Welcome to I'm So Sorry, the blog that puts the sad in sadomasochistic power fantasy.
As a gamer, I've cured sufferers of zombiesm with cricket bats, murdered Nazis with piping, attended a wedding while possessed by a horny ghost, raised a wolf, sung karaoke in the name of police work, high-fived a robot on his birthday, drunk absinthe for health reasons, punched a wizard that came from the moon, hunted sharks with C4, won the presidency of the United States and performed an octopus abortion without a medical license.
The point is, as a gamer, I spend a lot of time doing awesome shit and while 2016 won't go down in history as one of humanity's greatest years of existence for just, so many reasons; maybe 2017 will hold some rad new experiences. See that? Optimism that was. Feels weird.
1. Horizon: Zero Dawn
If you like crafting weaponry and hiding in caves from a vastly technologically superior foe then you're probably a member of ISIS.
2. Mass Effect: Andromeda
Andromeda continues the story of a valiant group of writers trying to engineer conflict in a galaxy in which all threat was vanquished over the course of the last three games.
3. For Honor
It's like a crossover episode in a sitcom. Suddenly samurai are knocking around Medieval Europe and no-one thinks to question it.
4. Red Dead Redemption 2
People who aren't me remember the last Red Dead as an engaging open-world western with plenty of rootin'-tootin' good times. I remember it as the game that put a $5 bounty on my head for accidentally fatally running over a prostitute with my horse. Later on, the same Sheriff's department chased me through two states just because I put a few sticks of dynamite underneath one cow.
The only thing that's ever hated women more is yeast and I don't see that changing.
5. South Park: The Fractured But Whole
Doesn't need a joke because it already is one.
6. Spider-Man
Doesn't need a joke either because ditto. Shit. Threw that joke away. Why couldn't there be a Pokemon game coming out this year? There is? Fuuuuuuucccc-
7. God Of War 4
Things have changed. Psychotic antihero and by now, ex-god of war Kratos is reduced to babysitting duties in a Nordic-style environment. Although that does mean a brand new pantheon await a good old-fashioned, deiform curb-stomping.
8. Star Wars: Battlefront II
This is a game that is so profoundly uninteresting to me that I'm just going to copy and paste some of my favourite Star Wars-flavoured 'yo mama' jokes from that Robot Chicken special. Away we go:
''Yo mama so fat Ben Kenobi said: 'That's no moon. That's yo mama!'''
''Yo mama so hairy she have to comb her wrist to tell what time it is.''
''Yo mama so stupid she thinks a TIE fighter comes from Bangkok.''
9. Persona 5
So few fucks are given in Japan that they actually have special protected status as an endangered species. And this game will be so Goddamn Japanese. It should be the equivalent of watching an anime but being interrupted every five minutes by a sad virgin's crane kick.
10. Detroit: Become Human
Writer David Cage's latest upcoming attempt to make a video game with no gameplay. Could be OK if he miraculously learns to stop writing like eight people with MPD trapped in a lift, trying to order takeaway online.
11. Gran Turismo Sport
A bold leap in shiny metal objects moving quickly.
12. Yooka-Laylee
This could be good or it could be another opportunity for Kickstarter fanboys to experience regret. Here's hoping that they learn something this time.
13. Guardians Of The Galaxy: The Telltale Series
As the industry's most liberally-minded whores, Telltale will make their trademark episodic conversation marathons about seemingly anything. Look forward to next year's Brexit: The Telltale Series. It'll only be one episode long and regardless of what decisions you make you still get Game Over.
14. Shadow Warrior 2
Playing the last Shadow Warrior, with its cathartic, retro-strained violence, nerd references and genital fixation felt like watching a confused ninja use the internet for the first time. And I can't wait to join series' protagonist Lo Wang aboard the dick joke train again. Boarding in the rear! Anal! He's better at it than I am.
15. Vampyr
Gothic RPG where you a play as a vampire, surprisingly enough. Rampant slaughter will have negative consequences but you have to kill to survive so should raise difficult choices. Probably the only game coming this year that will inform you how delicious and missed a potential target will be before you eat them, sneak into their spouse's room and eat them too.
16. Friday The 13th: The Game
Finally, in 2017 we can all play as outdated horror star Jason Vorhees. Or more likely won't because it's 7 vs. 1 multiplayer. How do you feel about those odds? You're going to be spending considerably less time hunting bouncey co-eds than cowering in a wardrobe.
17. Sniper Elite 4
This game should answer an important question: just how many times can you watch a rifle bullet in super slow-motion bulldoze through a Nazi's testicle before you start feeling ashamed of yourself? 18. Gwent: The Witcher Card Game
A card game featured in another game that's getting its own game.
19. Injustice 2
DC Comics beat-em-up sequel that'll let you pit your favourite characters against each other. Over and over. Without resolution. Forever.
Characters such as Atrocitus! Supergirl, Manhammer, Sharkonaut, Blue Beetle, Laserdick Richards, Deathstroke, Gorilla Grodd and Funk Supreme! I only made a few of those up!
20. Little Nightmares
If everyone at Aardman Studios suddenly cracked and started using claymation to spread evil in the world, Little Nightmares would be the video game based on their office crime scene.
21. Sea Of Thieves
You can fulfill all your piratical fantasies in this multiplayer adventure. Drink grog, unbury buried treasure, get hanged by the Spanish! Do it all with your bestest friends!
22. Cuphead
Generated a whole saucer-load of hype when it was announced largely for its Steamboat Willie-era Disney animation style. Probably won't be easy. Or anti-semitic.
23. Yakuza 0
If you're new to the Yakuza series which, despite what the title suggests, has been going a long time, let me tell you: You would be surprised how much shirtless oratory and crying was involved in the life of an average member of the Japanese mob.
There's also some fighting, traditionally. Although 'fighting' seems a tad tame to describe it. 'Beaucoup beatdown face disaster' might serve better. Gang violence on the streets of 1980s Tokyo. That means crushing a pickpocket's windpipe beneath my winklepicker to drown out the sound of Banarama. At least, that's what I'm hoping for.
24. Scalebound
Looks for all the world like a Devil May Cry game. It has all the warnings signs: douchey protagonist, huge enemies, fast-paced combat, moronic soundtrack; it's all there. But I'll tell you what else is there: Your own, commandable, rideable pet dragon.
25. Knack 2
Will, in all likelihood, also be cack.
26. Nioh
Dark Souls taken out of Medieval European fantasy and plonked down in Feudal Japan. Also the protagonist is Geralt of Rivia for some reason.
27. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice
You can play as a woman whose internal monologue speaks in Andy Serkis' voice. That should be reason enough.
28. PaRappa The Rapper Remastered
Proof again if proof were needed that quick time events aren't even fun when karate onions are involved.
Welcome back to I'm So Sorry. The blog that defies all expectations by still existing. With another year cast into the yawning chasm of time, let's take a moment to remember just how awful it was. Labour MP Ed Balls gave the nation his best over-inflated Alec Baldwin sex doll impression on Strictly Come Dancing only to be topped by the internet's greatest cynics' dancing on the mass graves of seemingly all likeable celebrities. Also several other things happened including in the world of video games. Where bombs falling and priceless historic artifact loss are a given, not news.
