On Stardock, EA, and Vegas 2

Imagine if heroes were an even bigger part of WarCraft 3.
this article has a brief on Demigod as well as Stardock in general.

I have had a huge appreciation for Stardock since they avoid bullcrap DRM and provide a good digital distribution platform. The recent success of Sins of a Solar Empire commercially gives me some hope that the market in general shares a lot of my own personal sentiments on how and what we enjoy.

I never understood the "pc gaming is dead" thing since a solid 80% of my game purchases have always been for the PC, but I agree with what they say about the industry being fundamentally broken. Like the bureaucracy civic of Civilization 4, the games industry in general but especially PC gaming has grown into an unwieldy beast of corruption and waste. Sadly, there's no one small group to which all the blame can be delivered; fortunately, it seems that the industry is fed up with having gamers migrate to the 360 and is actually starting to do something about it.

---

In other news, I maintained some small piece of respect for EA, understanding that most of the hatred is just because they're large, and because of the inherent problems with largeness. This has been more or less shattered by the decision to release the creature creator for $10 (or a limited "free" demo thereof). This is detestable.

I've read some commentary and the discussion always migrates to microtransactions, but listen: it's not a microtransaction if you don't get anything. This tool is useless without the full game and it comes bundled with the full game. EA is offering to give you some of the game a few months earlier if you're willing to pay more for the total game. This is a critical distinction from actually getting something new or unique or otherwise different from the standard box. Shame on EA, and shame on any rubes that end up actually supporting it.

What's worse, they want us to use it. They need content generated by a large and diverse team to pack with the game when it ships, to properly populate the galaxy at launch. They're leveraging the internet, using us to help make their game better. And they expect us to pay money to do so.

Screw you EA. For the first time since 3DO went defunct, I'm going to start caring who made the game on those should-I-or-shouldn't-I purchases. Ironically, or perhaps predictably, they were founded by the same person, Trip Hawkins, who last I heard is now making mobile games. But I digress, so let's move onto other matters...

---

Rainbow Six Vegas 2 for the PC is pretty abominable. For the love of all gamers everywhere, please, people, when you make a port from a console to a PC, don't just remap the controls onto a keyboard. IT DOESN'T WORK. Things that are intuitive on a console controller aren't on a mouse and keyboard and vice versa. Please stop.

Also absurd is the inability to change guns while reloading. If someone is shooting me in the face, I don't give two PSOne memory cards about putting in a new magazine and chambering a round; I'm dropping that mofo and taking out my sidearm.

This wouldn't be a huge problem except that hitting fire with an empty gun makes it reload. This is a great example of decent mechanics not mixing well. No weapon change while reloading? Reasonable, if annoying. Fire to reload when empty? Quite helpful! But both? I'm in the middle of a fire fight, I'm firing my weapon frantically, I don't have time to watch my bullets. I expect to run dry and switch my weapon, not start reloading while I'm still peeking out of cover. The mixture of the two elements simply doesn't functionally make any sense, and I'm ashamed of the oversight.

Furthermore they hacked the XBox LIVE system of online play to the PC, with the individual PC owners as the game hosts. The entire system is laggy and absurd. As I was led to understand that the true joy of Vegas was the multiplayer, for them to completely botch it on the PC port makes me feel like I payed $50 for a $30 game.

The rest of PAX

Already December! enough procrastination; I'm going to dump the rest of what I've written here, unformatted, with no photos, for better or worse. This is the rest of PAX:

America's Army: True Soldiers for the XBOX 360 is an UbiSoft title greatly assisted in development (but not financially supported) by the U.S. Army. It promises to be, though not totally realistic (it's a little more forgiving about death than real life), at least the most realistic game I've ever seen.

By realistic, I'm not referring to graphics, but game mechanics; If you want to know what it's like to be in action in the army, you like FPS, or you simply appreciate realism in games, you need to pick this one up. For the truly hardcore, there's even a "Super-Real" mode, which will remove all indicators, maps, and numbers from your display.

