Hollywoodland

I watched Hollywoodland the other night. And I was left feeling more than a little unsatisfied. It was no fault of the actors, they all had fine performances. And the colors and aesthetics of the movie made it quite pleasing on the eye. But it just didn’t go anywhere. It was pretty much the most anticlimactic movie I’ve ever seen. I guess there kinda was a partial climax, but it was smack dab in the middle of the movie, not closer to the end. Which left me with the feeling that I was still waiting for the real climax… and then the credits rolled.

I understand that it’s a historical movie, and the George Reeves mystery is unsolved. I’m comfortable with that. I can deal with a lot of grey in my movies. But while storytellers should feel free to mess with my head as much as they please, they really shouldn’t mess with the pacing.

In music, pretty much everything fits in to one of a couple standard time signatures. That provides the frame, and then the musician can paint whatever they want inside that. Breaking outside of the standard timing can sometimes be interesting, but usually just results in something you can’t tap your foot to. Movies are the same way: they should follow the standard narrative structure. I’m not saying that every movie should have a happy ending. I’m saying that they should have, you know… an ending.

If I can feel mysteriously satisfied at the end of the hugely unresolved Fellowship of the Ring, you can manage to make an unsolved murder satisfying. You can flip pretty much every other standard on its head (case and point: Memento). In fact, please do. But that whole notion of “building up to something” - keep that.

Final Fantasty III - Beware of Port

GameFAQs’s list of top FAQs is generally a really good indicator of what games people are playing right now. And it’s quite telling that Final Fantasy III (the DS port of the Japan-only NES original) is still hanging out on that list after 5 months. Because old school RPGs are fucking brutal. I’m glad to see that many of my fellow gamers are still working on this one. My commute gives me near infinite time to grind through any game. Unfortunately, RPGs demand just that: infinite time.

Last week I was so psyched to be close to the end of the game. I was in the last dungeon of the game, decently leveled (with one of my jobs at level 99), and had all the best gear. I’m in the final stretch. I pass the point of no return (no more opportunities to save), and prepare for the final boss battle. 2 hours and 4 bosses later, I’m actually at the final boss. I’m getting a little nervous at this point - because if I die at this point I’ve lost 2 hours of work (or roughly 2.4 bus commutes). Thank god for the quicksave feature (non existent in the original game), otherwise I would have had to do that all in one sitting. But I’m feeling good, because the mini bosses leading up to the final one were pretty manageable. Then I get thoroughly owned by the Cloud of Darkness.

Fast forward to this week. My commutes are spent grinding my character’s levels up so that I can make my second attempt. And now that I know just how long that attempt is going to take, I’m sure as hell making sure I’m ready. Because I’m a stubborn son of a bitch, and I will beat this game.

We forget in the modern gaming world just how unreasonable games were back in the day. I’m sitting there, post-smackdown, thinking all sorts of nasty thoughts about FFIII’s game design. But then I step back a bit, and remember that I had to do almost exactly the same thing when I played through Final Fantasy I (you have a rematch with all the four elemental bosses, and then the final showdown with Chaos, who will most likely r0x0r j00r b0x0rz). I guess I just had a lot more patience when I was 8.

F.E.A.R.

Played on Xbox360

I really wanted to like F.E.A.R. (despite it’s really lame sub-title “First Encounter Assault Recon”). The reviews made it sound like it was going to be good (GameSpy, GameSpot). Kinda like Eternal Darkness meets FPS. But it wasn’t. Not even close. This is my first review of a game that I started playing after I had already started this blog. So my thoughts are pretty well catalogued. I even went so far as to even take notes while playing :O. And looking back on them just backs up what my gut was telling me 10 minutes in: this game kinda sucks.

I’ll try to start out positive. We’ll see how long I last.

The game features a bullet time effect that you can flip on at will (with a cooldown). While in that mode explosions and whatnot look pretty darn cool. Unfortunately as the game goes on you realize that it’s actually not that useful, as that with everything slowed down all it does is give a little more reaction time - it’s not likely you also get Neo-like super speed. Which has the end of effect of making what should be a pants-soiling firefight into a Valium-paced game of whack-a-mole.

In general the weapon selection bored me to tears. But towards the end of the game, it did improve a bit. You eventually get this plasma railgun thing that is meltingly satisfying. But for 90% of the game I was either using Generic Shotgun or Generic Machinegun. And I never really ran out of bullets so there wasn’t much motivation to change it up.

Graphically F.E.A.R. is quite capable, but completely uninspired. The environments in F.E.A.R. are booooooring. Really, this game sets an all time new low. The entire game takes place in a nondescript industrial complex, followed nondescript office building, and towards the end you upgrade to a nondescript research facility. That is, if you kept playing long enough to give a shit. I work in an office. Wandering through one during my after hours game time just isn’t fun. Especially when they’re absurd maze-like complexes that no employee could ever ever navigate. And what brilliant plot tool do they use to transition you from destination to destination? Your helicopter gets shot down. Three times. That’s too bad, because I was really looking forward to the nondescript alleyways that connected the locations.

One of the things that I was the most excited about with F.E.A.R. was that it was supposed to be this whole paranormal, dim-the-lights, scary action adventure. It’s not. Office buildings are not scary, even if you flash black haired demon girls on the screen now and then. The story sucks, and what little there is ends up being so anti-climatic in the end that you feel really cheated. But what gets me is that the protagonist, connected as he is to headquarters or whatever via comlink, never mentions that he’s having these freaky visions. He just stupidly wanders through random building after random building, hoping the law of a thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters will guide him to the villain. Who you just headshot when you find him - no fight necessary (that wasn’t a spoiler, that was me saving you hours of your life). Even Doom gave me more motivation to keep trudging on that F.E.A.R..

