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:
| Console | June sales |
|---|---|
| Wii | 666,700 |
| PS3 | 405,500 |
| Xbox 360 | 219,800 |
| PS2 | 188,800 |
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.
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.
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 GTA: 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.
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 GTA: 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
You’ve probably noticed that a new Grand Theft Auto game is out, GTA IV. As usual, the release of a new GTA has resulted in a new round of articles criticizing (or outright excoriating) the game.
I’m a big fan of GTA. I’ve played every 3D GTA game from start to finish. As such, I feel I can provide an informed perspective on the game series. I see a number of annoying misconceptions and deceptions repeated time and time again, the most infamous of which is the claim that the game rewards you for killing prostitutes.
I’d like to explain why I continue to play every GTA game released. But before I can do that, I need to talk a bit about the history of video games, so that I can explain exactly why GTA was (and is still) so groundbreaking.
(In the text that follows, please excuse any lapses in chronology; my focus here is on general trends in game design, rather than the minutiae of which games were released when.)
Video games are a comparatively new medium. While a few experimental games were created as early as the 1950s, it was in the 1960s that the first recognizable video games began to appear on university computer systems. In the early 1970s, these primitive games began to appear in amusement arcades.
Early games mostly belonged in one of two categories: sports games and shooting games. The first amusement arcade game, PONG, was an example of the former. It presented a stripped-down approximation of a familiar competitive sport, in this case tennis. Other games attempted to simulate baseball, hurdles, and other sports events.
Perhaps the earliest example of a shooting game in the arcades was Space Wars, an adaptation of a mainframe game. It allowed two players to maneuver spacecraft on a vector graphics screen, and attempt to destroy each other with missile fire.
In 1978, Taito launched Space Invaders, which introduced two vital changes to the shooting game formula. Firstly, it was a single player game, so players no longer needed to find a friend of similar ability in order to enjoy play. Obviously this was a relief to the kinds of people who played video games, but it was the second innovation that really changed gaming: Space Invaders presented the player with an enemy whose forces were apparently overwhelming.
It was a massive hit, and set the pattern for hundreds, perhaps even thousands of video games. Sometimes the enemies were Japanese aircraft, sometimes egg-laying aliens, sometimes undersea creatures; sometimes the screen scrolled horizontally or vertically, or even diagonally. However, the basic situation was always the same: large numbers of enemies were invading for no adequately explored reason, and as they moved around the screen you attempted to kill as many of them as possible. The genre became known as the shoot-em-up. While it soon became formulaic, and is no longer popular, for a while almost every other video game seemed to be a shoot-em-up.
In the 1980s, a few new primeval video game formulae were invented. The game Scramble turned the tables, making the human player the aggressor in an invasion attempt; this idea was repeated later in games like Zaxxon and R-Type. Mazes became popular, in games such as Pac-Man and Berzerk. Pac-Man also introduced many people to the game mechanic of evading enemies rather than destroying them, a formula also used in Q*Bert and Crazy Climber. Driving games made an appearance, from purist Formula One simulations to avoid-the-enemy variations with cars in mazes. Eventually true 3D graphics began to appear, with games such as Battlezone, a commercial game which was adapted into a military tank battle simulator.
One thing that was clear on entering any 1980s video arcade was that there was a tremendous focus on shooting things, and not a great deal of story-telling going on. Partly this was because of technological limitations, but mostly it was because the purpose of an arcade video game was to extract as many coins from customers as possible. Games therefore attempted to give the most intense experience possible, so that even a five minute gameplay session could feel exhausting. The easiest way to achieve this kind of intensity was with lots of violence, often enhanced with pulsating sound and visuals. Eighties games such as Robotron: 2084 and Defender still rate amongst the most intense video game experiences devised.
While arcade games battled to fit more and more killing on screen, video games began to undergo a parallel evolution in the home. In 1977, the Atari 2600 introduced the idea of a video game console which could play any number of different games, loaded onto it from cartridges. Prior to this innovation, home video game consoles came with a fixed set of games built in.
Cartridge-based console gaming lowered the investment needed to put a game into commercial production, and reduced the amount of money the customer had to risk to try a new game. At the same time, companies like Atari were making incredible amounts of money, so game designers were allowed to experiment with games that would have been unsuitable for arcades. And with no requirement to keep game sessions short in order to pull money from the player’s pockets, games could become longer.
So it was that another video game genre began to become popular: the adventure. Often modeled on pen and paper role-playing games, adventure games offered players the chance to take part in a comparatively lengthy quest, which often had some sort of narrative purpose behind it. For the first time, games began to explore why the protagonist was risking his life and why he was being attacked. Furthermore, almost all adventures had an ending in which the player could actually win the game.
