Who Wants Muskrats?

Don't tell me there's no cancer in us. I've seen it. I've felt it. I've watched it consume and transform and weaken, turning our own mechanisms against us to pull us inward, shrinking us to grow itself. Leonard Cohen said of democracy, "it's coming for America first, the cradle of the best, and of the worst. It's here they've got the range and the machinery of change, it's here they've got the spiritual thirst." Only the machinery got twisted and the spirituality became a cudgel. I forever believe in our better angels while remaining ever mindful of the deeds of our devils. The true strength, the true majesty of this thing America is the constant struggle to be better, to be truer to the ideals and the struggles and the compromises that birthed us, to live the balance and the tension, never ever ever forgetting that we are not special, we are not blessed, we are not exceptional unless we earn it. America is more than a plot of land stretching across a continent. America is more than customary deference to a flag. America is a bold idea, a line scratched in the earth, a declaration of purpose and belief, and its high time we stood on the proper side of that line once again.

Go forth, Americans. Do your duty. Reclaim your honor and your birthright. Loudly, triumphantly reaffirm your faith in what we are all meant to be. Go now.

I have no idea how long it's been since last I posted.  Quite some time, that much is certain.  So much has changed.  I have a cat, for one thing.  She's sitting between my lap and the keyboard, and given enough provocation, she will rise up to traipse across the keys. switching Firefox to fullscreen mode and turning karet browsing on, as is her wont.  Actually, she's chosen option 2, furiously biting me.  And now she's run out of the room.  People wonder why I'm a dog person.

In addition to being a dog person, I've become... a more complete person, more comfortable in my own skin.  I've become even more certain about my path in this world (it leads to making video games), and I've found even more kindred spirits with whom to walk.  Things just make more sense, and I can see so much more clearly.  The way we're all trying to be superstars, even if we do so by fighting furiously against that very urge.  We're all grasping.  It's all just out of reach.

It is almost certain that this doesn't amount to a return to posting for me, though I doubt that will leave anyone distraught.  If anything, this is a celebration of the muse that still dances in the back of my brain and reminds me that I tend to spell better than many.  The cat is back in my lap, demanding attention.  Her name is Kitty.  She's purring and attacking the headphone cable.  I don't know what my intentions are with this post.  Contact with those lost, most likely.  I wonder if others have grown too big for my silly little sandbox, or if they started that way and I was just slow to catch on.  Whatever the answer, whatever I intend, I suppose I kept this account open for a reason.  So here it is, whatever it is.

One of my favorite ideas about game design is that of morality - creating a situation in which the player's understanding of right and wrong is tested, hopefully with somewhat unsettling results.  Players are used to the near-complete moral freedom or total lack of moral consideration afforded by most games.  In almost all instances, coming into contact with a non-player character (NPC) in a new game means the same thought - can I kill this person?  Most game designers know that this tendency exists, and they have a handful of ways to deal with it.  In many cases, they simply allow it.  Yes, you can kill that person, and there's no real consequence for doing so.  In Half-Life, non-player characters can (usually) be slaughtered with abandon.  If a security guard sees you doing it, he'll probably open fire, but they're pushovers, and just more fodder for mayhem.  In a few cases, an NPC is integral to the plot, needed to open a door to allow the player to continue further.  Half-Life's handling of these instances is one of its few clunky bits - killing such an NPC ends the game with a message saying that the player failed to preserve necessary resources.  This is another common method - killing the "good guys" abruptly ends the game.  This method is employed in Call of Duty 3, and it makes certain portions of the game almost unplayable.  As you try to clear a trench system of pesky Nazis, your cohorts merrily dash in front of you at inopportune times, catching your Nazi-intended bullets with their heads and promptly ending your run with a "Friendly fire will not be tolerated!" message.  In the former instance, the player simply learns who they can and can't kill by loading a previous saved game and it's on with the mayhem.  In the latter, killing friendlies becomes incredibly frustrating, but there's no sense of moral compunction, just a blindingly obvious in-game rule.  Another method, employed in Half-Life 2, is to make it essentially impossible to kill friendlies.  When the player places their targeting reticle over a friendly or important character, their gun lowers and cannot be fired.  This avoids the CoD 3-esque frustration, but it also absolves the player of any and all moral consideration.  The line between good guys and bad guys (or at least important characters and cannon fodder) is perfectly clear and immutable.  Other games, like the Grand Theft Auto series, take great pride in the fact that you can kill basically anyone (with the exception of a few story-related characters who must be protected in the missions in which they appear), though cops and friends of the recently slaughtered will react appropriately.  These games take great pride in the complete freedom they offer, but that same sense of freedom again lifts the moral consideration from the player's soldiers.  The worlds of these games are lawless and amoral.  While the player's actions may be objectively wrong (for instance, killing a crowd of passers-by for no reason), in the world of the game there is no real sense of that wrong beyond the inconvenience presented by the reaction of cops and cohorts.  A final method, the one closest to what I'm interested in making, exists in games like Knights of the Old Republic, Fable, Fallout, and (to a certain extent) Mercenaries.  In these games, who you kill can have a very direct impact on the how the game progresses.  Using the Jedi/Sith light/dark dichotomy, Knights of the Old Republic and other Star Wars games have give the player the option to use "light" or "dark" powers while also judging their actions to be "good" or "evil," with these determinations constantly adjusting the player's position on a spectrum between the light/good side and the dark/evil side.  Fable employs a very similar system, with the position on the spectrum having an impact on the physical appearance of the player character, along with the options available to them as they move forward.  Evil actions mean more evil-based spells and techniques are available, while good actions point the player toward more good.  There is some room for play, but the overall system is almost immediately apparent to the player in the same way the "right" answers tend to be entirely obvious on a Cosmo quiz: Is your boyfriend a jerk?  If you're carrying in groceries, does he A> Offer to carry them for you, B> Ignore you and watch sports, C> Punch you in the gut and laugh, or D> Tell you he wants to see other people?  The levers are right there, and it's immediately clear what pulling them will bring about.  Mercenaries offers a more interesting pseudo-morality, though its inner workings are every bit as clear.  The player is (surprise) a mercenary in a near-future conflict in Korea.  Several interested groups are simultaneously pursuing their own goals in the area, and the player can elect to work with any of them at almost any time.  Working for one will often impact the player's standing with one or more of the others.  While the story does set up some basis for qualitative reasons for siding with one group over another, such as identification with one group's overall goal, the gameplay doesn't stress these considerations, typically leading to the player carefully balancing each faction's opinion of them, playing the middle to the greatest benefit.  There's a moral choice in there, but it's not terribly important, and it doesn't require much thought beyond choosing the best way to win the game.  This is an interesting start, but I want to see people really struggle with questions of right and wrong.

