Alviiiin!

Last weekend I went to see Alvin & the Chipmunks, the squeakquel (do you see what they did there?), as one of the joys of parenthood is going to see kids' movies (though for every 'Alvin' there's an 'Up', I suppose). Not much of a subject for a videogame blog, you might think (if there's a spin-off game, I don't want to know of its existence), but one of the main human characters, Toby, is a gamer and the film uses his gaming habits as lazy, short-hand characterisation for 'loser'.

Once upon a time, I took a few classes in Communications Studies at university. I know what you're thinking and you're right - it was a load of old wank, taught by narcissitic arseholes. However, some of it rang true, particularly regarding cultural hegemony. Now, it's been a while since my studies (and I dumped communications studies and graduated in politics in any case) but cultural hegemony basically means (I think) that the beliefs of the ruling classes in society becoming thought of (by all of society) to be the 'norm'.

I doubt very much if Gramsci, whose theory it was, ever considered the possibility of gamers or gaming - he died in the thirties and I'm sure he'd have thought by 2010 workers would have seized the means of production and we'd be living in a socialist utopia by now - but his theory is relevant in considering Toby.

Toby first appears in the film playing on a black DS (with headphones) and mono-syllabically interacts with the three chipmunks and his grandmother, who is also present. He's not a kid or a teenager, he is an adult male and the subtext of his using a gaming device in his first scene, is that the viewer is being told that he is somehow 'other', that behaving in this way is not what an adult make should be doing. In the same scene, his grandmother says that he is staying with her while he works out what to do with his life, which, she posits (disapprovingly), seems to resolve around playing videogames.

Throughout the film, Toby plays games - Xbox 360, Wii, DS - and they are shown as having a negative effect on his life (he falls asleep in his bed with his 360 headset still attached and he is late in getting the chipmunks up for school, for example). He is a shy, anti-social, klutz and, the viewer is being shown, that is inextricably linked to his gaming - one leads to the other.

I would be lying if I said that I didn't identify (loser status aside) with Toby (albeit I'm older). I play all of the systems he does (and more), I wear 'geek-chic' t-shirts and hoodies (as he does), I have scruffy hair (though, admittedly, I have less than he does). But I have a wife and family and a reasonably successful career, which Toby most certainly does not.

You could argue that this type of portrayal of gamers has been going on since the 80s and this is only a cheaply-produced, half term cash-in movie but I don't think that that argument is sound. It is exactly in this type of throwaway mass market movie that cultural hegemony would show itself - if you want to influence the masses, aim at the mainstream, not the arthouse. What seems odd now is that the target audience of the movie would have been immersed in gaming their whole lives and so, possibly, would their parents. Gaming is as much a factor of their lives as TV or music, which is why the subtext in the movie was so jarring for me - gaming no longer equates to geeks in their bedrooms, it is just another part of life, certainly for the target audience.

Oh, and marxist cobblers aside, the film was crap.

Resident Evil 5 Lost in Nightmares DLC

Almost a year after its release, Capcom has released a DLC mission featuring series-veterans Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine, called 'Lost in Nightmares'. It tells the story behind the Resi 5 cutscene of Chris and Jill fighting seemingly indestructible Resi bad guy Albert Wesker, which ended with Wesker being defenestrated by Jill. Lost in Nightmares provides the back-story to that scene, explaining what Jill, Chris and Wesker were doing at the mansion.

As I'd thought when I saw the trailer, this is very much a throwback to the early games in the series, particularly the genre-defining original game. Although it is not the same mansion as in the original game, it is owned by the Spencers and was clearly designed by the same architect - many of the locations (and even puzzles) are near-identical to the Spencer Mansion/Arklay Research Facility from the first Resi. I'm not necessarily against introspective fan-service like this if well-executed but I'd sooner developers worked on new ideas for their existing franchises. As well as the location being a throwback, the same can be said of the gameplay. There's a lot of traipsing around the mansion, looking for 'item A' to place in 'slot B' and I think gameplay conventions have moved on from this in the 14 years since the first game was released.