It wasn’t long before some adventure games began to offer players true choice, with multiple ways to “win”–for example, by rescuing the princess, defeating the dragon, or recovering the treasure.
During the home computer boom of the 1980s, the price of game distribution fell further, as software for home computers could be duplicated on regular audio cassettes. In addition, home computer programming languages put the means of game development in the hands of millions of people. This led to another explosion in the degree of complexity found in video games.
As well as graphical adventure games, there were adventures where the gameplay was represented purely as text. One of the earliest was called simply “Adventure”, and was developed in the 1970s on business computers which lacked any kind of graphical output. It was played at universities and colleges all over the world, before being adapted to run on home computers.
Text adventures were able to use the power of the written word to represent situations that the primitive computer graphics of the time were not suited to. In addition, because the player could type complex commands, it was possible to affect the game world in more sophisticated ways than was feasible with the four-way joystick with single fire button that was common at the time.
Hence for a number of years, text adventures led the way in showing what video games could be capable of. Most text adventures avoided violence entirely, encouraging players to find other ways to make progress within the game universe. Characters other than the player-controlled protagonist were commonplace, and they soon began to exhibit their own programmed personalities and act according to their own distinct goals. For the first time, games began to feel comparable in complexity to more established artistic genres; a text adventure game could feel like you were actually in a novel.
As the worlds modeled in the games became larger and more complex, many players began to find that exploring and mapping the world was an enjoyable and entertaining activity in and of itself. Games began to be advertised on the basis of how large they were and how many different locations they featured.
Meanwhile, the shoot-everything approach of arcade video games had run into a dead end, and the industry had collapsed. There were lean times for consoles too, as the limitations of their low priced hardware prevented their games from competing with those found on increasingly powerful home computers.
By the late 1980s, high resolution color graphics were commonplace on most home computer owners’ machines. This made it feasible to use full 3D color graphics in video games. One influential early 3D game was Wolfenstein 3D, which challenged the player to lead a heavily armed soldier into a maze-like Nazi encampment.
While there had been 3D action and adventure games on home computers as early as 1980, Wolfenstein 3D achieved notoriety for the level of violence depicted. The player was encouraged to kill hundreds of German soldiers, who were seen falling to the ground in a spray of blood. In addition, killing the “boss” at the end of a level resulted in an instant replay of his death. Although the game was controversial (and arguably tasteless), its high speed 3D graphics were groundbreaking, and it won many awards. It also kick-started the video game genre known as the first person shooter (FPS), still incredibly popular amongst Windows gamers.
The makers of Wolf 3D went on to make Doom, which ramped up the complexity of the 3D world. Rather than limiting the player to wandering in 4 fixed directions in a grid-like world, Doom provided the illusion of a true 3D world in which you could move in any direction at any angle. Doom also featured exploration-based puzzles involving locked doors and hidden switches. More controversially, it ramped up the violence level. It was another hit.
Before long, video game developers tried taking the kind of free-roaming 3D graphics popularized by Doom, and using them in story-based action-adventure games. The ultimate aim was to make a "cinematic" game; one that would feel like you were inside a movie.
By the mid 1990s, it was possible to model objects using polygons, and draw them at high speed on screen. This led to games in which both the world and the objects in it were truly three-dimensional. The launch of the Sony PlayStation boosted video game console power, enabling similar feats of programming in console games. But while game programmers could now draw and animate pretty much anything, the complexity of the resulting game worlds now became a major problem.
Next, in part 2: the complexity problem.
I noticed that The Edge magazine has an article in a recent issue asking if boss fights are a cliché that should be wiped out.
My vote is an enthusiastic and wholehearted yes.
Last night I got to the penultimate battle of "Prince of Persia: Rival Swords". After about half an hour of frustration and annoyance, I gave up. The rest of the game was great, but the last major battle (with the Vizier) exemplifies everything that’s lame and sucky about traditional "boss fights", with some Wii-specific obnoxiousness added to the mix.
Thanks to the wonders of YouTube, you can see the final battle in all its irritating stupidity.
Now, there are video game boss fights that aren’t awful. Nintendo tend to do a good job of them. I had no objection to the bosses in any of the 3D Zelda games, because each time there was a strategy that you could work out that would make them pretty easy.
The first Metroid Prime had a couple of questionable boss fights, but after that they pretty much realized what they were doing wrong, and things got progressively better over the next two games in the series.
But in general, while I tolerate good boss fights, I never find myself wishing there were more of even the best ones. Almost all boss fights are lame pieces of arena combat where your abilities are crippled and then you’re given frustrating pieces of arbitrary crap to do, that has to be exactly timed and unnecessarily repeated.