Least likeable millennials Winner: Watch Dogs 2
The first Watch Dogs was hyped up the butt and then, in a perfectly appropriate fashion, played like seventeen hours of unedited colonoscopy footage. Boring and shit. I started slow for ya.
So the developers went back, drank heavily and reappraised the game desperately trying to reverse engineer the problem. Without understanding of course, that Watch Dogs had more problems than gameplay gimmicks and was only made of those. Eventually settling on the protagonist. That had to be the issue. Right?
So instead of the emotionless vigilante dullard that murdered policemen, robbed ATMs and violated traffic codes too numerous to mention in the name of social justice that we got the first time, this year, it was a bright-eyed, relatable young lad committing all the first-degree murder and so on.
In fact there's a whole stable of pedigree ethnic minorities to smash the system with. All of whom equally convinced that large-scale digital sabotage is an appropriate response to getting slapped with community service. It's like Scooby & The Gang except there're no white people, everyone speaks exclusively in memes and they're actually all in their thirties and trying to sound like children. So I guess it's actually more like Grease. But with hax0r.
Fucking, young people, amirite?
Lowest hunting to gathering ratio Winner: Far Cry Primal
Collecting random bits of garbage around the game environment for the purposes of crafting it into something useable has become one of gaming's most endemic design gimmicks. And in what you could charitably call Ubisoft's 2016 'addendum' to its open-world franchise, Far Cry Primal, you play a murderer who isn't fussy about the species of his victims so long as he can skin them afterwards. And its during the Stone Age. So the crafting made much more sense than usual, it being cavemen's whole schtick and all. However.
The sheer amount of Neanderthalic detritus you needed in this land before storytelling just to be a functioning force of natural selection is, ironically, biblical. I spent more time gathering twigs than scraping my innards off mammoth tusks. When I closed the game it took me actual minutes to remember I wasn't a beaver. They could have called it Far Cry Composting.
Most South African name
Winner: Titanfall 2
Video games share many of the same challenges as movies including race politics. So while Englishmen, Nazis, demons, zombies and English Nazi Demon Zombies (the worst kind) remain ethically safe choices for writers as antagonists, other assignations are not, without naming names. Which is the whole point.
South Africans, mercenaries and South African mercenaries have also been slowly creeping into villaintown recently making notable appearances in Matt Damon Exo-nerdathon Elysium and Uncharted 4: A Thief's End this very year in fact. And also in Titanfall 2. Led by the preposterously evil-sounding Kuben Blisk. A man who lived up to the malevolence of his name because his every utterance sounded like all the world's worst racial epithets rolled into one and multiplied by the C-word cubed.
Broest bros bro/steamiest homoerotic undertones
Winner: Final Fantasy 15
After a hard day's slouching resentfully in the backseat of your royal supercar while your personal chef and chauffeur drives you to the next town in need of a pest controller who's also first heir to the throne, what better way is there to relax than making camp in an isolated area where no-one's going to hear all the rigorous sex you'll be having with your royal retinue? At least that's what crossed my mind every time a day passed during Final Fantasy 15.
Inspired most pornography Winner: Overwatch
Blizzard's first attempt to make a video game for normal people was successful in many directions including visually. Its simple, colourful art and personable characters proved a hit for players and masturbators alike but its difficult enough to play Tracer with her shallow health pool and splashy guns without having to fight an erection at the same time.
Welcome back to I'm So Sorry Does E3 2015, the internet's only critique of the games industry with all the negativity unpurged by the Illuminati's Morality Intelligence. Last time, we took a brief look at some of the footage of video games squatting out there on the horizon and what they might be shaping up to be. And how disappointing all of it was. But forget whatever it was that happened in the nearest past, in fact, fuck it into a cocked hat! I've got a good feeling about some of these other games!
Horizon Zero Dawn Or, as they should be calling it: Third-Person Adventure Sperm Bank
A new IP! Let's treasure and nurture it and give it every chance to blossom into greatness!
It's a carbon copy of Enslaved: Odyssey To The West's world overtaken by robots premise. You know the kind: 'Let the forests reclaim the land' and all that while humans devolve back to cavemen and mechs evolve into simulacra of animals? Plus, it's got the absolute worst parts of Assassin's Creed's bush stealth and the 2013 remake of Tomb Raider's combat and crafting. Let me take this opportunity to speak for everyone:
"Not all of us want to go back to bows and arrows, games industry. Most of us were perfectly happy with guns."
The robots do look nice. But I'll be buggered with Monkey's electro staff if I give this rampant kleptomania a pass because of that. This is, by the way, Guerilla Games' new pet project. You know, the folks who gave us the Killzone games? Landmark efforts that set the bar for Playstation graphics with games about fighting Space Nazis? Granted only, maybe, two of them were good but this, just this whole thing seems tragically lazy for them. And they were onto such a good thing potentially with Shadow Fall.
Gears Of War 4 Or, as they should be calling it: Tears Of Bore 5
Due to a mixture of anti-psychotic medication, spiced rum and indigenous, shower mould spores, I thought The Coalition (formerly Black Tusk Studios), the latest developers to have a crack at making the original Gears' games particular brand of lightning strike twice, had dropped the 'Of War' bit from the title. My second thought not counting the one about building a device to make all humans within ten metres of me invisible and silent, was how cunning a move that could be. I was wrong, obviously. I just don't have the technical expertise necessary to make it a reality. Perhaps I could crowdsource it? Also the other thing. It is indeed and unsurprisingly Gears Of War 4 coming soon to Xbox One.
But then another thought occurred. That's a fucking great idea. Gears 4 is shorter, snappier, easier to remember if you've the mental and physical age of 12 like most of the target audience, but still has that precious brand recognition. It's also apt as balls because according to the six-minute demonstration they deigned to give us this year, any sense of organised conflict seems to have been dropped from the billing.
Instead, we have a more slenderly stacked duo (by Gears standards, which is to say, one brick shithouse per fitting to the usual four and a half) hunting or being hunted by monsters through the ruins this planet seems to have a fucking franchise deal with. An idiot might watch this and assume there's a subtler, more intimate tone this time. Everyone else will say: "You cut out the massive setpieces and bravado that made these, OK, one of these game what they were? Kind of alright? That's why Judgement was such a squeaky fart of a seller. It's barely even recognisable as a Gears Of War without those things. They could have called it Kicking in Over-Sized Doors - The Game!"
Just Cause 3 Or, as they should be calling it: Just Because, Again.
During one demo, a member of the Just Cause devs described how the team approached the mechanics of explosions in the game in a way that exactly reflects why you should want it. He said that they kept making them bigger. Nothing fancy about smoke density or spark decals or flame physics (although I'm sure there are lots those technical things involved) just bigger. Until they were so enormous that the game just broke. Then they stopped.
If that isn't enough and you didn't play Just Cause 2, consider this: That world map was vast but had plenty of interesting ways to get around it. If you're boring and sad and peoples' eyes glaze over when you talk to them and you'd escaped the digital internment camp we have for people like you called Grand Theft Auto, you'd probably buy a car and drive where you needed to go.