Gameplay is squad-based, with the best squad AI I've ever seen; you can't command your squad's movements and YOU DON'T NEED TO. Single-player seems to keep everyone into one fire team, but online or over system link you can play 16-player co-op, and split up however you like. The game features stat development where you can choose which aspects of your solider to upgrade, and it's presented not so much in an RPG-insane-magical-power way but more of a learning-from-your-time-on-the-field way. The training carries over to online play, so you'd probably do well to go single-player first.







Eidos was featuring just one game, but it's a doozy. Kane & Lynch is a 3rd-person shooter in the style of Gears of War, from the health system to the squad-based play to the "revive teammate" mechanic. What it doesn't do, however, is carbon-copy the style of any game you've ever seen. This game mixes ten parts Reservoir Dogs, Three parts Pulp Fiction, and one part Max Payne and drenches the tried-and-true gameplay with an atmosphere of pure badassery. For this reason I'm giving it the "Most Pleasant Surprise" award of PAX 2007.

This game is GORGEOUS. If you think that high-contrast graphics and over-used shaders can only look amazing in environments as fantastical as Quake 4 or Gears of War, you're in for a rude awakening, because walking down the street in a Japanese metropolis, guns blazing, will rock your eyeballs.

Controls are smooth as butter too. The game eschews complicated "hold this then tilt that" controls by assigning one action to each button and automating the rest. Familiar functions in Gears of War like "cover" and "reload" are replaced by squad commands such as "follow" and "attack".

"But wait," I hear you say, "putting all the squad commands into a menu on one button works fine. How can a game work without a reload button?!" Trust me, it does. Having a seperate button for each squad command isn't harder to learn, it's actually easier, since the other buttons don't have yet more crap for you to memorize. I've never had such an easy time giving so many orders to an FPS squad in my life. It works. Reloading works too. When do YOU reload? When you're empty or when there's a lull, right? Well the game does that FOR you. If you're not firing, iron-sighting, or performing some other action that implies combat, your character will put in a fresh magazine so you don't need to worry about a thing. The same goes for combat. If you fire your weapon and then stop firing/iron-sighting or moving, your character ducks behind the nearest object, be it a pillar, dumpster, or car. It works beautifully and you can finally spend more time thinking about how to beat a group of enemies than how to control your maneuvers around cover. Spray-'n'-pray from behind cover seems to not be a complete waste of ammo as well, a nice change from Gears of War.




Harmonix was expected to show off Rock Band, but I doubt anyone was prepared for how it turned out. People were OBSESSED with this game. It was totally impossible for me to play the game without waiting in line for half an hour - something I opted out of, for better or worse.

The songs are UNBELIEVABLE. The one thing above else that turned me off to guitar hero (especially the first) was the music. The covers were terrible, and most of the songs weren't that great to begin with. With Rock Band, the songs aren't known for their interesting guitar, but for being... you know... "good". The few covers there are in the mix also completely blow GH 1 and 2 out of the water in terms of musical quality; you'll truly WANT to rock out to this stuff.

The popularity was so massive that I have to objectively grant this the Best in Show award. What's so amazing about the game is that it doesn't do anything unique or new, but simply perfectly fits together the various pieces of all the other B- and C-list console music games into a complete set.


Nintendo & Jam Sessions

To say Nintendo's booth wasn't exciting might give the wrong impression; rather, from Nintendo, nothing is ever surprising because you always know to expect goods of a very high quality and polish. I wish I had spent more time with the new DS Zelda game, and my apologies to anyone I let down by not writing about it. Erm... you can draw on the minimap, notes and things. That's all I know.

Metroid Prime 3 was such standard fare I similarly was tempted to ignore it. The decision to buy it is a no-brainer, really: if you like the Metroid Prime series, you'll get it, and if you don't, you won't. It looked like a fantastic game, and it'll be on my Christmas list, but there's so little different-looking about it that it, like everything in the Nintendo booth, is hard to write about.

