Hatchet Jobs and the Hype Machine

With all of the energy surrounding the release of Sony’s PS4 and Micrsoft’s Xbox One, it’s especially glaring how much the video game industrial complex can skew games coverage.

Most gaming news and reviews sites are busy right now pushing out content on next-gen consoles and the bevy of mediocre launch titles released to accompany them. Despite their superior processors and more consumer friendly UIs, neither the PS4 nor Xbox One matters at all right now.

Though embargo dates help orchestrate otherwise arbitrary reportage in order to increase visibility and communicate some semblance of an “event,” this only highlights how incapable of generating interest the machines are by themselves. With so little to inspire thoughtful analysis among media gatekeepers, consumers are left with reviews that are often more pretty to look at than enlightening to read, much like the systems themselves.

The PS4 plays Killzones much like the PS3 did, and the Xbox One is an overpriced media box just like its predecessor. Eventually, the platforms will be crucial to the next wave of blockbuster AAAs and flashy indie staples, but until then their discs are left spinning haplessly amid the rapidly dissipating PR bluster.

But still we will talk about them endlessly. Not any of the hundreds of surprisingly satisfying PC games just waiting to be downloaded, or the two greatest games to appear on dedicated gaming hardware so far this season, muttering instead with feigned incredulity about the latest annualization that failed to live up to the stale promise of yet another dried up franchise.

One way to greet this absurdity would be to come out with the hatchet swinging. Review Call of Duty: Ghosts, expunging the evil with vitriolic grace. Pen a 5,000 word manifesto against the a system that promises little and delivers even less.

Imagine if every critic who declared off-mic that neither system was worth buying, at least not right now, with their current libraries and in their present states, made that the centerpiece of their review? What if both consoles were reviewed not based primarily on their potential as gaming systems, but on what specifically each was doing to make playing games better right now?

Or what if they just didn’t review them at all? At least not until either one had a library of games worth talking about (I mean really worth talking about)?

As much as I enjoy a good hatchet job, I find myself wondering if the entire approach shouldn’t be employed with more reserve. Even if a popular media outlet decides to take the ax to gaming’s most recent sacred cow, an indisputable improvement over the apathetic indulgence which usually wins the day, maybe it would be better not to waste time on them at all.

Buzzfeed‘s new books section editor declared the site will not be including “negative” reviews in its coverage. Cue the snark, outrage, and bodily disgust. “Civility” in the book review space has been an issue of some contention over the last year, from Clive James’ brief essay on the benefits of criticism that pulls not punches, to Lee Siegel’s call to “bury the hatchet,” starting with himself.

Jacob Silverman bemoaned the “epidemic of niceness” plaguing online book culture, while Roxane Gay defended it. She explained,

“I don’t write many negative reviews, not because I’m scared or nice, but because my time is finite. I recently read a book by a well-known writer from a major press. There was a grammatical error in the very first sentence and the rest of the book was not good—shoddy editing, shoddy writing. I could have written a scathing review but for what? Nothing would have been learned from that review and writing about that book would have given it undeserved attention and been a colossal waste of my time.”

While I don’t completely agree–a well-timed and exquisitely brutal take-down can be its own reward, and on occasion even required–I find the position more and more attractive as the last cycle of consoles crawl to their graves. Is another rebuke of the latest bro-shooter’s politics, exploitative gameplay loops, and repetitious execution really contributing all that much at this point? Perhaps in another few years when a fresher product deserves a fresher critique, that level of scrutiny on those games will be well spent.

Instead, here are over 500 IGF entries well worth experimenting with and probing deeper. Some have some interesting ideas, others simply an inspired presentation.

Leigh Alexander recently tweeted, “It doesn’t actually matter anymore what gamers want to play as much as it matters what game developers want to make.” There’s a cynical way of rejecting this statement, one which I was and remain all too ready to make. Pushing that aside though, I take it to the logical extension of the combined facts that more people are playing video games than ever before and more of them are open to a more diverse gaming diet. The only thing that remains then is to connect the game that X developer wanted to make with Y player who’s interested in playing it.

In all of this there’s an analysis of the effects of the Internet and digital technology on the political economy of entertainment production, but that’s almost beside the point–for now. At present, it’s enough to see that between books, comic books, movies, television, music and video games, the task of trying to curate a canon of consumption and police the ideologies guiding a given medium’s most financially salient works pales in comparison to that of simply trying to sort through everything that’s produced, and everyone who might want to engage with it.

So does Buzzfeed need to add to the chorus of snarky take-downs attempting to put someone like Pynchon, Rushdie, or Franzen in their place, even when new authors are releasing fiction every day through blogs and ebooks? Do I really need to know what the newest Katy Perry album says about the state of post-9/11 pop when hopping around the “related artists” links on Spotify for five minutes will give me enough music to listen to for the rest of the month? Comixology allows self-publishing. Netflix could too someday. And an hour digging deep into the Google search results for “upcoming indie games,” or through the backlog of Steam Greenlight nominees, will yield any number titles worth sharing.