If not, you could grapple up the side of a skyscraper in enemy territory, start some shit, grapple over to one of the attack helicopters they sent to dissuade you, hijack it, fly down to street level, bail out, land on a super car, attach a soldier to the abandoned helo as it crashes into the sea, bonnet surf a few miles before taking the car for yourself and drive it over a cliff and parachute the rest of the way. It's like 'the floor is lava' routine but you've never not got access to rocket launchers, fighter jets and whole islands full of petrolly disaster waiting to happen. And Just Cause 3 will have moreof all of those things.
Hellblade Or, as they should be calling it: The Story Of Me: I'm So Sorry And Why I'm Always So Terribly Sorry
Hellblade is the crappily named but nonetheless intriguing IP from my newest and favouritest, Cambridge-based pet studio, Ninja Theory. Previously of Heavenly Sword, Enslaved: Odyssey To The West and the preposterously titled DmC: Devil May Cry ONLY, these local-grown fellas have shot into my good books by making games with compelling and well-directed narratives plus the single best action game control scheme ever. I'm serious. DmC uses every facet of whatever controller you happen to be using (which now includes the Xbox One and PS4 ones since the HD rerelease) with trouser-tearing elegance. Combat in that game is like looking down at a naked woman. It's going to take all your fingers, thumbs and a few other things to get the most out of the situation and you've got more than enough motivation to try.
Heavenly Sword was a distinctly God Of War-ish hack and slasher, inevitably drawing the comparison because of its fixed camera. They hit their stride harder with Enslaved, which had this melancholy feeling because it was basically a swan-song to adventuring-platformer types like Jak & Daxter that we'd never see again. And as I said, Capcom dumped the then bloated and fetid carcass of the Devil May Cry franchise on them which they proceeded to fucking nail with the tightest combat system you'll ever experience.
One of the main reasons I've patronised this tiny, well-deserving studio is that they have a strong desire to not just reiterate. Which is why two of their three main products are IPs. As is their current effort. And I was hoping, perhaps selfishly, that Ninja Theory's next outing would use DmC's exemplary fighting mechanics and in that respect, I was disappointed by their outing at E3.
Hellblade is looking to be infinitely more reserved and serious than the bombastic, cock-waving bravado of the game that made me love these developers but at the same time, it has a strangely apt premise for me. It seems to be focused entirely on mental illness to whit, depression. It looks like one person's slow but inexorable decay into madness and oblivion. It also seems to be a game about fighting occasionally and this is where my excitement starts to go soft.
Infinity Blade. It just looks like Infinity Blade. An iOS game where you take on knights and monsters much larger than you one at a time, with strategic blocks, evades and strikes from a close-range, over-the-shoulder view. Not that Infinity Blade wasn't rad because it was. It had a radness it could whip out for all to see. Uncoiling and thunking to the floor of the app market to put every other mobile game dev to shame. It just wasn't the kind of rad I was hoping for from Ninja Theory's next IP. Still. I can look forward to more exploration than usual from them plus their usual blend of solid writing and art design. And some would say that's enough. Would I? What's that? Andy Serkis is on board again? Oh, sold! Sold, sold a thousand times sold!
For Honor Or, as they should be calling it: Deadliest Warrior If It Made Less Sense
This seems like another Infinity Blade clone that noone else noticed. In combat at least. It is vastly different in scope as a sort of MOBA with skill involved.
As one of the precious few IPs here I feel I should explain that For Honour is a multiplayer duelling game with four players duking it out and AIs filling in the numbers as defenceless blade fodder for the more cowardly players to hunt down. You can be Vikings, Samurai or Medieval Knights but it seems to make as much difference as it does sense.
Uncharted 4: A Thief's End Or, as they should be calling it: The Nathan Drake Ethnic Cleansing Experience. The New Ride At Universal Studios!
Ahhh, Christ. OK. New things! Grappling hook, errrr, mud effects? Wet t-shirt physics, fruit displacement, crowd...errr sourcing? Long lost brothers! Vehicular manslaughter! Jum-errr, jump... jumping! No. No, I just can't do this. I can't even begin to care.
Alright, what about story? Do you like the same one the other three have told? Don't be ashamed, I do. I just don't like the game part of the video game. But apparently I'm the only one so if you are partial to the Joss Whedon-ish direction then take it from me: do the smart thing. Watch the Youtube cutscene films. They've all been the length of the average summer blockbuster Uncharted has always tried so hard to be up until now and won't cost you a penny. Support the video games industry some other way. Buy Papers Please five times or something. Screw with some marketing figures.
Doom Or, as they should be calling it: Actually, that's pretty accurate.
Bethesda have become the unspoken masters of old-timey game reinvigoration. With the possible exception of whoever published XCOM: Enemy Unknown. 2K? I want to say 2K. Their last foray into ancient gaming history rewarded the world with the surprisingly excellent Wolfenstein: The New Order and the admittedly less rational Old Blood. And though I'm the only person in the world who didn't like Fallout 3 and will be damned if I talk about how they've added a dog (because that innovation worked so well for Call Of Duty, remember?) for more than a second, I've every faith that Bethesda can give the same miracle beauty treatment to the other crow's footed hag-child of Id Software, Dooooooom. Or Doom. If you want to spell it right.
There's an undeniable sense of logic to this move. Especially from a marketing standpoint as the Wolfenstein remake kicked such goose-stepping arse. And as comparisons go, it and Doom are hardly that disparate. Neither had any issue, say, with motivation. Wolfenstein might ask whether you'd like to push a bit of old pipe into a Nazi's brain as casually as you might a stick of celery into some houmous. And you'd reply, well he was a Nazi, Wolfenstein. I was already doing that.
Doom,on the other hand, is a game about killing demons from Hell on the planet Mars and sometimes in Hell too. I know, right? Positively cryptic by comparison.
This is probably the game I'm most not saddened by because it's refreshingly uncomplicated if not remotely original or intelligent. But it doesn't have to be. It revels in the dumb, cathartic fun of ridding the universe of something it unambiguously and obviously doesn't need like the Skittles, Nazis or Popcorn Chicken that came before it. It's a generous gift basket of sharp metal objects, squishy body parts and ever the twain shall meet. And the devil's in the details.
It's old skool without ignoring all the innovations or at least, trends shooters have charted in the many years since Doom 3 forgot it wasn't System Shock. Duke Nukem Forever thought it would be funny to make fun of all the games it was ripping off and look how that worked out. Shittily, that's how.
So Doom has Titanfall-y jetpack manoeuvring that isn't contextual as balls. And a backpack full of more than two guns but a less finicky weapon wheel so you can pick the one you want under pressure because you're never not going to be under pressure. And health packs. Tasty bits of health all over the place that I don't have to pick up one at a time like a fussy cleaner waiting for her nail polish to dry. And contextual finishing moves without- well they seem pretty intact, like them or not but this is at least a game where the brutality and glorification of same at least makes sense.