I know there are people who love that sort of thing, of course. For those people, there are games like Shadow of the Colossus. For the rest of us… an end to boss fights, please.
Check the second of today’s new GTA IV trailers.
GTA IV has Prius!
In the video game store the other day, rothko was ranting about the “girl games”. With the success of the Nintendo DS, there are dozens of the things. “Catz”, “Dogz”, “Horsez”, “Pony Friends”, “Horse Life”, half a dozen Barbie games, and “Baby Pals”, all with pink and purple cover art.
The games that induced the rant, however, were the ones in the “Imagine” series from Ubisoft. The boundaries of what a young girl is supposed to be imagining are starkly delineated by Ubisoft: “Animal Doctor”, “Fashion Designer”, “Figure Skater”, “Master Chef”… and of course, “Babyz”.
Nintendo themselves seem to understand how to produce games that appeal to women (and girls) without actually being incredibly patronizing, and without limiting the appeal only to females. “Nintendogs” was a system-seller, and managed it without pink ribbon and purple butterflies. “Animal Crossing” topped the charts, “Wario Ware” was big too. “Super Princess Peach” is dressed in pink, but the game has her fighting monsters to save poor helpless Mario.
But there’s a new brain imaging study that suggests that it may be a mistake to think that it’s possible to make video games that appeal to women as much as some games appeal to men:
After analyzing the imaging data for the entire group, the researchers found that the participants showed activation in the brain’s mesocorticolimbic center, the region typically associated with reward and addiction. Male brains, however, showed much greater activation, and the amount of activation was correlated with how much territory they gained. (This wasn’t the case with women.)
It makes a certain amount of evolutionary sense that male brains might be wired to get a bigger reward from gaining territory. However, this doesn’t account for games which don’t involve territory gain at all. I don’t think anyone was particularly hard pressed to explain why guys like FPSs and Sid Meier’s Civilization more than women do; but what about 3D platformers? Fighting games? For that matter, what about the first video game to become popular with women, Pac-man?
When the Xbox 360 came out, it was portrayed as something everyone wanted, the amazing new console that was selling out everywhere. Yet the next week, when I walked into Costco they had a pallet piled high with the things.
When the Wii was launched, it became the console that was really selling out everywhere. But by then, Microsoft had moved on to their new story, that the Xbox 360 was the biggest selling next-gen console.
Except that it isn’t.
If you read the small print on Microsoft’s announced sales figures, you find that they’re not actually lying; but they count a console as sold as soon as it leaves the factory. Sony and Nintendo do the same, but there’s a big difference in how that figure relates to the number of consoles actually sold to gamers.
If you walk into any electronics store, you’ll probably see several dozen Xbox 360s piled up in the main store. You won’t see anything like as many PS3s, and you probably still won’t see a Wii. Think about that. Also, think about the fact that electronics stores don’t actually like to pile expensive items up in the middle of the store inside their boxes; it usually indicates that they’ve got even more piles of the things in storage out back, and have run out of space and are trying desperately to shift them. Have you ever seen a big pile of digital cameras in their boxes in Best Buy? A stack of dozens of Denon receivers in Circuit City? Nope. But you’ve probably seen a big stack of $30 Chinese DVD players on clearance…
Someone has put these observations together with some hard sales data. It turns out that the channel is absolutely bloated with unwanted Xbox 360s. Not only that, the 360 was almost matched for sales by the PS2, except during Halo release month, which is clearly visible as a statistical anomaly. When the release of a single game skews your sales that much, that can’t be a good thing either, can it?
In fact, Xbox 360 sales peaked in 2006. And with the PS3 now having a solid library of good games, I don’t see it improving. Also interesting is the analysis of how the 360 is actually more expensive than the PS3, once you factor in the add-ons to make it equivalent in capability.
The amazing thing about World of Warcraft is that even if you’re a gamer, conversations about it sound like complete gibberish. And not the potentially interesting kind of gibberish, either.
Some quotes from the General forum Blizzard runs:
Won’t the S3 rating requirement encourage arena team selling? I mean someone could just have 1500 ratings for all of S2, wait for S3, buy a team that meets the rating requirement for the week. They would have the points and rating.
Fire Mages ouch, you got hit by a huge nerf bat with resilience, my resil alone takes off 10% of your total 20% average crit. So that gives you a measly 10% chance to crit on most decently geared fire mages so the High DPS glass cannon that was once fire mages is nothing but a PvE spec anymore. Without survivability you guys have it tough, especially with the armor nerf.
It would really help BGs if in AV HKs were worth more (except for Alliance at SH GY =) ). This would discourage a base race. The other 3 BGs needs HK honor cut way, way down. This would encourage people to actually go for objectives rather than HK farm.
It’s like D&D played over AIM by LOLcats.