The in-game moment that crystallized this notion in my head came early in 2001's Red Faction.  In the first level of the game, mistreated mine workers on Mars rise up against their oppressive corporate overlords and begin a general revolt.  As other miners begin taking on the guards and corporate workers between themselves and freedom, the player does much the same, running along a very linear path from the depths of the mines toward the surface.  Along the way, they encounter many different kinds of enemies, from low-ranking, poorly armed guards to heavy enforcer-types.  In that first level, I took a shot at a poorly armed guard, who immediately yelled "Don't shoot!  I'm not armed!"  I hesitated - here was a moral dilemma previously unseen in games.  An erstwhile enemy had apparently been rendered non-threatening.  Should that enemy be spared?  Will the game allow for something like mercy?  What should I do?  These thoughts were dispelled when the same guard pulled out a concealed pistol and opened fire anew.  The only option was clear - kill him.  For a moment, though, it was unclear, and that moment lodged in my head and became one of the defining motivations for my desire to make games.

This brings me (at torturously long last) to S.T.A.L.K.E.R - Shadow of Chernobyl.  The long-delayed product of Ukranian developer GSC Game World,  S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has occupied much of my fleeting free time of late, and it comes very close to offering something like the morality-tweaking I hope to create.  Very close, but not quite.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. drops the player into the wilds of a 30 square kilometer area around and including the Chernobyl nuclear power plant that suffered a catastrophic explosion that spread radiation over a massive area in 1986.  In the world of the game, as in real life, a large portion of that area has been cordoned off and remains sparsely populated and highly contaminated.  In the game, this area (known as "The Zone") has since seen the advent of Stalkers, scavengers who comb the irradiated land for valuable artifacts with strange, often useful properties.  As people with little to lose began to move to the Zone to seek their fortune, the Russian army moved to secure the area more effectively, while stalkers already in the Zone began to form into groups united by common beliefs about the nature and merits of the Zone.  Amidst the occasional clashes between these often opposing entities, unaffiliated stalkers continue to hunt for treasures, tangling with mutant beasts and bandits while (hopefully) avoiding deadly radiation and bizarre "anomalies" that can quickly eviscerate anyone unlucky or incautious enough to step into their area of effect.  By the time the player arrives on the scene as an amnesiac stalker who has just regained consciousness, an uneasy equilibrium exists in the Zone.  The factions are staying out of each others' way, for the most part, and a person who steps carefully can avoid most confrontations.  Of course, there's not much game to be had with that.  Before long, the player finds him or herself able to pick sides, much like Mercenaries, offering a bit of that self-determination I crave.  Even before that, though, the game toys with a much deeper (and to me, more interesting) test of the player's morals and mercy.

