Minor Irritations: The 5 Most Quibbliest Quibbles In Video Gaming

YOU SUCK.

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 Grand Theft, 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. 

5 Video Game Enemies From Non-Horror Games That Give Me The Willies

It's 2015, and while we've just got the tip in and its not complaining, let's start as we mean to go on and talk about fear. Because there're twelve gruesome months stretching out ahead of us with nothing good in them but The Witcher 3, possible entry into D'n'D and drugs. And if that isn't scary, I'm not every kind of screwed up and also Pope Beneficent I.

Horror-flavoured video games don't tend to make much sense. Here's why; I play games for, among other things, a sense of empowerment. The kind of control you don't get in life, unless you're a practicing psychopath. So when the barista at Cafe Nero is curt with me, I don't sneak into the back room and lift the day's take from a strongbox with my mad lockpicking skills, slit the guy up from taint to throat and warm my penis in the wound. I go home and play a game where I can do that.

But horror games should be about making you feel helpless and confused in the face of a nebulous, insidious force you don't fully understand, because that's what fear is made of. 

People like Capcom and the makers of films and video games too numerous to mention do not understand this. Because when you introduce zombies as a unhealthy thing to be around, putting a shotgun in the players' hands is only going to undermine that sense of threat. And restricting the amount of ammo you're going to find for it just makes ordinance accountancy the more significant worry. 

Massive, slack-jawed lad holding a tree, right in front of you: The new face of fear.

When your bullet savings account is more concerning than a crazed, chainsaw-wielding murderer with a prolapse for a face, I would say that's a failure at horror.

So I'm not the kind of person thats plays horror games. But it's not like I'm the kind of person that plays games where everything is sunshine and jewels and cartoon pigs and some kind of clash of multiple clans, because that wouldn't make me a person, but an infinitesimal fraction of a dollar sign in the eye of a publisher while he's masturbating to demographic figures.  

Anyway, these are antagonists in games that don't identify as horror, but make me experience fear in a life where I get enough of that at the thought of leaving the house for coffee. 

As seen in Far Cry 3 and 4:

The Far Cry series never really got into its stride until number 3. And then number 4 was just exactly the same game but in the Himalayas. So also good, I guess? It's around this time that the franchise became more about stealthy jungle-Rambo massacres and less GI dog-mutant or Red Cross with guns. And the right kind of stealth too. The kind where if you play your cards right, you are the scariest thing on the island.

When I'm playing this game and you see this man, you are half a second from a lung-full of jungle knife. 

It was the pirates or mercenaries lying awake at night dreading the entitled SoCal douchebag at the other end of the machete rather than the other way around. And these games give you plenty of opportunities to give some South Pacific meth addict a good reason to regret at least one decision he made recently, but is only really half of what the games are about.

The Far Cry worlds are lousy with enemy outposts, drug farms and fortresses but no matter how crammed with ornery dudes and assault rifles, these bits are civilisation compared to the thousands of lethal acres the developers built around them. These are games where you can get your shit wrecked crossing the road. Amongst many, many other things:

And that's one of the main things that makes them so awesome. Because the minute you leave the road and delve into the jungle, the tables turn. You may be the predator in a military base full of heavily armed guards, but out in the wild, you're nothing but six feet of Asian-American meat feast and it never feels fair.

In an autumn forest full of very well-rendered trees, spotting a clouded leopard before it spots you is like trying to find your keys in another pair of jeans in another room in the dark and your keys have teeth. And if you're more than ten strokes out in open water, there is never not a shark behind you.

Tigers are by far the worst though, my (entirely rational) real-life terror of sharks notwithstanding. You can avoid water. But you can't avoid something that may well have been tracking you the second you left your quadbike and is easily more dangerous than a soldier with three foot of body armour in every direction and a flamethrower and is also basically fucking invisible.

Make no mistake: Far Cry is Darwinism in action. Try disagreeing while you're being pooped out the back of a tiger. Doesn't work.

As seen in several Final Fantasy: 

The Japanese don't experience irony like the rest of us, so when we hear of a monster called a 'malboro' they don't understand how we can be surprised that it's not just a cloud of smoke spraying out of a footballer's wife. Oh, wait it's Marlboro? Sorry, I take it back, Japan. I can see how you missed that.