One thing I've never played (but always wanted to) was the Fire Emblem series, and the new one for Wii looks like a good ol' Tactics-genre romp, so I'll probably give in and buy it, if only to say I've played the distinguished series. Everything about the interface was very clean and easy to understand, and at no point was I stuck guessing, "Uh, well I guess that number's my accuracy, or maybe damage," a trait that seems exceedingly rare in the genre.

The only truly shocking things about the booth were that my mother fell in love with brain training, and that the Nintendo reps were obsessed with preventing people from taking video. Bear in mind that this is a public event, with an open booth, and thousands upon thousands of people streaming by. Nothing in these games is exclusive knowledge. MP3, the most hotly guarded, was set to release in mere days. The idea that you can prevent people from taking video would be insulting if it wasn't so ludicrous. After a time of repeatedly stopping my video-taking, they started targeting ME SPECIFICALLY, and I STILL captured plenty of video. In the end all it accomplished was lower my opinion of Nintendo of America, both in their common sense and in the lack of explanation over why video was forbidden (hence why I chose to ignore the restriction).

Jam Sessions, the DS acoustic guitar chord simulator, was not represented by Nintendo, nor even on the exhibition floor; rather, a music stage wandered about, moving each day like an elusive nomad. Part of the UbiSoft crew, I was fortunate enough to have a long interview-style conversation with a knowledgeable person, and here's what I learned:

It's got smooooth controls. You have a down-strum and an up-strum, which with their own sound, and if you strum from a line on the screen right next to your "strum bar", you make a very crisp and short "hit". The guitar tabs provided cover a wide range of good songs, so if you're not much of a writer, there's plenty to work with inside. Something everyone will be pleased to hear, the controls are customizable for either hand and for either way to be "down-strum". Recording of your own songs isn't that terrific, only about 1 minute, so this is more of a live-performance thing.

In summary, I'll try and get jam sessions, as it should prove a far more-convenient (if more-expensive) substitute for my harmonica as far as portable music goes.




Microsoft (mostly hellgate)

Microsoft's booth was mostly about Mass Effect, with Rock Band (yes they were in multiple booths), PC ports of XBox games, and lesser names take up the periphery. I still don't really know anything about mass effect because I completely ignored it in favor of one terminal alone: Flagship's Hellgate: London demo.

For those of you out of the know, Flagship studios is formed of a large chunk of the team that developed Diablo II, and it shows. A spiritual sequel in gameplay mechanics to D2, Hellgate is going to provide players with all the hack-n-slash dungeon-crawling they can handle when it hits shelves on Halloween.

With even simpler skill sets and a daunting inventory system, this game is definitely all about the loot. Basically, if you wasted a month or more of your life spending every evening playing Diablo II, this is a no-brainer. For those who still need to be convinced, I assure you that the game is beautiful and handles very will with keyboard movement in the 3-D world, freeing up your mouse for combat - allowing you to, for example, move backwards while firing your gun FPS-style at a charging demon. Laying the smackdown with a sword is perfectly acceptable of course; The game moves into 3rd-person for melee combat and features different attack motions based on which way you're moving when you attack.

The game will be an up-front priced game like its predecessor, and then also feature free online play with an option subscription. After hearing nothing about what precisely subscription would offer players, I was unhappy to find that the Hellgate reps were equally dodgy. I think they honestly didn't know at PAX-time.

In the end it looks a little too simple for gamers who want a game with more meat on its bones, satisfying a wealth-gaining response in the brain rather than a system-mastery response. Players who are looking for intense adrenaline-pumping battles will be a little hard-pressed, while players who live for the grind will be in heaven when they play Hellgate.







Fury is that type of game that is so esoteric that almost no one will play it and yet so perfect at what it does that every true gaming aficionado will have heard of it. Imagine if you will a game devoted to the PvP of such games as Everquest and World of Warcraft, and a dash of Diablo-2-style loot (that is, an orgy of the stuff), without all that silly xp grinding, re-rolling, and waiting for peak hours before you can find a PvP group. Fury is MMORPG PvP percolated down into its rawest and purest form, right down to taking all the numbers from the game and obsessively calculating your DPS down to 45.8 seconds after the beginning of engagement, resulting in the transposition of two abilities in your attack chain.

