts when necessary.

I have the PS2 version, and I strongly recommend the game, even though the PS2 version was the most criticized. For what it’s worth, I didn’t have any problems with the frame rate or other alleged shortcomings. Metacritic scores are 83% or higher for all platforms.

Like most cult games, BG&E commands a hefty price for a new copy, but used copies in good condition can be tracked down. You can also rent the Windows version on Steam or GameTap. Rated T for Teen.

Psychonauts

(PS2, Xbox, Windows)

Another cult game, this time from Tim Schaffer. Also another 3D third-person action adventure with puzzle solving. The protagonist this time is a psychically gifted kid named Raz, who runs away from the circus to sneak into a summer camp and try to become a Psychonaut. Before long, he must psychically journey into the minds of various disturbed individuals in order to heal their minds. Each person’s insanity manifests as a different surreal world with its own logic and graphical style.

Again, I played the PS2 version. I found it worthy of the praise it has been given (Metacritic scores in the high 80s on all platforms), though the final circus/tightrope world was infuriatingly difficult and spoiled an otherwise delightful experience. Unlike BG&E, I didn’t keep my copy.

Commands an even higher price than BG&E, and you’ll pay like-new prices for a good used copy. Rated T for Teen.

Ico

(PS2 only)

Third person action-adventure, again, but with a more distant look that often resembles classic isometric games. The most graphically beautiful game on the PS2, in my view, and one of the most sadly overlooked when it was new. Now commands premium pricing even for a used copy. (No, I’m not selling mine.)

The young boy Ico, apparently born with horns, wakes up in a mysterious ancient fortress. He is forced to go on a perilous quest to save himself and a young girl who is apparently some sort of princess. On the way, he learns about the mystery of what the fortress is for, and why he was placed there.

The game is mostly environmental puzzles. Monsters are the spirits of the dead manifesting as black smoke, and they are driven away with a simple wooden stick or torch. Rated T for Teen, because although it’s less violent than the above games, it’s creepier.

Okami

(PS2, Wii)

Another video game which was unfairly overlooked by players on initial release, in spite of winning numerous awards, this one has the advantage that you can buy it new for a reasonable price. A 3D third-person action-adventure steeped heavily in Japanese mythology.

The graphics are unlike any other game, with cel-shaded animation and textures inspired by Japanese ink and wash painting. The protagonist is Amaterasu, the Shinto sun goddess, who manifests as a wolf and attempts to lift a curse that has fallen on her native land. Combat is carried out, and puzzles solved, by painting mystical brush strokes on canvas using the celestial brush. This game mechanic makes the game a natural for the Wii’s remote, and I kinda wish I hadn’t played the PS2 version so I could play the Wii one fresh.

Rated T for Teen. There were a couple of instances of smutty innuendo that made me raise an eyebrow, but I suspect a kid would have missed them. There’s also some cleavage and a little partial nudity. Not a game for Christian conservatives, but then again they probably wouldn’t like all the Japanese gods either. Somewhat slow to start, and probably not a good game for anyone who lacks patience.

Naughty Dog have quite a history on the PlayStation family of consoles. They started out as developers of the first three Crash Bandicoot 3D platform games on the original PlayStation, as well as a Crash-themed cart racer.

With the introduction of the PS2, Naughty Dog showed that their developers could implement the best game engines in the business. Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy was built using a variant of Lisp, and featured dynamic multithreaded loading of game data and textures. This made it almost unique among PS2 games in having no loading screens–the entire world appeared seamless. By the time of Jak 3, the engine supported progressive scan and widescreen. It had multithreaded rendering as well, which kept the frame rate consistent at the expense of some tearing.

Unfortunately, the best technology doesn’t always mean the best games. Naughty Dog’s technology found its way into Insomniac’s Ratchet and Clank games and Sucker Punch’s Sly Cooper games, and I’d rate both series as generally superior to Jak and Daxter. In particular, Jak II was a low point for Naughty Dog: they tried to take the series in a more gritty and urban direction, and it didn’t really work. The infinitely respawning enemies were annoying and broke my suspended disbelief. Worse, someone on the design team decided that it would be fun to make players avoid randomly generated traffic while trying to travel around completing missions within tight arbitrary time limits. Sorry, but traffic jams are not a fun gameplay mechanic.