Battles in the game are difficult and frantic, often feeling much more like multiplayer matches than tangles with computer-controlled opponents.  This comes largely from better-than-average AI, but the fact that the enemies aren't ridiculously underpowered pushovers, even at the outset of the game, goes a long way to making the player feel the kind of vulnerability and stress that is typically found only in matchups against human opponents with identical levels of health and armament.  Once a battle has ended, the player is typically battered and in need of ammo and first aid, and the way to get it is to search the dead bodies conveniently left behind by the fight.  After one such battle, I sauntered merrily to the side of a fallen enemy only to find that, well, he wasn't quite dead yet.  Unlike his fellows, his prone form was writhing in pain as he moaned and called out for his friends to help him.

Bear in mind that these are not monsters.  These are humans, albeit irksome and overly aggressive specimens of the species.  Sure, games have been killing humans for a while now, but somehow, this feels different.  These feel just a step removed from the player - even though they're out to get you, their motivation isn't all that hard to understand or antithetical to the player's own.  These aren't Nazis or evil corporate minions or anything quite so monolithic and faceless.  There are areas in the Zone that are relatively safe, and when a player visits them, he or she will find clusters of stalkers sitting around having conversations, sharing a drink, playing guitar, and resting up for their next foray into the wilds.  Something about these safe zones makes all of the human characters seem more... human, and makes the rest of the Zone that much more sad.  Anyone who is there is at the raggedy edge, pursuing whatever path they think is the best way to get theirs in the hopes of returning to the world outside ("The Big Land" in the game's lingo).  The soldiers pulled a lousy assignment and are trying to live long enough to transfer out.  The stalkers are ex-cons or other down on their luck types trying to find a way to get a leg up back in the Big Land.  The bandits are crooks, sure, but some of them are just stalkers who gave up on trying to find anything good and now just rob the ones who haven't.  These are people, just ordinary people, and all of a sudden one was bleeding and begging for his life in front of me.  At other points in the game, when neutral or friendly characters were in a similar state, I could choose to give them one of my first aid kits, saving their lives.  Would the same option be available here?  Maybe, if I healed a downed enemy, he'd rise slowly to his feet and say "Thank you.  You didn't have to do that, you could have killed me and you didn't.  I can't promise that we'll never be on opposite sides of a fight again, but for now, let's go in peace," or something like that.

There were moments in the first Half-Life where the player would happen upon a group of Marines in a pitched battle with the nasty aliens that had infested the Black Mesa Research Center.  As both groups wanted the player dead, the best thing to do was to hide somewhere and let them slug it out, taking on the weakened victor after the dust settled.  Still, I always felt a twinge of... something, and more often than not, I'd jump in and start killing the aliens.  The Marines wanted me dead, sure, but they were still human.  Even then, when AI wasn't anywhere near as good as it is now (the fact that the Marines could work together at all was kind of a major leap), I held out some hope that a Marine I'd directly rescued would lower his gun and say "Move on, Freeman [the character's name is Gordon Freeman].  Next time I see you, it's weapons free again."  Never happened, but the idea of characters reacting in a more nuanced way to the actions of the player... wow.

So there I was, confronting the same basic idea in the wilds around Chernobyl.  To my chagrin, there was no option to give the wounded man a first aid kit.  Nor could I search his body for goodies, as he was still alive.  Eventually, I'd reach an area where I'd chosen to leave a disabled person alive and find that they were still there, still moaning for help, more than a day after I'd laid them low.  This usually only happens in areas where the mutant monsters don't roam, since they'll finish off the wounded and drag them away for a snack, but it often happens in areas where the fallen man's cohorts should eventually find him and heal him (or finish him off themselves).  There is apparently a modification for the game coming that will allow you to offer aid in these instances, though I don't know how the AI will react when that happens.

A similar situation arises in one of the game's side quests (all of which are optional).  The player is often given search and destroy missions, like clearing out a nest of mutant dogs.  When the target to be sought out and eliminated is a human, however, things get kind of interesting.  In some cases, the target sees the player coming and recognizes them as a threat, opening fire as soon as possible.  In others, the target doesn't see you as anything other than a stalker out wandering the Zone.  The player can walk up to the target, strike up a conversation, and even trade with him (there are no women in the Zone for some reason) before blowing him away and heading back to collect the reward.  In one case, the target, a deserting soldier, knew I was there to kill him.  He didn't raise a finger to defend himself - he just pleased with me to let him live.  I decided it would be wrong to murder him, so I went back to the person who had given me the job, thinking all the while how cool it was that the game actually made me care to spare the soldier.  When I got back to my employer and told him I refused to do the job, he took it in stride - I was hoping he'd get angry, refusing to hire me for any jobs in the future, or at least telling me that failing more jobs would jeopardize future collaborations.  It's a shame that making what I felt to be the right choice had no consequences in the game world, but it at least allowed for such a decision and gave compelling reasons for both options.