My main issue with Lost in Nightmares's style of gameplay is that it doesn't really suit Resi 5 co-op. The last two Resi games have moved away from the constraints of traditional survival horror and are, rather, action adventure games with a horror theme. Suspense was built in the early games by having only intermittent monster attacks in between the puzzling but leading the player to always think that an attack was imminent as they crept through the corridors. Over the years Resi has given me some great swear-out-loud frights by using this mechanic.

However, the more action-oriented later games don't lend themselves to this style of gaming, in particular the central co-op dynamic of Resi 5. I played Lost in Nightmares, as I'd played Resi 5, with my usual online co-op buddy. It is difficult to build the old-school Resi suspense when you are having an outside-the-game conversation, joking about the location, the not-as-bad-as-it-used-to-be-but-still-not-great voice acting and reading the (many) documents scattered about the mansion using funny accents. That dynamic works fine when you're being bombarded with the undead (witness Left 4 Dead); less so when you're spending 5 minutes between enemy encounters.

In all, it took a couple of hours for us to play through the scenario (but that was more due to our dicking around - it shouldn't take that long), which I think is reasonable value for money (it works out at about £4 in MS money), even if the gameplay is fundamentally flawed.

In addition to the extra slice of cheesy Resi 5 story, the Mercenaries score-attack mode is boosted by the return of Resi comedy relief (well, I think he's funny) beardy Barry Burton and Resi 5's Excelle Gionne (in 'practical' evening dress and heels). Those two are available from the start and an 'A' ranking (apparently) unlocks a few others, including, if that floats your boat, Chris in a 'Tom of Finland' style costume (now that IS scary).

The Climb

I started playing Uncharted 2 over the weekend.  I'd received it, along with Assassin's Creed II, for Christmas but I'd not had a chance to open it before now, as I was playing through ACII.  I'm about a quarter of the way through the game and I'm really enjoying it.  As with the first game, the story and the voice acting (does Nolan North ever say no?) are spot on and it is probably the best looking game that I've ever played.

However, after 30 hours of ACII, I found the lack of freedom in my climbing quite jarring.  I'd been used to having Ezio climb all over the buildings of Renaissance Italy with impunity but found that Nathan Drake was very picky about which bits of scenery he was prepared to shimmy up.  A few times over the weekend I couldn't work out which way to go and I used the 'hint' button, to hear Nate say stuff along the lines of "I reckon I can climb up that signpost".  To which my reply was "well, what's so wrong with that nearby wall that you'd want to climb a rickety, free-standing lamppost?".

I think, to a certain extent, this difference is explained by the environment being somewhere that the gameplay takes place in ACII, whereas in Uncharted 2 the environment is  part of the gameplay.  In ACII there were a couple of areas where planning your route was challenging but, on the whole, Ezio's free-running was quite straightforward (though never a chore). In Uncharted 2, pathfinding is a big part of the game and there are 'right' paths that you have to follow.  Sometimes this 'corridor' effect is well-hidden - the opening 'train wreck' level did this excellently - but sometimes less so, as in the jungle levels.  Logically a jungle should be a playground of climbing opportunities but that wasn't what I felt when playing them.

This isn't a criticism of Uncharted 2 - it is a great game and the combat is particularly enjoyable -  but it does seem a backward step for games that Drake can't leap up to what seem perfectly good handholds on ruined buildings.

Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgment review

  

Vandal Hearts: Flames if Judgment is a sequel of sorts (it is set before the first game on the Vandal Hearts timeline) to a pair of PS1-era strategy role playing games (SRPGs), Vandal Hearts and the imaginatively titled Vandal Hearts II.

I was a huge fan of the first Vandal Hearts game on PS1, playing it through several times.  It was the first game of its type that I had played (I don't think that Japanese SRPGs were released that often in the West back then) and it is one of my favourite games of all time (I must get around to posting a top ten). Vandal Hearts's first sequel was poor in comparison but even so I started looking forward to Flames of Judgment from when I first heard that Konami were making a downloadable update. 