Naughty Dog’s first PS3 game was Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. They stuck to their 3D platformer roots, expanding out in the direction of third person shooters, and the result was another technical tour de force. Once again, the game engine used background threads to suck in data on the fly and provide the illusion of a seamless world with no loading screens; and for the first time, a Naughty Dog game featured realistic human characters.

Uncharted was like a Hollywood action adventure. It featured a lot of running around, ducking and diving for cover, grabbing guns and shooting on the move. The combat was interspersed with climbing and jumping, and some light puzzles. The game was well reviewed, though many felt it was somewhat short. It was also disappointingly linear, and only really supported a single play style–leap in, grab the guns conveniently scattered around, and run around causing mayhem.

And so to the inevitable sequel. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves keeps what was good about the first game, fixes what was wrong, and outdoes every other similar game in numerous areas. It fully deserves all the awards and rave reviews it has been receiving.

Like the first Uncharted, Uncharted 2 has no load screens; but this time, some of the environments are huge in scope, occasionally jaw-droppingly so. The draw distance is so large you’re never aware that it isn’t infinite, and only twice did I see any sign of popup or texture loading. (And one of those occasions was during multiplayer when switching cameras, so I’d argue that it doesn’t count.) Even though the plot is basically linear, the game feels open because of the excellent design; the only time I felt boxed in was when I had a traversal puzzle I couldn’t solve.

The graphics are amazing. There are no photographic textures; everything was drawn by artists, but in photorealistic style. Dynamic lighting is used so that game objects can cast shadows. Plants are apparently modeled using a physics engine which allows them to be blown about by ambient weather or passing helicopters.

By offloading most of the graphics pipeline onto the Cell processor SPEs, Naughty Dog freed up the graphics chip to handle dynamic depth of field, generally focused around either key action events (during cut scenes) or whatever your reticule is aimed at (during combat). Depth of field helps to focus your attention on what’s important, getting around the problem of visual clutter that plagues games like Killzone 2. (For an alternate approach, see Team Fortress 2 (part of The Orange Box), where the entire art style is focused on reducing visual clutter.)

The rendering pipeline uses HDR. The game simulates dark adaptation of the human eye–when you walk from a light area into a dark one, it takes a while before your vision adjusts. Fire and water are modeled well, and there is judicious use of motion blur and bloom. The end result of all these technical details is particularly impressive during a sequence that takes place on a moving train–I won’t say any more, in order to avoid spoilers.

The set pieces in Uncharted 2 are integrated into the plot much more cohesively than in the previous game. This is possible because the game engine uses Havok physics for both characters and destructible cover. You can literally aim and fire at enemies while sliding down the sloping floor of a building that’s collapsing into rubble, ducking behind tables for cover and grabbing pieces of wall to slow your fall. While Nathan Drake has many combat moves, the controls are kept simple enough that there’s no frustrating button-sequence-mashing.

While there are a few cut scenes (rendered with the same engine, of course), most of the combat sequences that would be handled as cut scenes in something like Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots are instead scripted battles you control. The end result is like a good Indiana Jones movie–except you’re controlling the protagonist. I didn’t want to stop playing.

Another welcome improvement is that the game allows for multiple strategies. You can run in with guns blazing and hope you can dodge, like the first game; but you can also hang back and be cautious and try to pick enemies off from a distance, or sneak up to them and dispatch them quietly as Solid Snake might. I frequently started out by trying to be stealthy, then switched to diving for cover and shooting once I slipped up. Often things would escalate smoothly into one of the aforementioned set pieces, gradually ramping up the adrenaline rush.

Voice acting is uniformly excellent. Naughty Dog record the voice tracks from the actors while they are taking part in the motion capture process, so the speech fits the action in a way it often doesn’t in other games. The story is less of a cliché than the first game, too, which helped to draw me in.

Overall, I’d say that this is the best action game I’ve ever seen. I hereby forgive Naughty Dog for the controller-throwing frustration of Jak II. Uncharted 2 is a game that ought to sell more than a few PS3s.

Of course, no game is perfect. There were three things that bothered me. The first was the Elena character; she was far too much of a Lara Croft caricature, complete with tiny waist, big breasts and tight clothing. Perhaps it was intended as satire, but it felt like pandering.

The second issue is the believability of Drake’s death-defying antics. In the first game, he actually felt like an everyman, but in the sequel it gets a bit unbelievable at times. I can overlook the magical regeneration of bullet wounds as a necessary game mechanic, but there were at least a couple of moments where he took a scripted fall that would leave any human with a shattered ribcage.

The third issue was specific to Chapter 20 of the story. [Minor spoiler, skip to next paragraph to avoid.] At one point I was trapped in an alleyway by the tank, and from the only places where I could get cover, I couldn’t see the alleyway that I was supposed to run to in order to continue the story. I ended up spending a lot of time looking for ways to climb around or over, getting frustrated. I suspect that adjusting the angle of the alleyways slightly would have avoided the problem.

From gameinformer.com:

The thing that old people don’t understand is – you know if you’ve never heard Bob Dylan, and someone listened to him for 15 minutes, you’re not going to get it. You are just not going to understand. You have to put in hours and hours to start to understand the form, and the same thing is true for gaming. You’re not going to just look at a first-person shooter where you are killing zombies and understand the nuances. There is this tremendous amount of arrogance and hubris, where somebody can look at something for five minutes and dismiss it. Whether you talk about gaming or 20th century classical music, you can’t do it in five minutes. You can’t listen to The Rite of Spring once and understand what Stravinsky was all about. It seems like you should at least have the grace to say you don’t know, instead of saying that what other people are doing is wrong.

That’s basically why my plan to write an article titled “In defense of GTA” turned into a three part epic. I wanted to try and explain to people who haven’t been playing video games for 30 years, why GTA is not just a dumb game about shooting prostitutes.

He continues:

It just seems so simple, and yet I’m constantly in these big arguments with people on the computer who are talking about, “I would never let my kid do this and this in a video game.” And these are adults who when they were children were dropping acid and going to see the Grateful Dead. I mean, the Grateful Dead is provably shitty music. It’s impossible – it’s theoretically impossible to make a video game as bad as the Grateful Dead. I throw that out there as a challenge.

Quite a challenge. It is, however, possible to make The Grateful Dead interesting: I quite like Grayfolded.

Sony has revised the terms of service for the PlayStation Network. The new TOS says:

You may not provide anyone with your name or any other personally identifying information other than your own Online ID

As it happens, I broke the new TOS twice at the weekend without realizing it at the time. I’ve told people in Team Fortress 2 and Burnout Paradise both my name, and the fact that I live in Austin, TX.

I can see a case for prohibiting disclosing someone else’s identity. (Key words being "disclosing" and "someone else’s".) However, if I want to tell people online where I live, I don’t see how that is any of Sony’s business. Furthermore, since my PSN ID is just my name with a random number appended, does that mean I need to change my ID? That’s awkward, as Sony’s system doesn’t let you do so. Perhaps I should send an e-mail to customer support?

I’ve finally done some online gaming a couple of times, playing GTA IV with a couple of people.

I also have The Orange Box. I bought it mostly for Portal, but I’m amenable to the idea of Team Fortress 2.

At some point I need to find out whether my USB headset works with the PS3.

GamePro reports NPD sales data:

Of note, these are sales to end users, not number of consoles shipped; Microsoft prefers to cite the latter.

The Wii is now the #1 console in the US by installed base. So it seems as though as predicted, the Xbox 360’s best days could be behind it.

Once Sony got their act together and shipped a bundle with the rumble controller packaged along with the console, sales took off. When the 80GB PS3 with rumble controller replaces the current 40GB package, expect sales to rise again. It won’t take long to erase the lead in installed base Microsoft has.

This week, people are making a big thing about the announcement that Final Fantasy XIII is going to be cross-platform, appearing on the 360 as well as the PS3–but only in the US, as nobody in Japan has a 360.

I don’t see the Final Fantasy announcement as all that big of a deal, when you look at all the former Xbox exclusives that are now on the PS3 or will be soon.

• Saints Row was the Xbox’s supposed GTA-killer, and Saints Row 2 is going to be on PS3.
• BioShock was the 360’s highest rated game of 2007 on Metacritic. It’s now coming to PS3, with "graphical improvements".
• Half-Life ’s developer Valve was always a staunch Microsoft supporter, with Half-Life 2 an Xbox exclusive–but The Orange Box came out for PS3 earlier this year. (I’ve picked up a copy–FPSs aren’t really my thing, but I want to play Portal.)
• Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion made it onto the PS3.
• Dead or Alive 4 is being ported, and it’s rumored that the sequel may be PS3 exclusive.
• Ridge Racer 6 was Xbox 360 only, Ridge Racer 7 switched to PS3 only.
• Full Auto was Xbox 360 only, Full Auto 2 is on PS3.