That the game evokes such a strong sense of place and the reality of the non-player characters is a major step, and I have little doubt that the developers wanted to do all of the things I think of when I see the holes in the overall presentation.  The whole game feels very much like something I would want to do, so I think we're thinking along similar lines.  GSC Game World will be announcing new S.T.A.L.K.E.R. titles in July, so there's reason to think they'll be building on the foundation and fixing up these little inconsistencies.  If they do, they'll be pushing a hell of a product.

As it stands, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is already a hell of a product.  It offers an incredibly immersive and engrossing world and storyline, along with a terrific amount of player freedom - remember those safe havens I mentioned, with the stalkers sitting around the campfire playing guitar?  Yeah, you could slaughter them all if you wanted to.  You can also join the different factions and take all sorts of different paths through and around the story.  The Zone is confusing, intriguing, and occasionally deeply disturbing (in the best possible way).  The engine feels clunky and a bit rushed at times, with crashes to the desktop far too common for my liking, and there's a very palpable sense of the developer's intent versus the game that made it to stores, but it's still one of the best games I've played in years.  It does a lot of what Half-Life 2 did right in linear fashion, but strips away the linearity and lets the player do things at his or her own pace and according to his or her own goals and style of play.  It feels like art, even if it's flawed.  I can't wait to see what the developers build from here on out.

Word has come down from the Entertainment Software Ratings Board that Take Two Interactive's Manhunt 2 will be rated AO (Adults Only).  The rarely used AO rating has usually graced openly pornographic games, and while this is probably not the first time it has been applied for violence, it may be one of the most mainstream instances.  It's also causing quite a bit of a headache for Take Two.  The game was destined for release on the Nintendo Wii and the Sony Playstation 2, but both companies (as well as Microsoft) have policies that will not allow a licensed developer to release Adults Only content for their consoles.  Take Two is now left with essentially no choice - they can tone down the violence to squeak by with an M (Mature) rating (suitable for ages 17 and up), or they can scrap the title.  Even if they were to release it for the PC, which has no central body deciding what can and cannot appear, many of the major retailers of games have similar policies about stocking AO content.  Again, there seems to be no real choice for T2 - the game's violence will either be toned down, or it will not see the light of day.

Manhunt 2 is an interesting test case.  Like its predecessor, it is an action/adventure game with a heavy emphasis on stealth, in which the player, in the guise of an escaped/escaping prisoner must use whatever is at hand to... ahem... "deal with" their pursuers and tormentors.  The first game garnered notoriety for the gruesome nature of its violence.  When the player managed to sneak up on an unsuspecting enemy and execute an attack, gore was plentiful, with blood often spraying onto the "lens" of the in-game camera.  As the player character had been sprung from death row to act as an executioner in snuff films made by and for the entertainment of his liberator, encouragement for more gore was implicit in the storyline and structure.  It's reasonable to expect that Manhunt 2 features more of the same, and indeed screenshots echo the original's gritty look and atmosphere.  T2 has talked about the fact that the second game's protagonist, Daniel Lam, is more reticent about killing his way to freedom than the first's unrepentant James Earl Cash, but the emphasis is still on executing brutally rendered murders as a path to freedom.

What makes this interesting (at least to me) is that the Manhunt series is far from alone in the stealth genre.  Most of these types of games are all about sneaking up on unsuspecting targets and incapacitating them.  Some allow targets to be simply knocked unconscious, some leave them dead, and others provide a per-victim choice of action.  In most cases, the killing is fairly antiseptic, usually taking the form of a swiftly broken neck.  The core mechanic of the gameplay is very similar, while the presentation offers up the critical difference.

One of the most popular stealth series is Ubisoft's Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell.  In these games, the player takes the role of Sam Fisher, stealthy super-agent, as he traverses the globe, snapping necks for democracy.  Sam has a wide array of weapons at his disposal, including many non-lethal options, but even when the situation leads to deadly force, it is presented with very little blood.  Recently, the series has strayed into darker territory, with Sam's motives and options becoming more muddled, but this darkening of story has not changed the presentation of violence much, if at all.  The first two titles in the series were rated T (Teen, suitable for ages 13 and up), while the two subsequent titles have been rated M, with the forthcoming 5th game likely to carry an M as well.

Here we have two series with essentially the same core - move stealthily from point A to point B.  Manhunt places far less emphasis on the possibility of avoiding fights, but it's entirely possible to play Splinter Cell in the same way, opting to kill every enemy the player encounters rather than trying to slink by in the shadows.  Again, the difference is all about presentation.  The fact that the killing is gory and without Sam Fisher's clear-cut moral rectitude is what makes it Adults Only.  I'm not arguing with that - it makes perfect sense.  What I have trouble with is the seemingly subtle line that T2, Sony, and Nintendo expected the title to walk.  They were well aware of the style and content of the game's predecessor, and surely they expected the new title to receive the same rating.  Since we haven't played the game, we can't know if it is actually more gory than the original or if the ESRB has decided to make their ratings more strict, but is it reasonable that the first title was rated M in the first place?  If so, what makes the second so much worse?  If not, is the somewhat sanitized violence of Splinter Cell better?  The enemies are still dead, even if they're not lying in a pile of their own entrails.  Is the issue with death, gore, or moral justification?