There's nothing controversial about pulling a demon's leg around to stove in its own head with because it's a demon. Buck-toothed little shit had it coming. And it's made painfully clear what will happen if you don't. One of the demos ended with a jetpack-toting skeleton tearing off your arm and beating you around the space chops with it. Although from its perspective you probably had it coming too.
This bit. Right here.
This is a game I'm looking forward to playing. I'm looking forward to finding a Transfunctionating Cyber-Dragon Bollocks Cannon that shoots crotch-seeking laser tigers and not having to ditch it when the game decides: "Right, you've had your fun with that in the one section we made it available, now go back to the regular shooting drudgery."
I want to hoard that ridiculously overpowered cannon ammo until I reach a scenario where I'm down to my last shred of health and just want to make everything bad go away. I want to scour the environments looking for new Transfunctionating Blastey-Bollocks cannons even on the off-chance they were stashed somewhere. I want to validate the courageous man who raised his hand at a dev meeting and said:
"To hell with audio logs. Why not video logs? Better yet, hologram-video logs?"
Why not indeed?
***
My usual stream of bile notwithstanding, I'm probably going to get all of these games (except Gears Of War, obviously) because I don't believe you can take an accurate reflection of a game away from five minutes of highly rehearsed footage. Sometimes. Mostly. Even in an industry built on franchise reiteration, you can't really be sure how developers are going to do with sequels. I mean, Dragon Age: Origins didn't hold my attention for more than two hours and the second one shat a hole right through the bed depending on who you ask but the third soaked up a week of my life and I love its frickin' pants off for it. I suppose my point is that you don't know what you want until you actually have it. I mean, I didn't know I wanted Inquisition until I had it and then I wanted the shit out of it. I guess that also means my point is - this whole thing was pointless. Wonderful. Until next year then. Happy E3.
Hello, I'm Will. Head writer, editor and only one of those things of the internet's oldest recorded hate crime, I'm So Sorry. During my long, long, fucking long tenure producing uniqueish content for the internet and descent into mental collapse, I've dreamed of going to E3. To rub shoulders with sweaty, watery-eyed pricks in neck beards and Master Chief t-shirts as they bay and cheer for thirty seconds of footage of Link holding a different coloured sword.
To the un-e-nitiated, E3 (or the Electronic Entertainment Expo) is the annual trade fair for the video game industry. A chance for developers, fans and press from around the world to converge on some LA convention centre and revel in a Bacchanalian orgy of hype-mongering announcements, bare-faced lies and Nintendo trying to find a new way to word that they did indeed make another Mario game.
Surely, E3 encapsulates so much of what is wrong with video game culture. So let's validate the shit out of it by commenting on stuff that happened! At length!
This year, I was not actually in attendance (much like every year) as they don't hand out press passes to people who don't ask for them or entertain an audience that could fit inside a non-Time Lord phonebox (which is incidentally as timely a reference as I deserve given the tardiness of this) but thankfully everyone who was recorded every second of it.
So thanks to Youtube's sterling journalism we can all gather round the fire and enjoy pre-rendered trailers that reflect as much on the actual content of the game as five minutes of gameplay from another, totally different game. Seriously. You could realise five minutes in that you're watching footage from Das Boot and it would still tell you as much. Mercifully, developers sometimes take the opportunity to sprinkle down gifts of actual gameplay footage at E3 so we'll mostly be focusing on that.
These are some of the games we might be playing in the next year or two, maybe even enjoying but I wouldn't get my hopes up if I were you. That's if the developers don't just bottle it like The Last Guardian.
The Last Guardian Or, as they should be calling it: At Fucking Last, Guardian
The Last Guardian is a vague adventure game from auteur, critic bait makers Team Ico about friendship, yiffing and a giant griffin-puppy you... interact wiiiittthhh, somehow? To solve environmental puzzles aaannndd... get, places? You want to go? For equally unspecified reasons.
It's very much like the game Team Ico announced in 2009 that the developers just stopped making presumably due to a crippling fear of money and success called The Last Guardi-oh. How awkward.
Yes, I can confirm I'm not above an easy target and language parsing joke routines but in my defence, they started making this game in 2007 and we'd only just gotten over the loss. And now they bring all that blue ball grief back up again? Fine. I'll suck it up. We're only at the first entry. Positivity, ho!
So what's new, Team Ico? What bold new strides have you taken in all the years since you last apologised for delays and we all just gave up hope of ever actually seeing this thing come to light?
So, just the same footage then? The same footage we saw six, repeat six E3s ago? With nothing (a subtle kind of nothing, I'll grant you) added or changed? Neeeooooo. Nope. Still positive. Imperceptible HD dusting aside, if The Last Guardian is even half as valiantly unique and emotionally engaging as Team Ico's last effort, Shadow of the Colossus, this should be a must play! Ahh. Made it. Alright, let the hate flow.
Hitman Or, as they should be calling it: Hitting On Men When They're At Their Most Vulnerable
Agent 47's still bald and hitting men (and presumably some women too) in a professional capacity. And that's about all I'm prepared to say at this point and every point after. Niiieeeeext!
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Or, as they should be calling it: Deus Ex: Mea Culpa
Previous Deus Ex game Human Revolution was a fairly typical, cyberpunk, corporate conspiracy tale wrapped around an aggressive and uncompromising stealth, action and exploratory gameplay system. Or, if you'd prefer, a game that wasn't in the least bit afraid to bend you over a urinal and pound away at your most sensitive areas with a Shake Weight.
The first we saw of this new adventure in bunghole savagery was a trailer that demonstrated exactly why you don't want Square Enix within ten square miles of your workspace as a game designer. But in a strange way, it was pretty accurate. It showed a whole bunch of new cyber-prosthesis-tricks we might be stashing up our techno-sleeves plus some other bullshit that sounded like someone ad-libbing 'meaning of life in a world with advanced medicine 101' and a giant guy more synthetic enhancement than man with a terrible Russian accent. But I guess I can't blame Square Enix for stupidity. It'd be like blaming a kitten for shredding all your R2-D2 throw pillows. They just don't know any better.
Then Eidos gave us a whole demo showing most of those things. There's apparently a more balanced open combat system this time but the day I believe that will be the same one I return my 'Angsty, Nitpicking Wanker' Loyalty Card. But the new armour skill looks pretty handy, covering returning 'hero' Adam Jensen in glossy black vector art and making him immune to damage briefly.
But enough about all that boring violence let's talk about something central to Deus Ex: humans! And Adam's relationships with the squishy mortals. We didn't get much of a look at them apart from a brief example of one of the series' typical Talking Boss Fights which were like oratory Minesweeper but more luck-based. Other than that there was a pilot who'll presumably be ferrying Jensen around the world despite not liking him for no other perceivable reason than token character conflict which is a shame because there are plenty of perfectly good reasons to dislike Jensen. [Side note: Did Malik (your other pilot) die at the end of the last one? Because I enjoyed her.]
Adam Jensen has the same kind of misplaced self-pity as Kratos or Max Payne and their stubborn refusal to be grateful for anything.
"Boo-hoo, man crossed a line that he wasn't meant to cross and now I can pull a minotaur's horn off and feed it to him or gun down eight favela kids while halfway in and out of a breaking window but why does no-one feel sorry for me?"