So looking at the high profile well-reviewed Xbox exclusives, that leaves Command and Conquer, Project Gotham Racing, Mass Effect, Gears of War, and of course Halo. (Dead Rising is heading to the Wii, along with Beautiful Katamari.) It’s a good job Microsoft bought so many game companies, or they would hardly have any exclusives left at this point.

So the video game industry will avoid Microsoft domination for another generation. I think this is a good thing.

In part 1, I talked about the history of video games. In part 2, I talked about how GTA 3 differed from earlier games. Now I’ve finally reached the payoff: discussion of criticisms of GTA.

Getting off on a technicality

Let me first return to the media controversy of GTA, and start off by talking about prostitutes and murder. You’ve probably heard the horror soundbite: GTA encourages players to have sex with prostitutes and then kill them.

As mentioned earlier, I’ve played all the storyline missions of all the 3D GTA games. Going by my experience, I will say that technically, I know of no point in any of the games where you are encouraged to kill a prostitute.

I say “technically”, because in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, there’s a mission where a pimp hires you to protect his girls. You’re told that two of them have been murdered, and you end up racing to rescue a third who is being attacked by two men. You then take the woman to a nearby hotel. Unfortunately, the woman later decides to leave the business, having met up with some charismatic Christian preachers. The pimp demands that you kill the ex-prostitute and her new friends. (Later you might end up killing the pimp too.)

This is an example of the kind of moral ambiguity that occurs in the GTA universe. One moment you can be saving lives, the next you can be killing people. The game presents you with many options, and leaves you to make the decisions. As I pointed out in part 2, you could also decide to protect prostitutes from the men who attack them. There are several story missions in the various games that involve that kind of scenario.

So other than a single mission in one of the games, I don’t believe that GTA games encourage or require that the player kill any current or former sex worker. The story rose to notoriety because some GTA 3 players worked out that you could avail yourself of a prostitute’s services–thereby boosting your character’s energy/health level–and then kill the woman afterwards to get the cash back.

I have no proof, but I suspect that the rules of the game were not chosen specifically to encourage prostitute-slaying; the fact that dead prostitutes drop cash is simply a matter of realism. When you kill any person in the game, you can grab whatever cash or weapons they were carrying. The rules of the universe were set, the gamers made the moral choice.

The questionable part, frankly, is the idea that seeing prostitutes would have a positive effect on your health; perhaps Rockstar should simply have made it one of the many things you can choose to do within the game that have no real benefit, like knocking down lamp posts or shouting insults at passers by in GTA: San Andreas. Perhaps in a future game we’ll see the protagonist come down with a bad STD and limp around in pain until he goes to the clinic.

A mug of hot coffee

Now the second controversial thing everyone’s heard about: the so-called “Hot Coffee” modification to GTA: San Andreas. The modification restores a scene which had been cut from the game before being completed, in which the protagonist has consensual sex with his girlfriend.

Let me emphasize that: Consensual sex. There is no moment in any of the GTA games where the protagonist gets to rape anyone. There is no sexualized violence.

The hot coffee scene occurs after CJ, the protagonist, has taken his girlfriend on a number of romantic dates to restaurants or bars, and has presented her with flowers or some other token of affection. She invites him in for coffee, and there’s some clothed and badly-animated grinding. In the game as released, you just hear some muffled moaning.

So in short: A series of games were sold in which you get to kill as many people you want, and can do so in dozens of creative ways. The authorities had no problem with that. But as soon as it was discovered that one of the games could be altered so that it depicted romantic sexual activity without nudity, there was a government investigation. That’s the USA for you.

But this episode brings me to another fact about the GTA games: They do not portray women only as prostitutes and strippers, a claim I have seen repeated many times. Nor are women always victims or sex objects.

In GTA3, the protagonist is at one point ordered around by Asuka Kasen, a woman who is a member of the Yakuza crime syndicate. In GTA: Vice City, there is a series of missions you can perform for an old Haitian matriarch called Auntie Poulet. In GTA: San Andreas, you can lead a double life and commit crimes for a vengeful criminal woman named Catalina, while dating a female police officer from a nearby town.
Kill all reporters!

As well as the fuss over “Hot Coffee”, there was some controversy in the media over allegations that the GTA games were racist. Specifically, one of the missions in GTA: Vice City included an instruction to “Kill all the Haitians”. The mission is one in which the protagonist has been hired by a gang of Cubans, who are racist towards Haitians.
Now, as I’ve already mentioned, you have the opportunity to work for the Haitians later on, and kill Cubans. However, as a result of the criticism, the game was modified to alter or remove references to both Cubans and Haitians.