We probably all have our own answers to those questions, and they're probably all fairly similar.  Most of us don't wince much at death in entertainment media, unless it's presented in certain ways.  We feel better about on-screen killings if we can agree with the motivating idea behind them.  Games automatically ask us to accept such a motivating idea on at least some level, since we're guiding the player character and there's no "I don't want to kill anyone because I don't think the situation merits it" button.  We still make those decisions internally - my moral compass kept me from playing Grand Theft Auto 3 for quite a long time.  Of course, that compass became a non-issue once I realized the game was a hell of a lot of fun.

The ratings are very important in allowing appropriate parties to make that kind of judgment, whether it's the gamer themselves or their parents or guardians.  I think the Manhunt 2 situation gives us a good opportunity to look at those ratings, consider where the lines fall between them, and analyze what we're willing to see.  It seems reasonable to me that Manhunt should receive an Adults Only rating.  I don't know that it's reasonable that the console manufacturers maintain a hard line against AO games, since they wouldn't have had a problem with the same game if the ESRB had handed down an M.  That calls for some nuance that could quickly become difficult to manage in the face of a lot of titles treading the fine line, though.  Still, should AO automatically be a kiss of death?

It's been a long time since I've posted anything on Vox.  I haven't had a whole lot to share lately, as the minutiae of my life have seemed either bland or inappropriate for the forum.  This just served to reinforce my long-held belief that while I will read and find interest in other people's blogs about their personal lives, I don't know that there's really much place for me in writing my own.  This brings us to the warning and the change of focus.

WARNING: Every so often, I have thoughts about my chosen vocation (that being video game design), and I want to vent them into a public forum.  From here on out, I'm going to use this space for exactly that.  If you dislike reading what will certainly be rather nit-picky "Inside Baseball" kind of stuff about games, please feel free to unsubscribe.  My feelings will not be hurt.  At the same time, there is some possibility that you may find some of what I have to say interesting and informative, as I'll probably address instances where video game culture and mainstream culture collide fairly regularly.  Most of the pundits and journalists who talk about those collisions tend to get a few things wrong, and as an insider, I can dispel some of the rumors and lend credence to others.  I like to believe I am emblematic of the changing face of video game fans - I have a full-time job and an excellent social life.  I am not a slacker.  I don't live in my parents' basement (or anyone's, for that matter).  I am older than 13.  I have a functioning brain.  I also know quite a bit about the game industry and game design.  Hopefully, those factors will combine to form an interesting read.

It's been a long time, DU shouldn't have left you...

This will be an unapologetically video game related post.  Consider yourself forewarned, though I don't think the subject merits warning, per se.  There are those who aren't interested.  Turn away now.  The rest gives no warning or apology.

I finally got myself an XBox 360.  It's been a long time coming.  I wish I could say I scrimped and I saved and I finally balanced everything out to find myself on the sunny side of the equation.  I did scrimp, I did save, and every time I thought I saw the sun rising on those empty composite video ports on the back of my TV, something came up.  Car needed new tires.  School books needed purchasing.  The holidays made me put aside my selfishness.  Whatever it was, it got between me and my super video game system.  Eventually, I had enough.  This has created a situation in which my normal expenditures make me worry that my debit card will cause klaxons or explosions the next time it is swiped, but not far from me resides a white machine full of fancy graphics that makes me genuinely happy.  That said, I have to register a complaint...

Gears of War is tremendously unimpressive.

For those of you not in the know, Gears of War was the XBox 360's killer app.  Given Bungie's insistence on taking quite a bit of time with Halo 3, it was the game that would convince the universe that the XBox 360 was worth a damn.  On the face of things, it has succeeded.  It has pierced the Japanese top 10, which is quite a thing for an XBox title.  It has sold a huge number of copies, and it is the game that the various critics and media outlets have showered with praise.  It has been characterized as the absolute no-brainer.  You buy an XBox 360, you buy this game.  Gone are the days in which systems come with games (Nintendo, I salute you for actually packing a game with the Wii).  As such, you're going to buy a game, and the media would have you believe you should be buying Gears of War.

I should give a little bit of background.

Gears of War has been in development for a long time.  It has been an XBox 360 title to watch for almost as long as we've known the XBox 360 was to exist.  All that time we knew that there was to be a Halo title for the machine, given that Bungie is a first-party developer for Microsoft.  At the same time we knew that Bungie would be taking its time with Halo 3, not only undoing the disappointment of Halo 2 but ending the story on a strong note.  That being the case, the 360 needed another big title, and the early screenshots of Gears made it clear that this was a contender.

Okay, so the graphics looked special.  There were other titles with graphics that looked worthy of attention.  Isn't every next generation supposed to be about something beyond graphics?  Yes, and I'm not talking about what next-generation video format it supports.  The real promise of each generation of hardware lies in its ability to offer new arenas of gameplay.  Often this means better graphics, but it also includes better AI for enemies and friendlies, along with more immersive environments and a better sense of "being there."  Graphics can't be separated from that overall sensation, but they aren't the be-all and end-all.

Thing is, with Gears, Epic Megagames was talking the talk.  They seemed to be acknowledging that exact thought, that graphics weren't the end of the line.  Cliffy B talked about narrative, and overall involvement.  He seemed to be talking about a game that would transcend the traditional boundaries and leave gamers completely amazed.

That may be what he was talking about, but what he and his crew delivered was something else, something deeply lacking.  What they delivered was wall-to-wall Epic Megagames.

Years ago I played Unreal.  It was technically quite beautiful, but the game itself was boring and unimaginative.  The narrative took a lot of stupid shortcuts that were obviously not considered shortcuts by the developers.  It was a long game, requiring a lot more patience than I had to beat.  I filed it along with most of id's offerings - pretty, promising, but ultimately worthless.  It proved that a better creative crew could do quite a bit with its elements, like Valve would eventually do with the Quake engine.

Some time later, Epic released Unreal Tournament.  The engine sported a few new graphical tricks, and the focus was on multiplayer games, rather than a story-driven single-player game.  The characters were all ridiculously over-the-top - males with tiny heads and builds that make the most steroidal NFL players look like Pee Wee Herman, females that make Penthouse Playmates look like Sarah Plain and Tall, all sporting names that come directly from the most bombastic and silly of the Dungeons and Dragons sourcebooks.  In short, Unreal Tournament spoke directly to the worst stereotypes of gamers.  What's worse is that it didn't quite feel right.  The guns all felt floaty, the gameplay all felt disconnected and boring.  It was, in my mind, a complete failure.

Over the intervening years, Epic managed to solve a lot of the technical problems.  They made the weapons feel more solid, and the overall game started to feel more worthwhile.  The characters were still foolish caricatures with dumbass names, but at least the game was fun to play.

Into this newly mellowed sensibility came news of Gears of War.  The initial screens made it clear that the game would be a graphical powerhouse, but here was Epic's Cliffy B talking about things beyond graphics - story, immersion, investment.  The concept of "decimated beauty," or whatever the hell he was calling the overall style of the art direction.  He seemed to be speaking directly to my ideas about what games should be.  When the game came out and garnered universal praise, I found myself thinking that I had to get a 360 in order to play this game, which simply had to be revolutionary.  The praise that was being heaped upon it couldn't be misguided, could it?

It took me a while to get a 360.  In the months I've striven toward that goal, I've heard quite a bit about Gears, all of it falling in line with what had come before.  Now I've got the machine, and Gears was my first game purchase.  I've played it, and the time has come for me to render an opinion.  And here it is.

What the hell are you people thinking?

It is customary for those who consider themselves the "hardcore" of any form of expression to view the popular elements of that form with disdain.  Indie kids hate the Grammys.  Film lovers think the Oscars are a joke.  People the world over say "I liked them before they got big."  This is the way of the world.  Still, I have to wonder what the hell leads people to think that Gears of War deserves such praise.

Let's break it down.  Gears of War is a third-person shooter that relies heavily on finding cover.  The player controls Marcus Fenix, who is sprung from prison at the outset in order to continue a war against the Locust, an alien(?) race bent on wiping out humanity.

Okay.  We have to start with Marcus Fenix.  He's being sprung from jail by necessity and given a second chance.  He can be a super-soldier and prove all his detractors wrong.  And his last name is "Fenix."  I don't care how you spell it, it ends up meaning "lazy" on the part of the writers.  So there's strike one.

Strike two is standard Epic Megagames.  To call the character design "exaggerated" is to call a shotgun to the face "subtle."  To a one, the human male characters are pituitary giants.  Armor that looks like a boombox strapped to their chests, each character is a steroid posterboy with a tiny, tiny head.  I've only seen one human female so far, and while she was at least more reasonably attired and proportioned, that seemed only because of her role as a helpful, demure semi-authority figure.

So the characters look silly.  That's not uncommon, right?  Metal Gear Solid gets tons of praise, and its characters are largely recycled from anime and '80s action movies.  What's the problem?

Allow me to remind you that Cliffy B talked about getting the player more emotionally involved.  Then allow me to explain that the dialogue and storytelling in Gears of War... sucks.  Seriously.  It's crap.  Take, for example, the interaction between Fenix and Baird.  Not long after Fenix and his rag-tag bunch of misfits manages to rescue Baird and his... rag-tag... bunch of... misfits, Baird goes off about how Fenix is an asshole.  This goes on for some time, even after Fenix risks his life to rescue Baird and others.