Besides looking like a Sarlacc-squid hybrid, malboros feature all over the Final Fantasy spectrum of games as shitty enemies whose halitosis causes a noxious spray of status effects. To those of you who don't play RPGs because you're too busy having sex and finding closure from life's challenges, a status effect is much like an STI. And getting caught short by a Great Malboro means you're getting blasted with basically every STI known to science at once. So at this point, everyone knows what to do: Scream for a doctor and hope your last fevered words aren't too stupid.

Damn. And it really doesn't look any better post-3D graphics engines. 

As seen in Elder Scrolls: Skyrim:

Skyrim was a masterclass in open-world design. It was also buggy as all hell: riddled with bad writing and acting, technical faults, pointlessly obtuse difficulty spikes and spiders. But, again, totally awesome. It is possibly the ultimate flawed gem. Because for every shopkeeper that floated into the air and got stuck halfway through a wall without shutting up about her goddamn wares, there were hours of organic adventuring fun stretching out as far as the mediocre draw distance could cope with. 

Much like Far Cry, the land of Skyrim was also stuffed with assholes that wanted nothing but your precious Khajiit coat or gold or just didn't like your face or whatever. So you got killed pretty often. Some of the things that killed you were probably just folk trying to feed the families; pretty much everything else that did was ripped off from Tolkien and understandably upset about it. But did they really have to take it out on your sensitive elf skin?

Eh?

So there are trolls and giants and orcs and goblin-flavoured, subterranean terrors and all the rest of it. But there are also monsters copied from other works of fiction! Like spriggans. And dragons obviously. Which for supposedly extinct creatures are worryingly pest-like. 

Hagravens are one of the most dangerous denizens of Skyrim and actually not from Tolkien or Medieval mythology. Because they're Greek. The treacherous sirens are half-woman, half-bird creatures and while they're fairly sexy, mostly, hagravens will have much the same effect on your turgid, fantasy erection as your character: withering magic death and avian ticks. These things are seriously unsexy. Perhaps dangerously so. 

And speaking of dangerous, this is a world where 'dragon' is basically a form of weather. Wait hang on, that might be the best idea I've ever had. Can you imagine the weatherman coming on and saying that? Well you don't need to. And also it's Prince Charles doing it.  

As seen in Mass Effect 3:

If you don't play games, you may be beginning to notice that the creators of some of these beloved products haven't gotten over Tolkien. And you'd be right. Because no-one has. This is why.

The twisted face of evil in the Lord of the Rings is probably the generic orc, because Sauron doesn't have a face. He's a floating eye made of fire. Tolkien knew, that to make something truly awful, you should make it good first. The orcs were elves once, as we all well know if we spent the noughties obsessing over culture instead of socialising. Tortured and mutilated yada yada. Elves are your perfect lifeform: wise, long-lived and suspiciously fey but if you submit them to suffering, become the absolute worst.

This idea, that even the best of us can become savages so easily, is one of the fundamental horror themes. It's why we used to fear zombies. Because they showed us the beast within and how close we are to savagery. Obviously they're not now, because they're everywhere. Today, zombies're just an easy representation of how much we hate each other as humans in an easy, lumbering, mindless package we don't have to feel bad about slaughtering with cricket bats.

The Mass Effect series spent two games building up to one final, desperate struggle against an ancient machine race with a hard-on for the extermination of all sentient life in the galaxy. And the seemingly insurmountable 'Reapers' pull a total Sauron on everyone and mutilate the various alien species into horrible, piping-covered techno monsters. And in equally Tolkienian form, the most intelligent and advanced race become the most awful enemies in the game. And the fact that that race is made up entirely of sexy ladies with a penchant for space stripping is somehow just bacon bits on the terror salad.

Did I mention that they're also magic and bi and a few other things that nerds long for?

As seen in every platform game since 1981 & change:

Bottomless and spiked pits have claimed more gamers' lives than diabetes. If every loss to the diabolical pits was given a funeral, it would take more material than there is in the universe just to make the ink to write GAME OVER on all the gravestones. So many virginities were sacrificed to Super Mario that Nintendo video game landfill sites are haunted and you can't even access them unless you're twice-certified as a necromancer.

My point is, these fucking holes have caused me more problems than, well, regular holes. And if that isn't scary, then I don't know what is. Apart from the obvious: