My 2012 in Gaming

I’ve never quite defined myself as a gamer, at least not a particularly intense one.  By the standards of the less casual (re: more *ahem* committed) players I’m sure I would come across as a heathen and a pretender akin to a johnny-come-lately Battlestar fan or the dreaded ‘fake geek girl’.  I’ve never waited in line for a game, or preordered one months in advance, and as far as I can remember I’ve never joined a forum or message board for the purposes of talking about a game, which always seemed to me to run counter to why one played a game in the first place, i.e. not spend time online interacting.  Dovetailing on that last sentence, I have also never – yes, NEVER – engaged in online play.  No FPS arenas or MMORPGs for me.  Games have always to me represented escapism first and competition second.  As such, beating a computer is satisfying enough without ‘graduating’ to human competition, or, God help me, cooperation.   

But I do play, and play pretty well, and when the game is good I really enjoy myself.  Gaming has been such an entertaining facet of my life that I employed Passion Number One, writing, to gaming a few years back, doing reviews for the online periodical Game Chronicles Magazine, a fabulous experience which I boast on to this day.  It was a valuable experience because it taught me examine games in acute detail before I bought them and become a savvier collector of titles.  In the wine world I would be known as a “score whore”, one who buys purely on the merit of critical raves.  But when you’re buying something that will gobble up ample quantities of free time (and when the price tag is usually around $60), I think there is a great deal of logic in seeking out titles that have wowed the discerning crowds.  I want my leisure time to be well spent.

Owing to that philosophy, a year of semi-serious gaming usually results in me tackling a few new titles, a few oldies (either re-played or never yet picked up) and a handful of casual experiences that are worth mentioning.  On to that there is an observation or two that might leave a mark in my mind as something to look for in the future of the industry: a sign of hope or a portent of doom, either or both can apply.

Dishonored

This would be my favorite of the year.  A hundred websites could describe why it is so great and an armful of prestigious awards would validate their praise; I can do no better.  Dishonored is often erroneously called ‘original’ when most people really mean ‘clever’.  The game’s alternate history take on a pseudo-Victorian realm is not necessarily an original idea; most of the elements within the story are mimicked from various steampunk-y sources and Britain-with-a-twist notions from the likes of Michael Moorcock and his ilk.  As an FPS game it is not original, and stealth-over-slaughter is not new either.  But there was something about Bethesda’s combination of all three of these concepts that made for a fantastically entertaining game; a brain teaser-plus-nail biter as fun to look at as it was to play.  While I found the story a tad light and rather predictable (your allies betray you when you have three missions left?? The Devil you say!) I also found I couldn’t care less because the game was such an engaging mix of elements: problem-solving, combat, stealth, and most intriguing, choice.  A game where any one of these tricksy reagents has been refined to near-perfection is gratifying to play.  A game where all of them work harmoniously in a way that is both exciting and intuitive is a rare find indeed.  Dishonored nails it.  I especially loved the how every problem could be tackled in a multitude of ways with the challenge undiminished regardless of which path you took: slipping quietly over the rooftops to your target was as gratifying as plowing through an army of guards with a flintlock in one hand and fistful of summoned rats in the other.  Will you assassinate your targets as ordered?  Or will you take the more subtle – and possibly more rewarding – challenge of disposing of them non-lethally?  The choice is yours.  Just don’t teleport yourself off a roof; the water isn’t clean.

Far Cry 3

Sublime, ridiculous. Ridiculous, meet sublime. Putting this one after Dishonored is sort of unfair to both games. Both are FPSs, but there the similarities end. I am not a veteran of the other FC titles; I bought this one based purely on hype, excellent reviews and its favorable E3 showing. Perhaps most compelling for me was the fact that it was universally considered a better single-player/campaign experience than an online co-op shooter. For the gamer who prefers to hunt alone, this was the silver platter for you.

FC3 is simply a blast; a cookie-cutter macho revenge fantasy that doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not, with some not-so-sly commentary on the gossamer-thin line between civility and madness (apparently crossing it usually involves killing lots of people, imagine that!). You run screaming into the face of beyond-impossible odds, blasting hordes of heavily-armed pirates on an island where most things can kill you if your attention wanders or you get distracted by the stellar scenery. I’ve played many shooters in my time, but this is the first to allow me the experience of lining up a long-distance sniper shot only to have my blood run cold at the raptor-like hiss of a komodo dragon slithering up kitty-corner to me hungry for my well-concealed ass.

It’s a sandbox through and through, and one of the nicest looking ones I’ve ever seen; try playing this after a session with Fallout 3 and you swear you’ll cry when the vibrant color of the beaches and jungles kiss your eyes like angel’s tears.  It’s also just a huge environment, and loaded with enough side quests to leave you exhausted.  Over a dozen vehicles to commandeer, over two dozen weapons, an enemy AI that is fun to trap but not always easy to fool, and, oh yeah, a wingsuit, perfect for a cliffside escape.  This game is a thief of time for sure, and I love it.

Demon’s Souls

I submit this as proof that being a score whore doesn’t always work.  This was an impulse buy, albeit one that seemed pretty informed at the time.  $20 thanks to its “Greatest Hits” designation and loaded with critical praise all over the box, I saw that it was a customizable RPG/fantasy combat game and wondered how I could have possibly missed it in its original run with this dearth of good feeling going its way. 

 

Well, as anyone familiar with this game or others from the same producer can tell you, playing Demon’s Souls is like watching an alcoholic relapse right in front of your eyes.  How is that, you say?  Don’t quite get the analogy?  Well, substance abusers are usually told in counseling that the definition of ‘insanity’ is repeating the same behavior over and over again while expecting different results.  A relapsing patient is one who reengages in pointless behavior even when he/she already knows the outcome will be awful and demoralizing.  That’s Demon’s Souls in a nutshell.  Put another way, it’s about as satisfying as a root canal from the Osmonds.  Put a third way, it’s fucking awful. 