Uh, why?

I understand that certain people are doomed to rub each other the wrong way.  That's just part of human nature.  Even in those cases, though, there's usually at least the appearance of a reason.  It may be a flimsy pretense for treating each other like crap, but at least it's something.  Gears doesn't bother providing even that.  For some reason beyond the perception of normal folks, Baird hates the guy that has saved his ass on more than one occasion.

So the interpersonal relationships are... forced.  That's not entirely deadly.  People accept the odd terms of relationships all the time, as long as the dialogue is worth a damn, right?  Well, Gears can't claim that comfort.  The whole thing is made up of ridiculous bombast and corniness that tries the patience like you wouldn't believe (if you hadn't played it).  I'd quote an example, but if you've played the thing you already know how forgettable and yet memorably crappy the dialogue is.

Many of you will take this as a given, as I'm discussing a video game.  If I can achieve nothing else, I can hopefully inform you that that is no excuse whatsoever.  Valve created a compelling character in Gordon Freeman by never letting him speak a word.  In addition to allowing the player to assume what Gordon would say, this also kept him from ever saying anything stupid.  Bungie crafted a fun and intriguing relationship between the Master Chief and Cortana (the artificial intelligence temporarily lodged in his head with deft and clever conversations.  There is non-crap out there.  Gears simply ain't it.

We are led to believe that such concerns don't amount to much in the mind of the gamer.  We are told that gameplay is king and will override all other concerns.  For the most part, this is true.  If a game plays like crap, it wouldn't matter if the script was by David Mamet at the peak of his skill - no one would want to play it.  That said, the writing of the plot does have a large effect on overall enjoyment.  Still, we'll put that aside for a moment in order to talk about how the game plays.

When I first played Gears, I hated it.  I simply didn't grasp the fact that finding cover was the key to the game.  It's quite simple - fight outside of cover, you die.  I picked the "hardcore" difficulty setting to start with, because I consider myself very much a hardcore gamer.  It kicked my ass.  I didn't understand the cover mechanic and the game punished me for it.  After dropping back to the casual level (I'm so ashamed), things were more manageable, giving me time to understand just how critical the cover mechanic was.  I managed to get past the first level.

Once I had a handle on the way the game worked, it started to become more enjoyable.  Knowing the shape of things allowed me to get into crafty set pieces, with cool camera tricks adding a cool note of urgency to the proceedings.  Still, it all felt more than a bit... disconnected.  The visceral link to the characters just wasn't there.  It constantly brought to mind the Ani Difranco lyric "Beautiful, but boring."  The over-the-top gothic decimated cityscapes are technically impressive, but who cares, really?  There's no investment in the goings-on.

All of this brings me to the inevitable comparison with other games (yeah, yeah, I've already mentioned several other games, but this is as close to apples-to-apples as I'll get).  The other game I bought with the system was Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter.  I have a long history with the Ghost Recon series, as its first incarnation gave me some of the most enjoyable multiplayer I've yet experienced.  There was a magic to spending five minutes or more setting up a single shot with several cohorts, going over the exacting details of each enemy you were aiming at.  The second game in the series skipped the PC, and while I played it on the original XBox, it was basically fun, but forgettable.  I bought the third outing for the PC, but it crashed a lot and was extremely difficult in single-player.  It screamed to be played with friends, with each role (rifleman, grenadier, support gunner, sniper) played by those who excelled at those roles.  If I were to load it right now, I'd still be stuck about halfway through the second mission.

The 360 version is, quite simply, a revelation.  It follows the same story and mission structure as the PC version, with some concessions made for the differences between the platforms.  The command interface is drastically simplified, and the missions are smaller and more action-oriented.  Still, it's a tight, demanding game that feels right.  The dialogue and overall story are far from sparse, and it would be inaccurate to say that every line is spot-on, but all in all, it comes off quite reasonably, with the characters being at least on par with a decent action movie.

Thing is, it does a lot of what Gears of War does, and does it better.  It's a third-person shooter, and it feels much more grounded and reasonable than its more critically acclaimed cohort.  Beyond that, it gets many of the basic mechanics better than the more lauded title.  The cover mechanic, which Gears has grabbed a lot of praise for, is actually more intuitive and fun in Ghost Recon.  On top of that, the overall experience feels more varied.  The cover mechanic is powerful and effective, making the player feel like they're grabbing elusive shelter in the face of powerful opponents, but fighting outside of cover isn't an automatic death sentence, which goes a long way toward making the cover system feel like something other than a ham-fisted gimmick.  Most importantly, the game makes me want to keep playing.