On top of sub par environments and sub par story, the entire game is littered with in-game ads for Dell XPS game systems. Almost every computer and every monitor is brandishing the Dell logo, putting you on the express route out of disbelief suspension land. If only they had used that ad money to actually build a game worth my time.

I finished F.E.A.R. not because I enjoyed the story and had to see the ending. Nor because I enjoyed the gameplay and just couldn’t get enough. I finished F.E.A.R. so that I could guiltlessly write a nasty blog post about it and so that I could get some achievement points (which they totally gypped me on).

I can't hear you

I’ve noticed a bad trend in the FPS these days: I can’t seem to hear what the hell is going on. Oh, I can hear the action all right. The sound of the gun rattling off. That grenade detonating right next to me (whoops). Those I can hear just fine. But that guy standing next to me giving me important plot details? Mumble mumble mumble. The guy on my radio telling me what to do next? No clue what he just said.

There are two main causes of this:

1) 3D Sound

Sounds fancy, doesn’t it? Games have this sound engine to make sure that when a rocket whizzes right by your virtual ear you hear the path via your speakers. Cool for rockets, bad for dialogue. If there’s some guy in-game talking to you, in many shooters you won’t be able to hear what they’re saying unless you’re standing right next to and looking directly at them. I don’t know about you, but I’m capable of hearing someone talking to me even if they’re behind me and across the room. Our ears are actually very capable receivers. And optimizing over the whiz bang effect leaves a poor experience for dialogue.

I appreciate now the wisdom of Bungie for putting Cortana in the Master Chief’s head.

2) No independent speech volume control

It’s so simple. It’s a knob in settings that assigns a volume level for speech and only speech. Most games already have a category for “Music” versus “Effects”. And to be fair some games were smart enough to call out a “Speech” category. But far too few.

Maybe it’s my sound setup. It’s true, I had to neuter my 7.1 sound setup to 7.0. I live in the city, where neighbors are separated by walls, not fences. Removing the sub woofer wasn’t quite enough - I also have to keep the volume at a reasonable level while I game. The catch is that people have a much higher tolerance for continuous sound over burst sound. That’s why alarms beep in intervals to wake you up. Speech fits in the continuous sound bucket, which is why it’s possible to tune someone out even as they’re talking to you (not a good idea to let them know, however). The sounds of TV are accepted much more by neighbors than the sporadic explosion. I could happily crank up the speech volume in the game while leaving the rest of the sound low and not disturb anyone. If only someone gave me the option.

Another option is subtitling. Which is certainly functional, but it has the side effect of being the most anti-immersive thing ever. Plus nothing really highlights the poor voice acting in so many games like being able to read the script side by side with them.

The saving grace is that most shooters are light on plot as is, so you’re probably not going to have your experienced ruined by missing out on the dialogue. But that’s a trend I’d wouldn’t exactly encourage. Either do it right or take the silent cue and do it Gordon Freeman style.

How to make WoW even more addictive

My name is Chris, and I’m addicted to WoW.

There, I’ve said it. At least I’m not alone; WoW is up to eight million subscribers. We’re all willing participants, but there’s no getting around the fact that we are also addicts.

It’s not like WoW doesn’t put out. Aesthetically WoW is very satisfying: the world is pleasing on the eyes and the monsters look appropriately fierce. By RPG standards the gameplay is actually pretty deep and entertaining. And there’s certainly no end of things to do.

But WoW is just a glorified Skinner Box, and we’re all sitting there pulling the lever hoping for another pellet. I know this. So why is it that lately I’ve been thinking of how great it would be to combine two of my addictions?

WoW, meet Achievement Points. Achievement Points, meet WoW.

One of WoW’s main problems is that everything boils down to gear. You kill stuff to get better gear so that you can see new places and kill bigger stuff. Your ability to proceed through the content of the game is gated by how good of stuff you have. Skill has something to do with it, definitely. But you’re dead in the water without good gear.

So what’s the problem? Well, not only is gear the means to explore new content, it’s also your reward. For a little while after you finish an instance, you’re so excited to troll around with your new thingamajig so that everyone can see where you’ve been. But inevitably you’ll go somewhere cooler and your fancy thingamajig will become obsolete. You have to throw it away. Where’s your memento of journeys past? The game actually discourages you from holding on to the nifty stuff that you collect along the way. Gone is your visible badge of honor that you slew the mighty whosiwhatsit.

This is where achievement points come in. WoW needs non-gear related rewards for special achievements. Nothing that affects gameplay; just a badge of honor that says that you successfully downed Hogger. It’s probably just another tab on your character sheet - nothing fancy. But that little piece of permanence would motivate many players (myself included) to drill into a larger percentage of the content that the WoW developers worked so hard on. Sure there would be a achievements for the obvious things, like finishing some major instance. But things get really fun when you pull out the really in-depth achievements, like soloing a boss, clearing an instance under a time limit, getting a killing spree in PvP, or exploring every zone. Blizzard has already taken some interesting ideas like this and turned them into quests, but the problem is that there’s nobody to appreciate that you finished that quest except for yourself. Which is totally missing the whole point of us all playing this RPG together.

C’mon Blizzard. Give me something else to shoot for, because I’m growing tired of the endless cycle for “better stuff.”