The thing is, gang warfare can be racist. The GTA games depict it, without necessarily condoning it. The same can be said of many books and movies.

Do I think GTA is racist? Well, two of the games have a black protagonist, and the new GTA IV features a protagonist from Serbia. Both GTA: San Andreas and Grand Theft Auto Vice City Stories feature interracial dating, which is treated in a completely matter-of-fact way. There are heroes–and villains–of all races. So I think it’s a stretch to claim that the games are racist; rather, they at times depict racism.

Are you high or something?

I haven’t played GTA IV yet, but there’s one more recent controversy I feel the need to mention briefly: Mothers Against Drunk Driving complained that the game allows the player to get the protagonist drunk and then have him attempt to drive home.

There are several ignored facts that make this a poor criticism of the game. The mission in which drunk-driving is set up is specifically intended to introduce the player to taxis, and how to use them. The game specifically tells you that you’re drunk and ought to take a taxi home. If you fail to do so, you are likely to hit stuff, kill people, and end up arrested. It seems to me that if anything, the game attempts to educate the player not to drunk-drive.

Informed criticism, rather than the usual kind

Having dealt with a few of the common misconceptions surrounding the GTA games and talked about a few uninformed criticisms, I’d like to move on to consider some of the ways in which the games do, in fact, fall short.

One criticism that can justly be leveled at GTA is that all the protagonists are men. Of course, GTA games are hardly alone in this; the number of video games with strong female leads is pretty small. (For my money, one of the best is Beyond Good And Evil , which is good in so many ways I could write a separate essay about it. The Metroid Prime series is excellent too.)

I gather that in GTA IV, you can play as a woman in the online multiplayer. Obviously it would be good if the main game allowed you to play through the story as a woman, but let’s stop and consider what would be required for that to happen.

Video games these days are big business. Tens of millions of dollars are spent developing them. The GTA games have hours of motion-captured 3D cut scenes in them, and voice acting from famous names as diverse as Samuel L. Jackson and Phil Collins. It’s reported that GTA IV has over 60,000 lines of dialog for 660 speaking parts–just for the pedestrians who populate the city! And because the games are set in a world somewhat like ours, you can’t just swap a male and female character and expect all the dialog and plot to still make sense and sound right. Hence, there would need to be parallel cut scenes and dialog tracks for the male and female variations of the game. I’d love to see it, but I don’t think it’s realistic, any more than it’s realistic to demand a version of Tomb Raider where Lara Croft is replaced by a guy with asthma who programs computers for a living. Maybe that would help me identify with the character more, but I don’t need protagonists to be just like me; as mentioned earlier, I’ve had great times playing games in which the protagonist is a woman.
Another justifiable criticism of GTA is that it’s a totally heterosexual world. Here, I suspect that the reason is the genre. The games are set in the world of violent crime. While there may be gay gangsters–and several of the games hint at same-sex attraction on the part of some of the thugs in the GTA world–it would be a stretch to make the protagonist overtly gay.

Does that mean the protagonist is always the aggressor in relationships, then? As a matter of fact, no. GTA: Vice City Stories features a transsexual German movie director who is constantly trying to get in the lead character’s pants. There’s also a mission which ends up in a gay bar; the first time I played that one I got my ass handed to me, so to speak.

Meanwhile, one of Rockstar’s other games, Bully, allows same-sex kissing. Like the GTA series, Bully is a “sandbox” game, this time set in a boarding school; so perhaps we’ll see same-sex romance in a future GTA as well, when it makes sense for the scenario.

A third criticism of GTA is that for all the openness of the world, your interaction with it is still pretty limited. You can eat food, exercise, shoot stuff, drive vehicles, and that’s about it. Again, it comes down to limiting the complexity explosion, but still, I’d love to see an adventure game that had a world as open as GTA’s.

Conclusions

The GTA series of games isn’t perfect. However, it isn’t the misogynistic interactive ultraviolence that people often claim. While some may play the games for the violence, a lot of us play them because they are a massive sandbox city that you can explore and mess with as you please.

As a reviewer at WIRED comments, the games are ultimately deft satires of the American city. They are so carefully observed and detailed that if you visit the real city after the GTA version, you’ll recognize familiar elements everywhere. As such, it’s almost as much fun to explore a GTA city as it is to explore a real city, and a lot less tiring and expensive, not to mention safer.