In the end, Gears of War feels a lot like the other Epic Megagames titles I've played - a great tech demo waiting for a truly gifted company to realize its potential.  id has always been the same way - Quake 2 was fun, but it took Valve to turn the impressive engine into a compelling game.  The disappointing thing is that Cliffy B talked a really good line about how Gears would take the non-technical side of things to another level, but the game fails to deliver on that promise.  I want to make games, and what I want more than almost anything else is for the games I make to be intellectually challenging.  I want them to be disturbing and frightening, and I don't want the player to ever be able to step back and say "What the avatar just said was really stupid."  More than that I want the game to be fun to play, but with that achieved, the real gift of interactive media is in messing with the user's head.  I want my players to walk away from the game thinking "I enjoyed the hell out of that, but now I feel more than a little disturbed."  Gears of War seems far too content with "I enjoyed that a bit.  Let me load up a different game."

Seriously.  That business hurts.  Painful, painful business.  With the heightened photosensitivity and the blepharospasm.

If you could make a magic wish for a futuristic gadget or high-tech innovation, what would your item do? 
Submitted by Red Pen.

I'm gonna have to go with giant robot.

Today, I have set myself to a task - to reduce the amount of complaining I do.  I've known for a while that much of my conversation takes the form of a shared airing of grievances against uninvolved 3rd parties.  I don't want to do that anymore, as it doesn't really get me anywhere and just makes me seem like a negative jerk.  So no more.  There are some arenas that will still see complaints from me, such as politics, and I may still single out some things for derision from time to time, such as reality TV.  I will make a very serious effort not to bitch about my job, how busy I am, how much things cost, and the weather, along with the hundreds of various and sundry annoyances that plague everyone's existence.  If something is annoying me so, it is my duty to change it or shut the hell up.

You must have been a fashion victim at least once in your life. What hideous blunder did you commit? 
Submitted by Tina. 

My fashion-based blunders are too many to recount, and more may well be occurring even as I type.  The one that leaps immediately to mind took place in ... sixth grade, I think?  Partway through fourth grade, I had the opportunity to go to a magnet school.  I'm pretty sure my parents had already made the decision to send me, but they wanted to give me at least the appearance of a choice in the matter.  Of course, they front-loaded the "so, do you want to go?" with lots of talk about the well-equipped science and computer labs, and hey, I was(?) a nerd.  There was no choice to be made.  And so it was that I left the company of the kids I'd been friends with since preschool and found myself across town among an entirely different crowd.  These kids liked rap.  They wore the latest fad threads.  It's entirely possible that my old school chums were suddenly into the same sorts of things, but the overall newness of the magnet school made everything seem alien, and since I had no interest in clothes, I just chalked their trendiness up to some weird local affectation and went on my merry way.  My mom kept picking my clothes and I saw no problem with it.  I wasn't ostracized because of it (at least as far as I knew), so it was no cause for worry.  Sure, I wasn't a fashion plate, and there was always a sense that the girls I had crushes on would be more offended than flattered to learn I liked them, but for whatever reason, I was generally okay.

At the beginning of my sixth grade year, my parents realized that I'd soon be reunited with the old crowd when we all went to junior high school.  Fearing some sort of culture shock, they decided to put me back in my old school so that the reintroduction would be less difficult, what with the smaller class sizes and all.  This made perfect sense at the time.  So, suddenly I was back among the old gang, only... things were different.  Growth spurts had set in.  Clothes had become similarly popular.  Cliques had formed.  Hobbies had changed from Lego and G.I. Joe to, well, clothes and the formation of cliques.  Neither my wardrobe or my preferred leisure activities had changed, and the outsider status that hadn't bothered me in the alien landscape of the magnet school was now reflected in the eyes of the kids I had come up with, people I thought I knew well.  It wasn't pretty.

I committed myriad fashion crimes in those days, and while ignorance is not an excuse, there was no mercy upon which to throw myself in that court.  I remember a shirt, one that I rather liked - a maroon long-sleeved polo-type number that got singled out for special derision.  Apparently, it was too tight - a throwback to the '70s, they said.  I may have been wearing corduroy pants with it as well.  While I find some solace in the fact that '70s fashion came back around eventually, that didn't do me much good then.  Typing this now, the heckling seems pretty tame.  Back then, though, it was hell.  The nerdy outcast aura stuck with me for years, and is probably still rattling around in the back of my brain, quietly shaping my self-doubts.

Eventually, I got better.  Actually, my mom got better at keeping me in style.  My t-shirted geek slacker days have finally given over into an awareness that such things look really silly when one works for a living.  Just last night, mom sent me a fairly snazzy shirt, which I'm wearing right now.  So far, no one has called it a throwback to anything or laughed at me, but the day is young.  Even with this awareness of how I look, I still can't bring myself to care about clothes.  Yeah, I want to look nice, but why buy clothes when there are XBox 360s and computer parts to claim massive sums of coin?

Yeah, again, nerd.  Ah, well...