For the uninitiated, the Vandal Hearts series (and SRPGs generally)   entail you controlling a small band of characters in a series of one-screen, varied terrain, grid-based battles. Battles are turn-based, with the player moving their characters within its movement allowance for that turn and then attacking, healing, waiting etc.

A grid-based battle, yesterday.  And that's not a black border  - that's my telly

The character types conform  to usual RPG conventions - fighters, archers and magic users -  and the narrative they travel through is played out in the cut scenes that take place between the battles .

Ah yes, the narrative. The story centres around two nations, Balastrade, where the game is predominantly based and most of the characters come from and Urdu. There was a war fought between the two many years before, in which they'd fought each other to a standstill and which was then followed by an uneasy peace.  Fortunately for the game's story arc (if not the inhabitants of the countries), that peace breaks down very early on in the game and you then follow the story of Tobias, the game's main character  (a war orphan).


Like I said, it's an RPG - don't expect high literature.  The story arc is Lord of the Rings lite - a quest, an ultimate weapon, betrayals, friendship, evil, rogues.  And so on and so on.  But no-one plays RPGs for the story (do they?) and for SRPGs read that doubly so - the story is there to fill in the gaps taking you from one battle to the next. No-one needs an Metal Gear Solid style cut scene in a SRPG.  Or in Metal Gear Solid, for the that matter.

You'd be surprised how many cut-scenes end in a fight.  Or maybe not. 

Unlike the earlier games, you are limited to the same six characters throughout the game, all of whom are selected for each battle (if a character 'dies' in battle, they 'retreat' and are back on the roster for the next battle). There are no character classes as such but different characters are better at some things than others, so the player tends to make them perform that  function. For example, a character might be good at casting magic, so you tend to load him/her up with spells and they take on the role of a wizard, even though they are not referred to as such. 


Similarly, there is no promotion in levels - the characters have numerous stats, showing how well they do a certain action or perform a certain task and, during battles, those individual stats level up. As with most things in life, continual performance of an action makes you better at it, so the more arrow-flinging an archer does, the better he or she is at archery.

The game is not particularly long - Raptr says I took 16 hours 40 minutes hours to complete  - but you could probably do it quicker than that. I tend to micromanage my party a lot between battles and also like to plan my moves on the battlefield to the nth degree, like in  chess (which it resembles but like the chess from the first  Star Wars film). However, it was only 1200 MS points and I would sooner pay that for 16 hours of great SRPG action than play £30 for a full price game that gives me 16 hours of fun and 14 hours of slog.

The art style is different from the first games and other SRPGs, particularly in relation to the character models, which quite 'cartoony'.  The biggest problem visually, though, is with the pallete used. The landscapes, other than those battles that take place in towns, are too close in hue to that used for the character models and you can find that your best laid defensive lines have an inadvertently camouflaged enemy soldier lurking within them. This is probably the only aspect of the game that I didn't like. Vandal Hearts avoided this by having the character models 'pulse', like a  Roobarb & Custard cartoon, so you could always pick them out from their surroundings. I have my doubts that that technique would have worked with the new art style but it would have avoided the 'shit, didn't see that ninja' scenario. Though I suppose that is the point of ninjas.

The loading screens display concept art.  Pretty, aren't they?

One final point on the art style - the cut scenes. They have a strange, shaky-movement,   Captain Pugwash feel and the characters don't seem to have any necks, like a world populated by the genetic offspring of Gladstone Small. And yes, I am aware of of the irony of trying to raise the profile of a niche-genre, download-only title by referencing two 70s Britsh kids' programmes and an 80s English cricketer.

I loved Flames of Judgment but then I love SRPGs - I put 160 hours into Final Fantasy Tactics Advance on GBA - and I greatly enjoyed its gently cerebral change of pace from that shown by most other 360 games.  I don't think that it's going to change anybody's mind about SRPGs, though. There is nothing that the game does that wasn't done by similar games 10 years ago but what it does, it does very well. If you want an updated SRPG, pick Valkyria Chronicles  on PS3 (my favourite PS3 game); if you want an enjoyable, if not epic, example of the genre, go for Flames of Judgment.  