I mean, if I was Adam Jensen and woke up on the operating table to find someone'd brought me back from the dead and also grafted sunglasses directly into my face and replaced my arms with swords, the first thing I'd say is:
"Ok, I do remember agreeing to a donor card but not so much signing anything about putting things into my body after I died. What's that? I can turn invisible and punch through walls and shoot a thousand exploding ball bearings out of my armpits? All righty then. I'll let it slide this one time. But if I get killed again, I've got three words for you, Doctor: Vibrating. Laser. Dick."
XCOM 2 Or, as they should be calling it: How To Do Sequels Of Remakes Of Sequels: Vol Unknown
Firaxis Games showed off some different flavours of alien and weaponry including swords because what sci-fi game would be complete without them, eh, Mass Effect? But otherwise it's the same trial, error and combat loss we all know and love from 2012's Enemy Unknown. Which means there'll unavoidably come a time when you have to tearfully put down your favourite sniper like Old Yeller because he got mind controlled by a Sectoid Commander.
Pro tip: Make your inevitable failures potentially and tragically prophetic by naming your starting line of soldiers after your closest friends! Incidentally, that's probably why I always had so much trouble with the last one because you can't fight off an entire alien invasion with only three blokes. Ha! Oh.
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain Or, as they should be calling it: Bring Me The Head Of Editing. No, bring me the head of the head of editing. What do you mean, why? Because of the film, idiot. I was trying to do a thing. Ah, fine, forget it. Moron. 'S funny.
There's a fair bit of footage from The Phantom Pain floating around the internet after demonstrations at TGS so go watch those if you care so much. Jeez, fine. Here's a taste.
With such extensive coverage already you'd think there wasn't a whole lot more for Konami to show us at E3 this year so they apparently took that as a sign to dial up the stupid until it was more in line with Kojima's resting, redline idiocy. You know, the kind that led to scenes like tech-savvy kid dropping a bootlog in his hacker pants on an active battlefield. Or Senator Hulk Hogan flipping you the bird from the cockpit of his giant robot spider. Snnnaaaaaakkkkeee!
Introducing, the Metal Gear Walker! A man-sized droid that looks like Chappie robo-impregnated the surprised head of a personnel crane and fits about as naturally and believably in the period and scenario as a fucking luck dragon. Which would incidentally be exactly as noticeable to soviet guards in the dimension everyone except Hideo Kojima lives in.
Soviet Guard 1: "Hey, comradevic. Is there a man hiding on board that extremely armed mech speeding into our compound?"
Soviet Guard 2: "Nyet that I can see, buddyin."
Soviet Guard 1: "Okey-coke, then. Just checking. You know, guardin'. Pays to ask these questions sometimes."
Soviet Guard 2: "I hear that. Because I am in range of you as you make that noise."
Soviet 1: "Ha. Guard joke. Love it. Hey, why are we speaking English?"
Soviet 2: "Ah, suka. I bet we're in a thing."
Soviet 1: "Da. Must be a thing."
Soviet 2: "Would certainly explain the distasteful stereotyping."
OK, I'm done with that.
I suppose the cassette tapes lying around the world you can collect and make your own soundtrack with are more applicable to the timeline than, say, robots, iPhones or witches. But excuse me if half-cyborg, greatest soldier ever (apparently) Big Boss aka Snake aka Jack Bauer jamming to 80s power ballads seems a tad out of character.
Mass Effect: Andromeda Or, as they should be calling it: Gene Roddenberry's Spacetacular Adventure In Alien Sexing
Bioware said they were pleasantly surprised by how many people enjoyed Mass Effect 3's multiplayer segment, myself among them. It had this sort of free market of ideas feel despite being absolutely riddled with microtransactions. And if you didn't want to cough up real money but fancied the idea of test driving the game as one of the universe's many, fabulous alien races like Krogan, Asari or Collector, you faced an immense grind of time, limited map variety and missions as routine as a menstruating pocket watch. But. And it's a large, shapely but, it was interesting.
I don't usually give much credit or time to multiplayer features because I like my games to have endings and be winnable but Bioware pumped a lot of effort into it over at least a year after the game's release and is technically the last thing they did with the Mass Effect universe up until now.
And for its drawbacks which, let's be honest, were many and grievous, it showed how naturally varied and deep the game's core mechanics really were when you weren't saddled with boring old human, N7 space marine Commander Shepard. And not just that but how fully and richly they'd populated their world over the course of those three games. The possibilities were positively juicy. And once we'd actually gotten a taste of playing as a Turian, or a Phantom or Kai Leng, we were all just begging for the next in the franchise to let us go Dragon Age a little and choose our own species at least. Mass Effect 3's multiplayer wasn't just a bigger draw than anyone expected, it sired an entire community that saw what Bioware could achieve if given room to spread their wings a little.
So hopes have been high for a while to say the least. Not least, because developers said from the get-go that Shepard would have bugger-all to do with entry number 4. And how did Bioware respond to our excitement of all the colourful possibilities the next game could bring in their fascinating world? With a two minute trailer that showed a human-shaped N7 space marine, holding the same gun we've been using since 2010. It wasn't so much a swing and a miss as a half-hearted paw at a target in a different galaxy several generations down the line. I honestly wanted to cry a little.
But Commander Unnamed was using a different flavour of galaxy map plus, he was wearing this tasteful cashmere collar number so baby steps, I guess. Wait. Jetpack. I meant tasteful jetpack number. And who doesn't love jetpacks? They sure were fun in the multiplayer on the Turian bird monster I fucking want to play as you cockteasing pillocks!
The No Show Award And the winner is: Persona 5
We know Atlus are making Persona 5, a game that if even remotely like its true predecessor, will be about as Japanese as its possible to be without being wrapped in seaweed and tentacles.
Whether or not it turns out to be actually good is a question for otaku and slightly less otaku critics but I'm prepared for an RPG with depth and complexity and that unique, melancholy sense of atmosphere the Japanese are so good at when they're not fussing about breakdancing cyborg ninjas and raping schoolgirls.
***
That's all we've got time for today, but check back here soon for the next instalment of Games Coming Out In Future And What We Know About Them if someone boring had been in charge of titling. Perhaps counter-intuitively, it'll be up top there. No, all the way up. No. Up. That way. The opposite way you've been scrolling to get here. Actually, you know what? I don't need your kind. Go home. Yes, you. Christ, I feel stupider just for acknowledging you. Is stupid infectious? Stupid question. Of course it is and you're like Typhoid fucking Mary. CLOSE THIS WINDOW BEFORE YOU MAKE ME FORGET MY MOTHER'S FACE. Thank you. Cretin.
We're always supposed to feel sorry for Elves, aren't we? And how about that for an opening sentence that waves goodbye to majority viewing before they've even pulled up their idiot pants? But seriously. In every fucking game, film and change these fey, pansexual lop-ears are introduced as tragic figures, complaining loudly from their ghettos and tree forts because humans walked in and rebuilt fabulous castles all over their arbitrarily superior architecture. You'd think it was some tortuous metaphor for Christianity's treatment of paganism or in fact, anyone except them but it's probably not. Right?