There's a massive number of abilities; I'm talking hundreds. Each ability has many levels and you can choose your abilities and levels at will (there's no stone-set classes in the game). Do you take two abilities at level 3 or a single one at level 4? You can spend literally all day at this.

Of course, the game, perfect as it is in its role, is totally, %100 unappealing to those who are unable to spend an idle day in MMORPG PvP and feel satisfaction at bedtime. I myself am among such folk, so while I enjoyed the beta copy I snagged on and off over the course of about 10 days, I was more than happy to let it fall off my desktop when Valve's Team Fortress 2 beta went live, as it was far better at filling my PvP appetite.

Far Cry 2 & Crysis

One thing I was happy to see was the first glimpse the general public got of Far Cry 2 - No photos, they made damn sure of that. However I took notes as best as one can with literally no light to write by, and I'll try and piece together what I jotted down:

For those of you still confused, Far Cry was created by CryTek and published by UbiSoft, at least that's how I understand it, and then they went their seperate ways. CryTek teamed up with EA to make Crysis, a sci-fi near-future-themed game, and UbiSoft maintained the Far Cry name and is making Far Cry 2, a more realistic take set in Africa.

First off, don't think that Far Cry 2 has suffered from lack of CryTek; the game is still gorgeous. The best part is that there's not a lot of faking, thanks to some clever optimization tricks; the detail fades off quite naturally with distance, as opposed to the various "detail level" distance cutoffs many of us in MMOs suffer through.

The game takes place in Africa, in a 50-square-kilometer space surrounded by desert, with no loading screens as you travel from one corner to the other. As you go back and forth on a quest for vengeance/assassination of a criminal boss figure, you must combat a very advanced AI with mobile stockades/ammo dumps with the help of buddies. Buddies are NPCs with their own looks and personalities, but they're created as necessary by the game. If you murder a buddy senselessly (and shame on you for turning down the help), sure enough by the time the script calls for a buddy, you'll have met someone new. The game tries to do cinematic tricks behind the scenes, like, for example, building up a storm so it might start raining at a particularly dramatic point which you may be approaching.

Speaking of storms, boy howdy, the weather system is a beaut. From wind effects that can tear branches off if they go fast enough to brushfires that follow the wind direction and realistically grow and die, this game doesn't need anything fancy to wow you; the run-of-the-mill stuff like fire is that good.

The AI also seems to be much improved. When the demonstrator fired a sniper rifle at an encampment, hitting a guy in the leg, he dropped to the ground clutching his leg, and everyone else scattered for cover. Halfway back in the darkened room, I almost rolled my eyes; the animations were good, but this was how he was showing off his "amazing" AI? But then after a long moment, maybe 6 seconds, someone rushed out to their comrade - and started dragging his buddy to safety. The demonstrator put one in the head of the would-be rescuer, then one in the head of the bait. The crowd erupted into applause and cheers.

Finally, the game takes realism to a whole new level not just in graphics, but gameplay mechanics as well. Rather than just say, "OK, you're in the gunner's seat now", or "OK, you used a first aid kit", your character actually goes through the motions of swinging out of the driver's seat, or prying a bullet out of your leg with a knife. Catch fire? You'll pat at your sleeve to put it out. Weapon jammed? You gotta fix it. Want a look at your map? Your character literally pulls out a folding paper map and a compass. There's even an option to turn off all HUD indicators for maximum realism. This is UI immersion I've rarely, if ever, witnessed.

---

Crysis, sadly, didn't make an appearance at PAX. However, the single-player demo is available for download, so if you have a decent PC you can check it out immediately. Sadly the top-end graphics would make for too big a download I guess and aren't available, so people with champion PCs can't open up and see what it can do. Regardless, it's a good deal of fun for such a short demo, but there's a few things you need to know, at least on Normal difficulty and above.

THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW WHEN PLAYING THE CRYSIS DEMO:

1. The gunboat can see you. No, it doesn't matter that you have your cloaking device on, are halfway behind a tree, immobile, prone, in tall grass, and was last spotted or did something noticeable 300 meters away. The gunboat can still see you.
2. Do not ever, ever, ever use strength mode in combat. You will die, and everyone will laugh that you tried to throw a crate or another person at them instead of using your perfectly good guns.
3. This is still, spiritually, a Far Cry game. Even after you've made a massive debacle of an objective, if you go unseen for a minute or two everyone will assume you probably left. Similarly, if your commanding officer tells you to keep a low profile on an upcoming area, feel free to take off the silencer and go wild, then waltz in while everyone is 100 meters away, investigating the site of your firefight.
4. No, the gunboat can still see you, it's just not firing because there's 4 feet of solid rock between the two of you. You are not going to sneak away from this thing in the grass, Predator-movie-style. Run.
   

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess - First Impressions

I've now played through the second major dungeon in Zelda: TP for the Wii, and I think I've got a good handle on the overall game now. What follows is first the Wii-specific impressions, and second the overall game impressions.

---

The Wii:

This game is very nice on the Wii because unlike say, Wii Sports, you can actually calibrate the pointer to have some semblance of 1:1 relationship between the pointer's vector and the actual cursor on the screen. This makes aimed items, like the slingshot and boomerang, much nicer than it would be otherwise. I'm still new to this interface (vs. 8 years aiming Zelda games with an analog stick), so I'm a little worse than I would be on the GameCube, but this is no problem: When I miss, it's fun because I feel like I missed. You can either look or move (by holding Z) with an aimed item out, and getting in big, high-mobility archery fights with half a dozen out-of-reach enemies is an absolute blast thanks to the Wii pointer. It's also nice to be able to drag around the map like you can in many PC games with the middle mouse button.

Unfortunately, the accelerometer uses of the Wiimote, especially swordfighting, are rather shallow. It's clear that there's an "attack" button in the GameCube version that they simply slapped into a Wii motion: any accelerometer hit of enough energy counts as a "button press" of the attack button. Hence, no matter how you swing it, you do a horizontal swing in-game. Hold Z and any motion whatsoever is a vertical slash. Hold Z and forward on the stick, and any motion whatsoever is a stab. Shame on you, developers. Shame.

Does this mean that it works poorly? Not really; it just means that the Wii version's typical combat situations are no better than the GameCube's. The Wii can play both GameCube and Wii games, and I would still recommend anyone with a Wii get the Wii version for the few moments where it really counts.

---

The Game:

This is the best Zelda game ever made.
It starts off a little slow, even for someone who hasn't played Zelda in a long time, but if you're patient the first hour or two, you'll be well-rewarded. The game is so ridiculously chock-full of unique control situations I have no idea how they packed it all in. Heck, you play as not-Link for a good chunk of the game, with roughly the robustness of Link with 2 items. The sheer amount of variety is amazing, yet while WarioWare is a bunch of minigames, the short diversions in Twilight Princess feel like one small step in your journey of a thousand miles, because you're so driven to get to the next objective.

And driven you will be. The story is compelling at every turn, giving you both a long-term goal on the horizon to save the world, and imminent crises in the here and now that give your play a sense - however false - of urgency. Dungeons are the most brilliant ever made because the puzzles are never mind-bending nor tedious; You will never be stuck for long because a puzzle is too hard, nor will you be bored because you're solving the Nth variation on a puzzle you've already completed. Everything is brilliantly constructed and it's amazing how satisfied you feel after solving even the simplest of puzzles.

Finally, I've eh, spoiler removed, it's better as a surprise), and I don't know if it was the Wii controller or the presentation, but it was perhaps the most immersive moment in my entire video-gaming history. I was in the zone, man.

If you don't play Nintendo, pick up a second-hand GameCube and get this game... it's that good.

Fight Club

I tend to be bad at chopping these things down to a reasonable length when I'm tired; it's bed-time but I wanted to write this with the movie fresh in my mind. I apologize if I ramble. If you're not interested in an extensive movie review, and you're not worried about spoilers, don't read the full post. If you're not interested in a movie review and you are worried about spoilers, maybe you should skip this entry entirely.