Further reading

The GTA games, reviewed by someone who had never played any of them before.

MSNBC on why GTA is fun to play.

bOING bOING on how GTA IV is perhaps the best way to understand the real New York.

A Flickr set of images comparing Liberty City with the real NYC.

The Onion has a surprisingly insightful article that pokes fun at the lack of realism in GTA.

In part 1, I talked about the development of video games to date. I explained how we ended up with games with complex multi-path plots, and games with worlds modeled in true 3D. However, game developers started to hit problems when they began trying to build 3D games with complex plots…

The complexity problem

The issue of managing game complexity had been discovered by text adventure programmers back in the 80s. If you give the player a single tool (a gun) and a single set of adversaries (invading aliens), the number of possible interactions you have to program responses for is very limited. The player needs to be able to fire the gun, maybe reload the gun, perhaps pick up additional ammunition or other types of gun. The gun is either successfully targeted at an enemy when fired, in which case some damage is done to the enemy, or it isn’t.

Now consider a world in which the player has a gun, a flashlight, a screwdriver, and some health-giving combat rations; and suppose the enemy base has locked doors and guard dogs. What if the player tries to club an enemy to death with the flashlight? What if he tries to distract a guard dog with the food rations? What if he tries to open a locked door by unscrewing the hinges? Suddenly the number of possible actions the player can take increases significantly. In mathematical terms, there is a combinatorial explosion, as each object can potentially interact with every other object, and the game designer needs to decide what will happen for each combination. Even if the answer is “nothing relevant happens”, that’s still a design decision that must be made. Furthermore, too many “nothing happens” or “you can’t do that” responses will destroy the player’s suspension of disbelief, or even become outright annoying.

So as the complexity of the new realistically-drawn 3D worlds increased, the problem of making those worlds behave realistically increased much faster.

In addition, text adventure programmers discovered that providing players with genuine choices led to increased complexity. What if the knight sacrifices his henchman to escape the dragon? Who will perform the actions the henchman would have performed in the game? What about the fact that there’s still a dragon roaming around, shouldn’t that impact the plot?

Most satisfyingly complex plot-driven video games found a convenient solution to these problems: they put many completely arbitrary restrictions on what the player could do, in order to ensure that the plot didn’t “break”.

To see how these restrictions are enforced, it suffices to look at the Final Fantasy series of games, which became incredibly successful after Final Fantasy VII introduced full 3D graphics.

In Final Fantasy, if you encounter someone who has to remain alive in order for the plot to work, then you simply cannot attack that person. It doesn’t matter how annoying they are, or how many weapons you have–they are invulnerable. No explanation is given in the context of the game; they just are.

Furthermore, while the worlds of Final Fantasy appear large and open, they are full of invisible walls. If you are meant to wander through a forest, and there’s something to the north that you’re not meant to discover until your return journey, the game developers will think nothing of placing a temporary invisible wall there to prevent you taking that path too soon. So while the Final Fantasy games are almost universally acclaimed for their rich plots and character development, as well as their state-of-the-art graphics, there’s no denying that they lack realism and immersion.

Nintendo’s acclaimed 3D Legend of Zelda games are more immersive, as they mostly use clever world design rather than invisible walls to limit the player’s roaming. However, they take a surreal approach to preventing unwanted conflict: if a creature or person in the game is friendly, then you can swing your sword at them as much as you like, and it will simply pass straight through them or bounce off of them harmlessly–because that is what the plot demands.

Which brings me to Grand Theft Auto III.

The GTA revolution

Grand Theft Auto III (henceforth GTA3) was the 3D sequel to a moderately successful franchise of 2D games. The earlier games had presented the player with a top-down view of city streets, and allowed him to drive vehicles around, committing crimes and evading law enforcement. While there were tasks to perform to advance the game towards “winning”, players were given fairly free reign to decide where to go and how much mayhem to cause.

The revolutionary aspect of GTA3 was that it took this idea of player freedom even further, modeling an entire city in 3D, complete with parking lots, outdoor cafes, car showrooms, gas stations, apartment buildings, warehouses, airports, and all the other architectural features found in cities across the USA. These detailed virtual worlds were populated with hundreds of people–emergency services crews, police, shoppers, drug dealers, businessmen, construction workers, bus drivers–and, of course, criminals. An attempt was made to give the non-player characters their own personalities and agendas, and to model the physics of the world somewhat accurately. The game launched the genre known as the sandbox game, where you have no mandatory goals or tasks, and can do what pleases you rather than what will advance the plot.