But hey, Sony just released its fourth Playstation. It’s called the P(lay)S(tation)4. It plays games, on discs, using a controller that bears an uncanny resemblance to the one designed for the original system over ten years ago. It’s going to “revolutionize” gaming or something though, so we should all pay attention to it, cause even if it doesn’t, and we know it doesn’t, and any games critic worth their salt knows it doesn’t, we can at least naval-gaze about why it doesn’t, and continue speculating endlessly about how some firmware update yet to be imagined will transform it, and how Uncharted 4 (Halo 5) will bring out all of the PS4’s (Xbox One’s) latent potential.

Or even a quarter of that energy could be re-focused on discovering any number of creative successes that continue to proliferate on the devices we already own.

Oversold and Underwhelmed

At the end of last week it felt like everything was conspiring against me. As Friday drew to a close, last minute assignments at work kept me late. When I finally made it out of the office, traffic was unusually heavy, leading to one slog of an evening commute. An empty fridge meant I had to stop at the grocery store first too, and the fact that it was my best friend’s girlfriend’s birthday meant a necessary trip to the bar later that night, even though all I wanted to do was stay in an cuddle up next to my new PS4.

I won’t lie, when I opened the the box I half expected something magical to happen: angels descending from heaven blowing horns, fire works shooting out of the box, to be transported to another world filled with futuristic spires and cold war inspired grit.

None of this happened of course. After all, it’s just a black, plastic box that spins discs (andapparently wobbles, though I haven’t experienced this first hand). The first thing I did that night after getting back from the bar was plug the system in, complete the setup, and start downloading the first update. All this went off without a hitch.

Next I used the voucher that came with the system to sign up for a free month of Playstation Plus. Oddly enough, Sony requires that you enter credit card information for your account in order to redeem it. Their goal is auto charge at the end of the month if you don’t cancel the subscription before then–a sound business strategy, but still a bit odd given Sony’s penchant for getting hacked and losing users’ credit card info in the past.

First, I explored some of the start menu and the Playstation Store, then I went to download Resogun and Contrast, two indie titles I’ve really been looking forward to (though the latter didn’t receive nearly as good reviews as the former). While plenty of people seem to feel like the new interface is more accessible and easier to navigate, I find it a bit clumsy and cluttered. I actually really liked the PS3 interface, with its minimalist vertical and horizontal scrolling. It not only made things clear and simple, but freed up much of the background to display the user’s preferred wallpaper (mine was the Citadel from Mass Effect).

The downloads themselves went fairly quickly though, and as promised, I was able to boot up and start playing Killzone: Shadow Fall while they were finishing. While I’m not the biggest fan of first person shooters, or even the Killzone franchise, the game gave me the one thing I really needed in a next-gen launch title: a world I wanted look at, play in, and keep coming back to day in and day out.

The PS4 is my first launch console. Every other system I’ve ever bought was purchased well after the original release date. What was perhaps most surreal about pulling the hardware out of the box, plugging it in, and playing my first next-gen game was how current-gen it still felt. The game’s backgrounds are beautiful, and small features like the depth of lighting effects and the pervasiveness of floating garbage all help to flesh out the experience beyond what many games are currently able to accomplish on the PS3.

Obviously though, the games that come out later into the console cycle will be in a much better position to take advantage of the hardware’s full potential (just look at Oblivion compared to Skyrim on the Xbox 360). For now then I’m content to shoot my way through Shadow Fall’s gorgeous, and even sometimes surprisingly imaginative galleries, taking breaks now and again to dip into Resogun (exactly the kind of mechanically sound and tactically engrossing shoot’em up you’d expect from Housemarque) and Contrast (which I still haven’t tried out).

What surprised me most though about the time I’ve had with the PS4 is how little of it I spend doing anything other than playing games and watching Netflix. Admittedly, I haven’t dipped into Shadow Fall’s multiplayer, and I’m sure that after having done so the system’s social networking features will become more useful and interesting to me. So far though, I haven’t felt the need to explore any of the console’s “next-gen” features. I’m more or less content just to play games on it, and that much more relieved as a result that Sony was content to focus on making the PS4 a device for primarily doing just that.

Buying the console amounted to an expensive down payment on a future that won’t arrive for some time. The two titles I’m looking forward to most, Infamous: Second Son and TowerFall, won’t arrive until early next year. Unfortunately then, after the initial wave of excitement and euphoria, the system will more likely than not end up collecting dust for several weeks until Sony gets into the cycle of its next-gen release cycle.

Until then, I have a box that doesn’t do much more than the old one. Hopefully that’ll change sooner rather than later.

“What is Final Fantasy?”

That’s the question with which Luke Karmali begins his recent article on how the franchise will try to stay relevant going forward. And though he doesn’t answer it outright, the response embedded in the piece seems to be something to the effect of: Final Fantasy is nothing…Final Fantasy is everything.

At least that’s what Motomu Toriyama (FFXIII: Lightning Returns director) and Yuji Abe (gameplay director) insinuate in their interview with Karmali. The gaming industry is going through some seismic transformations right now, with new platforms being developed at every turn, genres constantly being redefined, and a new generation of consoles coming just around the corner. As a result, Final Fantasy is in a state of flux as well, trying to adapt to the rapidly changing landscape as best it can. At the end of the day however, the most accurate response to Karmali’s question might end up being: Final Fantasy is dead.