Better still, get both.

Tauntaun Sleeping Bag

I dithered over whether or not to blog about this - it's not really game-related, though it is exceptionally cool. In the end I reasoned that there are plenty of  videogames set in the Star Wars universe and, with a streak of self-justification that Tony Blair would have been proud of, I figured 'Hey - my blog, my rules'.

Relive your tauntaun evisceration dreams with the tauntaun sleeping bag, available from thinkgeek - http://tiny.cc/sppvv ! It's even got a plush lightsaber zip pull and intestines printed on the inside. Great for Geek Camp, kids!

I want one.

Left 4 Dead 2 - campaign mode review

Zombies, eh? Swarming hordes of them wherever you look. Zombie videogames, that is. In just over a year I've bought new releases Left 4 Dead and its  sequel; Resident Evil 5; The Last Guy;  Burn Zombie Burn and the turd sandwich that was House of the Dead Overkill.  And this morning I bought Ghosts n' Zombies for iPhone.    A brief bit of research (not really - just flicking through a magazine found on the floor of my bathroom) also came up with Wolfenstein and Plants vs Zombies to add to that decaying list. Zombies are flavour of the month for videogame bad guys, though I imagine it would be a mouldy, musty, budget-supermarket-ham type of flavour.

There didn't use to be this many zombie games. You'd get regular(ish) updates of established franchises like Resident Evil (and Capcom have certainly cranked those out over the years) and House of the Dead but after those venerable series' the graveyard was pretty much empty. I've done some research. No, just kidding again - I just read through my game collection on Playfire - and this zombie fixation seems a relatively recent phenomenem. I remember 'Carrier' on Dreamcast but I mainly remember it because it wasn't very good. Stubbs the Zombie had some fans on Xbox. And there was Boktai on GBA but they were space vampires (or something).

For a developer, zombies  are a safe-choice of onscreen bad guy, like an English villain in a Hollywood blockbuster. As gamers (well, some. Maybe) would baulk at shooting down wave after wave of Jeremy Irons looky-likies (and publishers might baulk at that, as the UK is a large games market), the English aren't really going to work. A couple of years ago, there were bucketloads of World War II games, as no-one objects to shooting a Nazi in the face. Gamers seem to have wearied of Nazis (or maybe just the crap forties-era weaponry) - witness The Saboteur's poor games sales -  and there's nothing that draws the attention of those bankrolling the games than falling returns. Zombies are this (and last) year's Nazi. Or, with Wolfenstein, both.



I've often thought that Hollywood goes with English bad guys in order not to offend any one of a number of racial groupings that the sterotyping that goes hand in hand with the shallow characterisation present in many mainstream films. The English don't really count, either due to their not being a clearly-defined racial group, or (and this seems more likely to me), we just don't like making a fuss. Give a character a voice like they are talking with a mouthful of marbles and a fondness for tea and you are away.

The same can be said for zombies and videogames. There isn't a zombie protection league, no meeja talking head is going to decry negative portrayals of zombies and  there isn't going to be a charity record for their benefit recorded by in-need-of-publicity pop stars.  No-one cares about offending the Z-man.  A developer would have to strive really hard to fuck up the guilt-free villain status of a zombie (hats off, then,  to dunderheads at Capcom and the opinions voiced after the first footage of Resi 5 was released). Left 4 Dead 2 (L4D2) treads safer ground, the game being set, as was its predecessor, in a post-zombie apocalypse America. In direct comparison with Capcom, Valve handled a possibly sensitive situation - the game is set in New Orleans and its surroundings, no strangers to disaster, albeit natural rather than undead - very well and what idiot-commentary there was (a column in a Houston newspaper) criticising the setting was brief and confined to the US.