So, at a friend's reccomendation I went out and rented Fight Club. It's spinning here in the PS2 under the TV next to the computer where I'm typing this. I wanted to quote the commentary (not sure whose) of what I found one of the more powerful and dramatic scenes of the film:

This is the kind of scene that uh, I don't know... only people with no sense of humor saw as... negative.

This is a pretty good way to illustrate that I don't "get" these films, especially given that people find my sense of humor almost absurdly broad. When I say these films, I refer to Fight Club, Jarhead, and Full Metal Jacket; for brevity I lump them into the "pointless antisocial" genre. Antisocial films feature a main character who tends to have a sort of disillusioned outlook on life with antisocial tendencies. This character serves as the center of the action and plays the role of narrator (as these are adapted from books and tend to convey a lot of information via literal narration). At his side is a violently antisocial person who has a rather radical, extreme view of his environment. At the periphery are normal folks like the boss, the drill sergeant, the squad leader, etc., who are at the same time "the man" who doesn't get it and a very personal character who can act as "the everyman" who just as much doesn't get it. A critical irony of the genre is that this type of film doesn't lend itself to explaining anything to the everyman moviegoer, but instead making sure that he continues to not "get it":

Most films um, do tend to wrap things up thematically in a bow and, and let you go out in the theater, knowing exactly what the message was that you were supposed to take from this... and when films that muck around in these kind of ideas resolve, in some ways ambiguously and, and dump a lot of it in your lap and say, "You have to sort through some of this this yourself and figure out what it means to all of you; what components of it you agree with, what components you disagree with," you know people get very uncomfortable; people don't like it.

Great, you admit to doing something people don't like, and you don't actually have a point of your own. See why I use "pointless antisocial" as the genre title? It's not only the main character, it's the film motivation. There's no point and it's not supposed to be entertaining. This is a bad mix for a film, I think.

What bothers me is that I never see a clear motivation or goal for all the hubbub. Max Payne, he loses his family in a rather brutal and overtly traumatic manner. His entire outlook for the two games is suspended on the premise that his life took a turn just a little too sharp for him to handle. These films start with the symptoms in full swing: the protagonist shows up to military training with no real desire to serve, or hasn't been able to sleep for 6 months, and that's the start of the movie. Looking further back might be boring, perhaps, but I just can't tell a motivation without something more concrete. A movie about how someone is unhappy because they are clinically depressed and/or insane does not meaningful drama make. That's like making a real-time 2-hour movie about a fender-bender that occurs at the 40-minute mark; good for you Mr. Artist, that's sorta like real life I guess, but what's your point?

Spoilers for the rest of the post.

I was also thrown off by all the gender-related implications, under the surface; things about how Fight Club is for men only, how dissenters within and without to Project Mayhem are castrated, how the one, tragic casualty of the movement is Bob from the testicular cancer support group - the guy with the "bitch tits"; how it could be worse: a woman could cut off your penis... I just know that being from a book, this is some huge statement about society.

People. Writers. Authors. Enough with hinting about gender roles and shit. It was interesting with Freud, it was done by the 70s, and it's old. If you want to say something about gender roles come out and say it and don't make a god-damn riddle out of genitalia references.

I'm also no chemist, but I could tell the recipes for explosive materials were bullshit, and it was a little distracting from the immersion. Apparently they talked to a bomb squad who wanted them to change it so people wouldn't do it in their own homes, so I guess I understand. =
One thing I have to give the film is, like Max Payne 2, you need to watch the film a second time to recognize details like the bullet-hole in the van windshield, or waking up on airplanes.

You might argue that, after all the above, I can't deny that the movie made me think. Thing is, I think all the time. I'm a big ol' box o' thinkin'. The problem is, I didn't come away from all of this with any sort of interesting conclusions. I managed to squeeze something out of Panic Room, and I got nothin' here. Overall it was a typical movie that pulls up to moderately cool with its awesome style.