Did no-one think to ask whether Elven civilisation was really so great when humans conquered it so easily and consistently across so many franchises? I'm guessing no, but speaking of barely thinking and jingoism, here are a few examples of video game issues that itch fervently even in the face of far graver mistakes.
The RPG: Relative, Pointless, Grab-bagging.
Where you might have suffered this:Grand Theft Auto, Shadows of the Damned (Yes, I know you haven't heard of it), Call of Duty.
If there was a video game review swear box for overused terms it would include: 'fluid', 'organic' and in big gold letters at the top maybe underlined a few times: 'RPG elements'. In regular people speak, they mean 'doesn't flow like a river of bricks uphill', 'not completely scripted, empty spectacle' and 'contains some kind of system of character improvement' respectively.
They're all lazy as Sunday as descriptions go but particularly the latter. Because the definition of RPG to me is that the number-crunching takes a higher priority than twitchy, caffeinated reflexes or, as a COD player would call it, skill. You see, all video games are built on numbers. In the same way that a church might be built on a pile of bones. In an action game, like a shooter say, the mathematics might be as simple as 'x bullets + face = zero face'.
Think of it this way. If you skipped straight to the final mission of name any Battlefield game, it'd be doable no matter what. But if you skipped straight from the opening area of Final Fantasy XII to the final boss, you'd be ground into fucking paste before you'd had your morning coffee.
In a true RPG, improvement of your character or team or whatever is paramount to success if not the whole damn source of fun in the first place. Asking us to spend in-game bucks or time in minigames or what have you to make some tiny, inconsequential improvement to our gun damage or sprint distance in a game where you could breeze through the singleplayer regardless is just busywork. Although if there was ever a word that defined games like Grand Theft Auto, it's busywork. Or, maybe: "ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ-Bleuurgghh! Arrggh! Bad decisions!" Not a word. Still true.
The Moral Choice: Dickhead Or Cartoonishly Evil Dickhead?
Where you might have suffered this: Infamous, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Dishonored, Splinter Cell.
Paragon or Renegade? Good or Evil? Handsome or Sweet Laser Scars?
Let me tell you a story. One day, in a universe far, far away, not long enough ago (but for argument's sake let's say early noughties), a massively drunk and self-hating game designer named Bo Vicodin had an idea. Of course, 'ideas' were punishable with twenty lashes in the video game design slave pits but a publisher overseer overheard it at the AI coalface and passed it up the chain. And it went something like this: Instead of offering meaningful options in gameplay, developers could just rewrite half the cutscenes along sickeningly contrived moral lines and make the actual game bit half as long! Genius!
"But, hang on," Bo whimpered from the warg enclosure, hungry jaws already clamped around his atrophied legs and heartily regretting opening his big, fat dicktrap to start with.
"Nobody's going to fall for that. If the game isn't fun to play in the first place, no-one's going to play it all the way through again just to see what the cutscenes are like when the main character's an unlikeable prick or whingeing niceboy. Surely it would make more sense to split the difference and make a character whose at least likeable or at the very least makes sense?"
But his only reply was lasers, now and forever. Blue lasers if you chose the 'good' options, red if 'evil'.
Leaving this Renegade metaphor behind for a moment, moral choice systems do let you leave a slightly more personal mark on a game and cement your identity in it where appropriate. Problem is, it rarely is appropriate. For one thing, there's no such thing as 'evil'. It's all perspective. And imposing a 'bad' ending as a result of playing with a Machiavellian sense of victory at any cost is just going to make most gamers feel like they've suffered an especially protracted 'Game Over'. As if the game's saying:
"Sure, you saved the world or whatever the point of this was, now, would you like to try again but be less of a cunt about it?"
And you know what? Now that you mention it, probably not, game.
The Map-ular Vision: Sprinting Blind.
Where you might have suffered this: Far Cry, The Witcher.
LOOK AT THIS AND NOTHING ELSE.
Minimaps are useful like Azealia Banks has a terrifying mouth. You can't focus on anything else and I've been waiting to make that reference since 212. But I was too afraid to. It's like staring down a sassy Saarlac's throat except you just know it would emasculate you on the way down.
In most games focusing excessively on the minimap's not much of an issue. It's like the Batman Arkham games' 'Detective Vision'. There's precious little reason to turn it off beyond aesthetics. Sure you're not paying much attention to the lavishly created world the game artists spent so much time and neglected their kids and marriage for, but in a few select kind of games, making the minimap too useful is a recipe for players' furious, impotent deaths.
Example: Some open-world style games let you jump a hundred feet, powerslide trainlines and float impishly around the map with as much regard for gravity as intact objects full of money. And some will murder you for falling more than a few vertical feet. I've spent more time cursing Isaac Newton in the Witcher 3 than werewolves and that's a game where I've killed so many wraiths that ghosts dare their friends to spend the night at my house. It's a game with miles of open terrain but fangy, clawed death instead of walls. And I've still been killed by more stairwells than mythological monsters.
It's one of those tragic side effects of playing games routinely. Slowly, yet inexorably, all matter moves towards entropy as all game players move towards a state of maximum efficiency. If your game's dodge roll is faster than running, it is just a matter of time before everyone is flailing objective-ward like a single-minded tumble weed. So it is with the minimap. The more useful information it shows: quest-givers, fast-travel markers, enemies, herbs, treasure - the more players are going to fall fatally down pits they never knew were there screaming the injustice of it all.
The Suicide Commute: Just Kill Me Now.
Where you might have suffered this: Sleeping Dogs, Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto, open-world video games too numerous to mention.
It's a London thing.
Someone very wise once said that a sprawling, open world is only as fun as the method you get around it, because in our tragically boring, dragon-less 'real' world, commuting is one of the most severe causes of stress and anxiety. So in one of Rockstar's more tacitly awful decisions, they said:
"Fuck good sense, this commuting lark is exactly the kind of boredom and frustration we want for GrandTheft, hell, why limit ourselves? Boredom and frustration for all!"
So horrifically lengthy travel time between every fucking mission ended up in Red Dead Redemption too. And all the other developers intent on ripping off the franchise weren't to be outdone.
"Rockstar won't beat us when it comes to terrible decisions!" Proclaimed the makers of Mafia, Watch Dogs, Saints Row, Sleeping Dogs and all the other watery, dead-eyed, crimebox knock-offs.
And that's how we ended up with a thousand games where your involvement as a player is limited to ferrying twats around, wasting millions of collective consumer hours getting stuck in traffic.
The Impossible Conversation: Because Everyone Hates Being Cut O-
Where you might have suffered this:Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto, Dragon Age, The Witcher, video games of all kinds too numerous to mention.
I get the feeling that this is starting to sound like a one man declaration of war against Rockstar Entertainment, and while I do believe they genuinely lost track of what the word 'fun' means back sometime around Vice City, they're by no means the worst thing to happen to games.
But this isn't meant to be some grand evaluation of gaming development and culture, hell no. We're here to give credit to the pettiest and niggliest of my petty niggles. So here it is:
Sometimes, games will ask you to walk slowly towards an objective with a companion while they talk at you. And sometimes the developers write your companion more dialogue than they have time to say on your stroll, so are cut off as you get you where meant to be going by a cutscene or new stream of dialogue.