The basic premise of L4D2 is the same as in the first game - you play as one of four survivors (your companions being either human or CPU controlled) immune to the zombie virus, fighting your way as a team through the zombie hordes (and, my, do they horde) to an evac zone. Each of the 5 campaigns (with one more to come - featuring both L4D and L4D2 characters - via DLC in the spring) is split into either 4 or 5 chapters, each ending with a safe house (or evac, for the last chapter of each campaign). There are also a few mid-level set pieces, generally requiring the player to pull a lever or press a button in order to  clear the way ahead but at the same time making a noise loud enough to attract the zombie horde. This review concentrates on the Campaign mode for the game.  There are other game modes - Realism, Scavenge, Survival, Versus - but I have not played them sufficiently to cover them in a review.


I've already posted my first opinions http://tiny.cc/tSYju which I won't repeat here as continued playing has, to some extent,  reinforced those opinions. There are plenty of differences between the two games - more special infected, more weapons, melée weapons, daytime, more involved gameplay, more zombies - all of which improve on the original.  I certainly think  there's enough new content here to justify this being a new game, rather than DLC.


Unlike last time out, the 5 campaigns are in a linked narrative - the start of each succeeding campaign continues from the end of the last.  This is a welcome evolution from the first game, where the campaigns - other than the 'Crash Course' DLC, released nearly a year after the game came out - had no narrative connection.  Albeit gamers have added their own  internal narrative to games since 'Space Invaders' (or maybe that's just me), having an overriding story arc running through the campaigns adds an extra layer of involvement for players.  That is, other than the  'so you've evac-d me from one zombie-invested hellhole to put me at the start of another?  Gee, thanks' feeling between at least two of the campaigns. 


As in the last game, the characters speak to each other independently of the player,  saying where there's ammo/health, when they have to heal, when they've thrown a molotov or pipe bomb (though how any human player can resist shouting 'Fire in the Hole!' to make their fellows aware of this, I don't know) or retelling redneck anecdotes (Ellis) .  The voice acting is good, particularly Coach (my character of choice) an aging, overweight football coach voiced by Chad Coleman,  'Cutty' from  'The Wire'. Yes -  zombie apocalypse/The Wire cross-over! 


Although my opinion of the difficulty level has softened since I wrote my first impressions - on replaying campaigns, we've been taking about half the time that we took when playing them for the first time - it is still a fair bit tougher than the first game.  That difficulty is, at times, frustrating but when you do complete a campaign, particularly for the first time, the feeling of achievement is palpable. I finished the final campaign, The Parish, for the first time at gone 1am in the morning, with my character, Coach, having very little of either life or ammo left, limping towards the open hold of the evac helicopter. Zombies were continually grabbing at my back (none in front of me, thankfully), meaning I had to turn around every so often to lop a few heads off with my machete to gain some time, while my, already onboard, co-op buddy laid down some fire to tamp down my pursuers (the two CPU characters had bought the farm some time before).  The last few yards, staggering across the tarmac, were extremely tense (we'd been trying to beat this campaign for a number of hours, spread over two nights).


When I finally got onboard and the tail flap lifted up and the 'Achievement' beep went , I literally shouted with excitement, nearly waking my sofa-bound sleeping wife. I also, I'm slightly embarrassed to admit, fist-pumped. 


The level of elation at finishing that campaign was in direct relation to the level of difficulty of that chapter. I love it when games push you like that (the final boss God of War II on PS2 springs to mind) - hitting the sweet spot between being too difficult to be fun and being too easy to present a challenge.


As it is, essentially, a multiplayer-only game, there is also the very real sense of shared experience - that you and your real-life companions have bested the game as a result of teamwork (and without teamwork, you won't get far).  You can play the game as a single player but such is the  emphasis on the group experience - even more than with the first game - that I cannot recommend purchasing it if it is your intention only to play it on your own.  As well as group playing of this type of game being a more enjoyable experience, the CPU-controlled party members just aren't smart enough to do what needs to be done, particularly with evac and the occasional mid-level set pieces. 

As well as the usual Achievements to boost your gamer score, the game offers avatar awards, that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago http://tiny.cc/zNg0o. 


L4D2 is a great game in its own right and a worthy successor to the first game and one that I would recommend to anyone seeking multiplayer zombie carnage (and who isn't?).