---

OK, so there's the film, but it reminds me of a very unique conundrum for a game: unintentional roleplaying. Let's say, the big hook of the game is that the protagonist is schizophrenic, and the goal of the game is to figure this out. How is this possible? Remember, the goal is to figure something out. Like an adventure game puzzle, the solution (the player's condition) cannot be known, or the game is moot. So, how do you make it compelling?

Your hook is a secret. It sounds totally unmarketable, doesn't it? How do you sell a game where the goal is to discover what makes the plot interesting? This is distinct from split-personality games like the third new Prince of Persia game (wow I mentioned all 3 already) or any game where you swap characters during play. This is a mechanic of plot, you see.

I think if anyone wants to put a meaningful story in a game, they have an obligation to make the plot itself a mechanic or an aspect of a mechanic; otherwise, why use games as the medium?

So anyway, if anyone reads this and has a good idea to tie this game mechanic into something more immediately compelling, please comment. If you can remove the above aspect and still have a fairly complete game/story, it doesn't count; the hook then becomes whatever you make up, and the mental condition is just a surprise ending (doesn't affect the game mechanics at all).

HL2 was a very unique experience for me.

You may read this if you are so inclined, as to why someone didn't like HL2. My response is more or less something I've been meaning to put into words for a long time about that game, so I decided to post it here as well. It's too late at night for me to be doing copy-editing, so the raw response-form follows.

The word "cinematic" gets thrown around a lot, but for HL2 and its Episode 1 expansion, I think it is more appropriate than for any other game I've ever played. Though it lacks cutscenes and doesn't play out like an interactive movie, the general style of story-telling is so much like that of a film that I never became embodied as Gordon Freeman; that's just where the camera happened to be.

In a typical 3rd-person game - let's say a platformer - the character's attitudes and motivations for the story's development are more or less independent of what the player would choose. The expectation for a first-person shooter is usually different, because seeing out of the character's eyes makes it immmediately unlike what one usually experiences in a book or a theater, and instead what they experience as their own selves.

In HL2, however, I see it as more of a device to hide the plot from the player. To hide details of a plot just beyond the reach of the audience has time and again proven itself a powerful and engaging storytelling mechanic, and HL2's camera achieves it in a way that a film cannot without getting a little nauseating. By putting the camera on Gordon's nose and keeping him silent, there's no telling what he's thinking in any given situation. The end result is that - aside from his credentials as an MIT gradutate, what he's accomplished as a scientist, and what has happened to him in the course of the games - we don't have any clue about Gordan Freeman as a person.

I think Valve is brilliant to make a "genre king" out of a story whose main character is someone we still know basically nothing about. No one has ever mentioned that Gordon regularly drinks coffee, or is prone to changing his hairstyle, or has a bad relationship with his father, or any other such detail. Alyx has mentioned in HL2, "You don't talk much, do you?", but this is as obvious after an hour or so of gameplay as his goatee. The character defies development.

The critical difference is that other FPS games with silent player-characters, like DOOM 3, F.E.A.R., QUAKE 4, etc., give the player a premise and a generalized template upon which they may go out and blast things as appropriate to the genre. The story plays out much like it would in a hollywood blockbuster, and the player-character himself is more of an observer on the narrative. In HL2, because the surrounding cast makes so few assumptions, the player-character no longer necessarily shares the player's status as an observer, but we can't tell if he is or not. The typical gameplay is there, seperately, but the single greatest tenet in the FPS - so great as to make up the first two letters in the genre's initials - is used as a mechanic to turn the storytelling on its head.

The most critical details of the story are that which we least have the capacity to observe, while the supporting roles are more visible (and thus more important to plot development) than the protagonist. I wasn't told how to feel; I was told how the surrounding actors feel, and expected Gordan (not me, Gordan) should also feel. The lack of confirmation in Gordan's feelings is what really kept me spellbound. For all we know, Gordan is an asshole; he could be a racist who secretly hates Alyx and her father; we have no idea.

Other shooters are married to the idea that the player-character is a roleplay of the player himself. I'm inclined to believe that HL2 was intended in much the same way, but for me, Gordon remains as much a uniquely non-self character as Mario or Solid Snake.