This is another way of saying, “If Final Fantasy is constantly changing, and often in fundamental ways, does it still exist as anything outside of a branding tool?” To think about this more systematically, it’s worth starting as Karmali does with what Final Fantasy once was.

4 Things I’m Loving about Arkham Origins

I popped Arkham Origins into my Xbox 360 on Friday and haven’t looked back since. It’s been said before but things this truth always bear repeating: few things have ever been as satisfying in a video game as combat feels in an Arkham game. It’s fluid but bombastic; challenging without being downright frustrating.

There’s a few other things I’m really digging about Origins though and which have left me surprised as to why many other critics have been so harsh on the game. W.B. Games Montreal have done a terrific job with the latest Arkham game, and not just because of how well it emulates the other two titles in the series.

Let it snow, let it snow

When it was first announced that Origins would take place on Christmas Eve, I wasn’t impressed. It seemed a bit hokey and a further admission that the game was more of a hold-over until Rocksteady completed the series’s next-gen iteration than a true continuation of it.

But the choice turns out to have been the right one. Setting the game on December 24th, in the middle of an early winter blizzard, serves both to convincingly mask some design limitations as well as help set the game’s unique mood. It doesn’t really bother me that people aren’t out in the streets of Gotham because it makes sense to me that on 1.) Christmas Eve and 2.) a big snowstorm few would want to leave their homes.

In addition though, both the holiday and the weather help Origins feel set in a specific place and time. All of which helps to ground the events that take place in a way that neither prior game in the series had been.

Christopher Drake’s music

The game’s soundtrack hews pretty closely to what you’d expect given Arkham Asylum and Arkham City. Ron Fish and Nick Arundel who scored both of those games established a mold for the series that any composer would think twice about breaking. Fortunately, Drake tinkers around the edges instead of it instead of making any drastic changes.

The slight shifts Drake does introduce are all for the better. The soundtrack for Origins is more electronic, with synth undertones that help the otherwise traditional orchestral arrangements sound more foreboding and urgent. Drake also borrows inspiration from Die Hard, an action movie that also took place at Christmas, by sprinkling church and jingle bells throughout certain tracks, giving the most wonderful time of year a distinctly sinister tone.

The challenge

I’m playing the game on hard because hard is the new normal. While that means that I’ve had to restart missions more times than I can count (truly), it also means that I feel much more accomplished when I finally do get past a particularly tough battle, or take down an unusually large group of thugs.

The way the game mixes different enemy types, and the way their AIs navigate each encounter, it really feels like I have to be on my toes and get into a rhythm if I’m going to have any chance of making it through alive–which makes sense since, after all, I’m only playing as a guy in a bat suit. The stakes are high, and i feel empowered without being invulnerable. Rather than make the game challenging by arbitrarily pumping up the difficulty, it really feels like whether I’m successful or not comes down to my own skill and focus.

A sense of continuity

Some have been complaining that Origins is only more of the same, accusing the game of not doing enough to distinguish itself from its predecessors. This is kind of like criticizing Batman the comic book for still being about the same character, doing more or less the same things, issue after issue, decade after decade.

While the game certainly has some flaws, it also has its charms, and the only thing I can say to people who are disappointed that Origins doesn’t do anything fundamentally different from Asylum or City is, maybe a quasi-open world game where you play as Batman as he beats up bad guys and searches, for clues just isn’t for you. To its credit, picking up and playing Origins is like coming back home in a way, and the game does an excellent job of making itself feel a direct part of the Batman universe the Arkham series has created, rather than a bastardized spin-off.

From what I’ve played so far, Arkham Origins is in the top tier of games that have come out this year as well as this console generation. Sure, it recycles somewhere between many and most of the same gameplay mechanics and narrative conceits of the earlier games in the franchise, but that’s hardly an issue unique to Origins. Halo, Assassin’s Creed, and Call of Duty are in the same boat, as are many other AAA titles. Welcome to the perils of annualization and an industry full of risk-averse publishers.

At least the Arkham formula is one worth using again, and Origins is (for the most part) as good of an implementation of it as any we’ve seen in the past, or are likely to see again in the future.

You Have the Right to Remain Independent

The first thing about Tracy Lien’s micro-documentary that caught my attention was the title of the post it accompanied, “How Indie Games Went Mainstream.”

It’s been a common refrain these last couple of years. With the critical and financial success of games like Braid, Super Meat Boy, and Minecraft, “indie” has become increasingly identified as a sub-genre of video game more than a particular philosophy of development or type of political economic circumstance. Steam includes it as a separate category when browsing its digital wares, though how exactly the company decides which games are Indie and which ones aren’t isn’t altogether clear.

But while a certain type of indie game may have gone mainstream, it’s worth pointing out that most are definitely still not. Indeed, the more a certain type of retro-pixelated, chiptune-fetishized, and/or late NES, early SNES era inspired video game comes to represent the genre in the popular imagination, it’s important to remember that indie games, as in >90% of the things made by small, piss-poor, borderline anonymous development teams are nowhere near mainstream, nor (most likely) will they ever be.