Yes, that's it.
Believe me when I say it doesn't sound like much but you only had to read it. I had to find a way to articulate a quibble that perspective would drown without even trying. But try and believe me again when I say that trying to get involved in a game with, let's say more ambient storytelling (mentioning no names!) that this is a special kind of irritation that creeps into your brain to lay its eggs before manifesting in the kind pointless agitation that makes you want to throw a shoe at the screen in the vain hope it'll make the developers less stupid. Mostly because it's so easily avoided. I mean, how hard can it be to time how much dialogue there is against how long it'll take to for you to get where you're going?
It may well be that I have a particular weak spot for this issue because it's conditioned me. I play games for empowerment and escapism. If I wanted to devote my life to a yawning chasm that does not end and cannot be won, I wouldn't be here, furiously and drunkenly typing to myself, I'd be slightly more ruined and 'playing' World of Warcraft. In so much as you can play a second job that you pay to take part in.
The point is, brainwashing is for Blizzard fans but gaming's absurd walking conversations have me slowing to a complete stop as soon as they begin even on the off-chance that I overshoot and miss some dialogue. And sometimes, games throw an ever-so-special sprinkle of bacon bits on the wilted, impotent fury salad that is my life by cutting off the guy's verbal shits to say: "So is your lazy arse coming, or what?" And there is never a microwave brutal enough to do to the game what is in my heart at that moment.
It's not even like its a limited kind of problem, it's fucking everywhere. In almost every game where NPCs add to world building. And that's like saying it's not a problem in games where murder doesn't add to progress.
I don't get out much in any sense of the phrase. So when I realised that the most exciting thing to happen to me recently was a renewed interest in yoghurt (because there're only so many times I can watch Terry Crews proclaim that "Terry loves yoghurt" in Brooklyn Nine-Nine before I have to leap off my sofa and testify "Me too!") I proclaimed "fuck it" and decided to try something new.
Despite video games being the last little blinking ray of joy in an otherwise hollowed and beshitted life and also despite the fact I like to think I know everything about the games worth knowing about, there are definitely gaps in my interest and knowledge. And adventure games are a particularly gaping example.
They're not to be confused with 'action-adventure' of course, which is the generic label slapped clumsily on clumsy generic games - often movie adaptations - usually typified by bits of shooting or brawling, bits of climbing and bits of stealth all done shittily and bundled together; like that 2013 Star Trek game everyone hated, or the Uncharted franchise if you want to get inflammatory. And I do!
Yeah, that's right you floppy-haired cretin.
No, a true-blue adventure game is one that will have almost zero gameplay, but thread a strong narrative through a series of logic puzzles and family-friendly conversations. Christ, that was dry. Why don't we say: 'Fuck-aroundy, puzzle-solvey, talky-talky funtime!'?
Anyway, I never got into them much. Mostly because I wasn't a PC gamer during the nineties or ever and also if you take the catharsis of extreme violence and 'interactive' part out of the interactive storytelling that makes games what they are (fucking tops), I'd just say: "So I might as well just be watching a eight hour long film then." And then something about how films are for yokels who can't focus on anything longer than 90 minutes and there was some grumbling about how I was sick of all the big-league, hoighty-toighty games getting pushed out before they're finished so they can block up a load of content behind transaction walls but I didn't write it down. I was probably sober.
But not the last week, ho-no. I've been all up inside adventure gaming and if you want to know how that all went please purchase the 'I'm So Sorry Season Pass*' by throwing your largest available wad of cash money down the nearest accessible drain.
*Gives you access to [unspecified number] of exciting new articles and strange, schizophrenic feature ideas like a diary where nothing happens at one [financially viable] price! Also, new player skins! Which I collected personally at the nearest bus station! With a flensing knife!
Day 1 -- Grim Fan Fun Go? Almost!
So it's Day 1, and I'm sitting staring at the Playstation Network Store heartily regretting this whole thing. Where the hell do I even start? This is a genre I've been purposely avoiding for actual decades. Why did I even pick adventure games? Good question, past-Will.
So now I'm staring at my shelf at a whole bunch of big-shot hoighty etc PS3 games. Dumb, racist military first-person shooters. Decent System Shock-rip off first-person shooters. Wait, where are the RPGs? I thought I was into those. There aren't many PS4 games since the burglary so what have I gotten since then? The dumbest racistest military shooter available and PS3 remasters, oh fantastic.
I knew there were gaps but this is ridiculous. Where are the stealth games? The horrors, the sports and the strategies? The butchers, the bakers and the candlestick makers? And then I realised: they're all crowbarred into the triple-A big dogs as featurettes, aren't they?
Ok, now, if anything I'm even more determined since I actively dislike horror, sports and strategy, so let's keep this simple: What's featured on the home screen? And that's the story of how I came to be downloading Grim Fandango Remastered, probably the most famous and successful OG adventure game of all time, and a screamingly obvious choice by all accounts, if I'd only thought for a single second.
Many, many hours later, I booted up my first new adventure in adventure gaming, set the graphics and controls to 'less shit' and 'slightly less shit' respectively (because this is a remastering, baby, slightly eradicated warts and all) and got going. And an hour later I put the controller down again and had a little cry.
Day 2 -- Grim, Tortuous Frustration Forever
If you've never heard of Grim Fandango, a marketer would describe it as 'a landmark adventure game from LucasArts with logic puzzles and dark humour'. See this came out in 1998, in the heady golden years of adventure game dominance on PC.
And believe it or not, this was a time when, in PC circles at least, LucasArts meant 'magical, enthralling and wit-laden video games' instead of 'franchisicide hacked out with a fucking meat cleaver' like it does today. And Grim Fandango was only a year before Jar-Jar Binks and the subsequent sinking of the SS Lucas around Cape Christensen.
So it escaped relatively unmolested by all that and in fact, is one of the critics' easy and artsy choices for 'best games evarr' schtick. It's hard to point at a specific reason people loved this game so much but if you waved roughly in the direction of Tim Schafer, most people would probably agree if not rush up to kiss him on the mouth. Schafer was project lead during development and also worked on Day of the Tentacle, Psychonauts and The Monkey Islands. All stellar adventure games. If you say so.
Which is all well and good. But you want to know why it made me cry. You monster.
The answer is that after a paltry hour pottering around Grim Fandango's opening area, I went, head-lowered in shame, to a walkthrough. But as it turned out, that shame was misplaced because up there a few paragraphs ago, where it said 'logic' slightly before the word 'puzzles', it should have read 'incomprehensible trains of batshit lunacy'.
No sane person would assume that an objective like 'find a new sales lead' would involve asking a mardy carnival magician to give you two empty balloons, filling those balloons with packing foam, sending them down the mail pipe system like in Brazil in the hope that they break the mail sorting machine so you can get in and read your competitor's mail. That's about as far from the word 'logic' as I can think of. In fact, I'm inventing a new word to describe Grim Fandango's puzzles: Unlogic. There. Now that reads much better: 'A landmark adventure game from LucasArts with unlogic puzzles and dark humour'.