MGS3 is one of the worst games ever.

Metal Gear Solid 3 fails on many points, but why don't I just give you the play-by-play?

First, Snake. This #1 big-time American super-spy is like a regular spy, only badass. He smokes cigars and won't put on his oxygen mask when the plane is about to depressurize.

He gets on the ground and that's when he discovers he had no equipment. He didn't bother asking about his loadout BEFORE he was in the middle of cold war soviet territory. Also, the mission is planned to be 4 hours, max, and he has a calorie bar... and a few minutes are spent explaining that he'll have to kill wild animals and eat them. Oh, I forgot to mention: this is all taking place in a swampy jungle in Asia. In radio range of the arctic circle. Something doesn't add up.

Once you thoroughly hate the plot, characters, and script - which is just great, considering this game is so full of cinematics as to be worthy of the title "interactive movie" - you finally get to the gameplay. Here's how it went down:

Area 1: No enemies. Snuck up on crocogator of some sort. Shot it with tranquilizer. Moseyed on up at a leisurely pace with knife to skin and cut out meat for later consumption. 10 seconds or less after tranquilizer hit - as soon as I got in melee range - captain toothy wakes up. He is not groggy at all, I can assure you. I almost die in the knife fight. These are the best fucking tranquilizers ever.

Area 2: Tried to sneak up on someone to neutralize. Got caught. Died. Tried again. Got caught. Ran past everyone to the next area. Soon died, but restarted in the next area, as though I had by any means completed this one.

Area 3: Read Area 2; exact copy.

Area 4: Actually was heard and managed to hide until the person thought he was hearing things, which was satisfying at this point. Snuck a ways into the area past a few people. Carefully looked around for 20 seconds or so to ensure no enemies were about, before leaving cover to get over a wall. Detected the instant I stand up. The game has made it clear that running past everything is no longer an option, so I try to run and hide a few times, but they see me more or less instantly in every single hiding place. I manage to tranquilize one person near the start of this area, then I die. As I "continue", I take 5 steps and see the tranquilized person, still asleep.

This is when I turned off the console. Aside from missing the point of video games - that you need to play them, not watch them - what game that is there, is an absolutely terrible one. This is the sort of gaming you expected in the days of the NES. And not even from the good ones.

Let me return to the point of games vs. movies. In paper and film, the more detail in your story, the better. This provides immersion. The opposite is true in games; if you want to immerse the player, make the plot vague. Give him side quests. Let him wander around doing whatever. Don't have every single character fully establish their every aspect before the player does anything. Don't force the player to operate by stealth in a jungle area that is, at the largest, the size of a living room. Immersion in non-interactive medium is about details of plot. Immersion in interactive ones is about details of environment.

You can't achieve the perfect amount of dramatic effect when the timing (and ideally the responses) are up to the player, and I wish developers would stop trying. Same goes for anime-RPGs like Suikoden and Wild Arms. It's not a TV show, it's a game. Let me play my character how I want to.

Examples? Half-Life 2 + episode 1. Now that's a charged story... and the player's character never talks. Not even at the player's discretion. There's no list of options of what to say, no talk button... he just never talks. Despite this, the story is more compelling than these other cinematic games. This is because the player character's head never says something that the player himself is not thinking. This is a rather critical aspect of an immersive shooter, in which the plot necessarily revolves around the player character's head. In other games, having the player character speak is fine. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is a good example. But keep this stuff to a minimum. In the aforementioned, the Prince and his accompanying Princess give a huge chunk of their dialogue shouting to each other across the room, while the player continues to solve puzzles or do whatever he wants. This way, the dialogue can progress and the characters can develop, without forcing the player into some scripted set of motions that remind him: this character isn't you. We can take control away from you any time we want and there's nothing you can do about it. We'll let you know when you can play your game again.

Finally, skippable cinematics have their place, but it's more of an admission that you can't think of any good mechanics to progress the story, without going into movie-mode. The truly great games do not need skippable cinematics, even when played by someone who doesn't want a more detailed plot than "shoot; kill."