Early on in GTA3, I was driving beneath the elevated railway lines in one of the seedier parts of town. As I cruised towards the Italian district of the city, I suddenly saw a piece of unexpected drama playing out on a nearby sidewalk. There was a woman, who from her dress was presumably a prostitute. She was being punched by a man who I assumed was either a john, or her pimp. I slammed on the brakes, jumped out of the car, ran over–and hit the guy with a baseball bat I was carrying. He stopped attacking the woman, who ran off, and began attacking me instead. I ended up beating him into unconsciousness. Unsure of what to do next, I looked around for the woman, but she was no longer in sight. I started walking back to my car. As I reached the car, I heard sirens. I looked around again. An ambulance was approaching. It stopped by the injured man, and two EMS workers got out. They loaded the unconscious man into the back of the ambulance, got back in, and drove off towards the nearby hospital.

I was amazed.

I am recounting this true story because if you’ve heard nothing else about GTA, you’ve probably heard that the game lets you have sex with prostitutes and then kill them. That seems to be the starting point of almost every critique of GTA I see, even today.

Yes, it’s true. GTA lets you have sex with prostitutes. It also lets you kill them afterwards. However, as I hope my own experience illustrates, it also lets you choose a totally different path. The game sets up a complicated virtual city that obeys certain somewhat realistic rules, and lets you decide how to behave.

If I had chosen to do so, I could have killed the ambulance workers. I tried that later on. That time, a passing cop saw me, and before long I was being chased by multiple police cars. Unlike many video games, violence in GTA has consequences in the game.

Alternatively, I could have stolen the ambulance while they were trying to load the guy in the back. If you steal an ambulance in that way, you can then choose to take part in emergency rescue missions where you pick up wounded people and ferry them to hospital. You can also steal a taxi cab, and try to make money ferrying people safely around the city as quickly as possible. If your driving is too dangerous, they’ll bail out as soon as they can, shouting that you’re crazy.

You don’t have to shoot people to kill them in GTA either. You can run them over, deliberately or by accident. In fact, some missions are considerably easier if you drive straight into a gang of assailants rather than attempt to attack them on foot. Other missions can be failed instantly if you accidentally plow your vehicle into someone you’re supposed to be saving.

People can also die when vehicles blow up–which they often do, either because someone has shot the gas tank several times, or because you’ve booby-trapped them with explosives, or because you’ve managed to get your hands on a rocket launcher, or because an adjacent vehicle blew up and set them on fire. Sometimes a bystander will avoid an explosion, but get hit by a piece of debris. You can drive up onto a parking lot rooftop, drive at a ramp that points out over the edge, leap out of the vehicle at the last moment and roll across the ground, then watch as the car sails off the roof,  through the air, and crashes into a crowd of pedestrians below, crushing some of them to death.

You’re not the only person causing casualties either. The police shoot at criminals, and sometimes kill them. On occasion, when in hot pursuit, a cop car will hit and kill innocent bystanders.

This kind of detail, and the associated freedom of choice, was groundbreaking when GTA was released. When the second GTA 3D game was released, titled Grand Theft Auto Vice City, the degree of choice was increased still further.

In Vice City, you can get a job delivering pizza on a moped, hurrying to get the food there before it gets cold, then returning to the pizza restaurant for more. You can still work as a cab driver, but you can also get involved in a fight with a rival cab firm, put them out of business, take over their offices, and earn a regular income. You can buy a car sales showroom, then steal cars to order for customers. You can take part in demolition derby races at the stadium for prize money and prize cars. You can compete in illegal street races. You can use an ice cream van as a front to start a drug dealing operation.

As alluded to earlier, there are missions in GTA games, which advance the overall story in movie-like fashion towards some sort of resolution, and the end credits. However, you don’t have to attempt any of the main story missions. In fact, none of the action I’ve described so far has anything to do with the main story of any of the games; it’s all just incidental detail, part of the sandbox. Personally, though, I like story. I’ve played through the story missions of all five PS2 GTA games. So in the next part of this set of postings, I’ll talk about the media controversies around the GTA games, from the perspective of someone intimately familiar with them.

In the mean time, you might want to read the story Rage against the machines from Prospect magazine, which talks about the idea that video games in general are a brain-damaging addiction, and describes why that’s an outdated idea.