So we're barely into Day 2 of my adventure game experiment and I'm sat with a walkthrough on my lap in every way like a security blanket, arduously Simon Says-ing my way through. And so, with more patience than brain power, I reach the end of the game's second act, which appropriately, are called years. Because that's what it felt like, get it?
Day 3 -- Year 3, Man City 0
It's Day 3 and Year 3 of Grim Fandango and having slept on it, I realise just what is so truly upsetting about this game. Because I've played bad games and this isn't one of them. I mean, I own Battlefield 4. I don't really have any right to complain about such an artistically lauded game as Grim just because it made me feel stupid. Shit, owning that game makes me just about the worst person imaginable.
But Grim Fandango has done something that hasn't happened in a while: Disappointed me.
I knew full well what I was getting into when I traded legal tender for Watch Dogs. I've only got myself to blame for wasting those few, ineffectual hours of my rapidly shrivelling lifespan. And while we're on the subject, Grand Theft Auto V too. As much as thousands of asset models for civilians or lines of lazy dialogue or acres of useless space thrill me, Rockstar, I won't be back to your house until you've looked up what 'fun' means.
Actually, I think Grim Fandango is the most I've ever been disappointed in a game. For all my big talk of gaps in my knowledge, I downloaded it two days ago knowing full well that it was going to be lousy with unlogic puzzles because people joke about its spurious sense of 'good sense' all the time. I was also aware that this and Day of the Tentacle and The Monkey Islands and other solid LucasArts adventure games are meant to still be funny. I was expecting in a charming, maybe mischievous kind of way. But I was wrong. Because Grim Fandango as well as being the most disappointing game I've ever played, is also far and away the funniest.
Games don't tend to be the best vector for humour (see Sacred 3 for abundant reasons why) but occasionally surprise; like Portal, Deadpool or Saints Row. But I've never played anything as consistently hilarious as Grim Fandango. The writing is bullseye black humour from the word go. The characters have colour and life, ironically, since they're all dead. And the voicing is always convincing. It's an all round pleasure to chat with people in its Aztec-through-neo-noir-filter afterlife. Which is what makes the utter frustration of the gameplay so galling.
Now I'm sitting here looking at the non-sequitur puzzles not as cheeky little challenges to overcome, but towering walls of trial and error separating me from the solid gold storytelling bits I actually want. The conversations with the dismissive secretary you're trying to nail, the alpha sales douchebag, the misanthropic beatniks, the Marxist docker bees, your alcoholic troll driver, the bit where you try and ask an endlessly chatting security guard for her metal detector, the sexy did-no-wrong saint you're also trying to nail whose case starts the whole plot, these are the moments that make this game shine brighter than any polished-to-perfection, committee-designed demographic-bait today.
But the wall is too high. Which is why, five minutes into Year 3, I give up on Grim Fandango. Super great fun though it may be, anything 5% fun by volume won't satisfy. Grim Fandango is an exquisite espresso drowned in whipped cream, chocolate flakes and broken glass.
Day 4 -- Taking Valium like candy Hearts
Day 4 in the adventure game house and the mood is sour. So I couldn't scale the barrier of obtuse, old-school challenge. Why don't we try something new and exciting? Something like Valiant Hearts: The Great War, available now for free for Playstation Plus subscribers.
Some unspecified time later I was playing and enjoying this wee indie darling. And while I wasn't frustrated any more, I am now miserable.
Because Valiant Hearts uses real letters from that most depressing of modern conflicts, the First World War, to craft a personal story from the perspective of a small group, in order to maximise personal tragedy when a few of them inevitably die, I'm assuming.
For one thing, it is refreshing to be playing a military game and not have some dickbag shouting in my ear to go and commit more war crimes. You may be at war here, but you barely kill anyone. Aside from the admittedly frequent setpieces where you blow up a bridge, or house or bellfry or whatever, the worst you'll do as a player is give some Kraut a boff across the bonce with a soup ladle or spade.
This is an adventure game, which means violence isn't your goal, it's some incredibly roundabout solution to move from left to right because as well as budget, we've dropped a dimension since Grim Fandango. Yes, Valiant Hearts is 2D, massively simplifying puzzle structure right off the bat.
Simple might be the watchword here actually. I just burned through the first chapter with nary a hiccough.
Day 5 -- All Buggy on the Western Front
The word of the day is 'incongruous'. Especially when you surround madcap racing and errant barrel-dodging to the sound of the can-can with weepy, Private Peaceful, war-is-hell melodrama.
The visuals are charming, with heavily hand-drawn sprites, watercolour backdrops and a dog called Walt, who I call 'Daddy's little cutey' when his AI is working and 'Korean bargain bucket' at all other times. Because, as I progress through a kind of lacklustre tour of WW1 combat and atrocity hotspots, I feel like the technical problems start to outweigh the artistic vision. And also that the art design was separated from the writing by a mile of barbed wire and sinkholes.
Then I got to Reims forest. Where three puzzle sequences in a row brought the otherwise great pacing to a screeching halt. Not because of my obviously non-existent dumbness, but because objects got stuck in the geometry, dialogue failed to activate and good old sheer stupidity in puzzle design. I know it hasn't been long, but I already want to make up with Grim Fandango.
Day 6 -- A Big, Rad Wolf
I demoed Telltale's The Wolf Among Us about a year ago and my initial thoughts were: "Conversations that make me feel like I'm constantly missing the 'right response' and quick time events. The feature that is to gameplay what working your fly is to sex - idiotically simple and irrelevant if you're doing it right. Not for me, no Sir."
But what the hell, I'll give it another go. I can get the whole load of five episodes together on the store. Here's a transcript of my day with it:
"Hahahaha, I burned you good, Mr Toad. Admit it."
"Hmnnnhnn-QTE-bor-fuck me I pulled his whole arm off!"
"Bllleeeeuuu-what? I don't care if you're at the door, mother. I'm busy. Fabletown isn't going to solve it's hooker-murders it's own self. I'm the Sheriff, dammit!"
Day 7 -- Dire Wolf, not arf!
The Wolf Among Us is the kind of game that's designed from the ground up to be played twice. And while I stayed up last night to finish it, every moment was marred by the fact that I wanted to play it through again as less of complete c-word.
Because this is also the kind of game designed in true Bioware fashion: With every dialogue choice giving you the option of being a simpering goody-goody or a toddler-burning, sacred icon destroying malevolopath, with something very vague in between.
I'm now balls-deep in it again trying to be as nice as I can but it is a credit to the game that I wanted to the first time as well and also that such an approach is difficult. The denizens of Fabletown are richly crafted and totally likeable, even the comically evil ones. And the undercurrent of consequence that influences every decision you make in the game pops up constantly during the five episodes and the last bring all the decisions you made together nicely.
Beyond that conversational adventure game stuff, there's also visceral, impactful violence. Sweet ass pacing. And a hardboiled narrative that would read like LA Confidential conflated with Brothers Grimm and read by Cliff Martinez. And if that's what I can expect of the genre in future then adventure games, you're all right with me.