No save points.  Extremely strong enemies.  Minimal curative tools/healing magic.  Regardless of how far you make it through a level, when you die you are re-spawned at the absolute beginning of that level, forced to redo every action, re-kill every vanquished foe, and, if you’re lucky, advance slightly further than you did the last time, moving the ball up the field perhaps a yard or two before being forced to do it all again.  And again.  You do this only after being penalized for your prior failures by having your store of potions reduced, thus lessening the odds of even reaching your previous high water mark.  Add to this a geometrically increasing sense of trepidation and impending failure – you REALLY don’t want to have to do it all over for the 30^th time so don’t screw up! – making you more timid and fatalistic each play-thru and you’re left an enraged, maddened, inconsolable and blubbering mess.  A mess who has just spent two hours trying to beat one level and has nothing to show for it but the ashen taste of failure.

Being the open-minded individual I am, I might be inclined to have a shred of empathy toward the parcels of over-eager ‘fans’ who try way too hard to love this title.  You might have seen them around:  aloof, too-serious dudes and dudettes who claim to love Demon’s Souls prohibitively difficult gameplay because it’s a “pure” gaming experience that rewards the Spartan-esque discipline required to succeed.  You can identify them in the field by their distinguishing love of all things Japanese and their disdain for the rest of the world’s fixation on “easy solutions”, “childish rewards”, and, apparently, “fun”. Yes, I might try to see where their devotion comes from…if Demon’s Souls wasn’t also such an UGLY, BLAND, and POORLY DESIGNED game.  Take your pick: joyless, muddied graphics with puke-inspired color palates; tone-deaf, funereal music and non-existent effects, and a clumsy, counterintuitive control scheme; it’s all here for your $20.  

I’m sure people who fancy themselves “purists” or any permutation of that and similar adjectives will find me a plum target for their snobbish ire.  Fuck them.  It’s an awful fucking game and I couldn’t trade it in fast enough.

Other games to make it though this year:

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (finally!)

Infamous

Infamous 2

Ghostbusters: The Video Game

Batman: Arkham City (replay)

Biggest Disappointment of the Year

Diablo 3

This one hurt because I really wanted it to be good.  Hell, I wanted it to be spectacular.  But Blizzard has followed up their over-complication of Starcraft with another bevy of fixes for a series that clearly was never broken.  A mandatory BattleNet subscription, requiring an Internet connection at ALL times (even solo against the computer) hobbled the gameplay with lag times and maintenance issues, prompting spontaneous suspensions of play.  Add to that the specter of Blizzard’s Big Brother-inspired micromanagement (censoring salty names? ‘suggesting’ team battles when no one is looking for one?) and it wasn’t hard to see how lovers of the seminal Diablo II found this offering to be akin to meeting a loved one after they’ve lived with a cult: unsettling and unrecognizable.   

Most Anticipated of This Year

So far: Bioshock: Infinite...if ever the damn thing would come out.

A Second Look at 'The Hobbit'...

Boy, there's nothing like carte blanche is there?

Watching “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey”, I couldn't help thinking that again and again.  For a film this patient, this detailed, this concerned with narrative minutiae could only have come from a filmmaking team that had already proven beyond a whisper of a doubt that it could pack the theaters in tight despite a two hour and forty-six minute runtime and a glut of CGI-laden fantasy flummery already cramming our overstuffed cinematic palate.  Having earned New Line Cinema two gazillion dollars over the last decade and practically redefined what we commonly consider an 'epic', Peter Jackson and Company must certainly enjoy a benefit-of-the-doubt factor well north of George Lucas, with considerably more quality-to-effort ratio to boot.  This is immediately evident in Mr. Jackson's latest foray into Middle Earth, adapting, in part, J.R.R Tolkien's slim 300-page piece of whimsy into a bladder-buster of a flick so rich with sidetracks and subplots a reader of the original text would be nearly at a loss to follow along with the beloved 1937 novel.  It is the kind of painstaking, detail-heavy offering one would expect from a director who has already shown the rest of us here in the orc-free world that he's got the goods.  I can see now why the studio is reported to have been delighted then-original helmsman Benecio del Toro was forced to drop out; a captain unfamiliar with the foibles of this fantasy land would simply never have been trusted with three huge films that, let's face it, are attempting nothing less than making lightning strike twice in the same place...three times over.

In other words, Jackson was given free reign on this one, or so it seems to me.  “An Unexpected Journey” certainly didn't have to be nearly three hours, but, then, “The Hobbit” didn't need to be a trilogy.  That said, we don't go to the movies to have our needs met.  We go to the movies to have our fondest desires made reality. And who on Earth, Middle or otherwise, wouldn't want to see the entire nation of New Zealand take yet another crack at the man from Oxford's seminal creation, and take their damn sweet time doing it at that?  I, for one, am freakin' delighted, and I thought “AUJ” was damn fine entertainment.

So enough about how long it is, for Pete (Jackson)'s sake!  There are plenty of movies out there that are longer that say considerably less and don't have nearly as much fun saying it.  True, audiences will have to stick it out: the pay-off for this film is two full years away; but this season's effort represents a pretty terrific down payment on what promises to be a most profitable return-on-investment.

So yes, there are tangents upon tangents in this film, but I'm pleased to report not a single one of them, though springing from the minds of Jackson and his writing team of Phillipa Boyens and Fran Walsh rather than Professor T, feels at all out of place.  Indeed, one gets the sense that if ol' John Ronald HAD written the Hobbit with the same gravitas with which he wrote his later, larger work (a little screed called “The Lord of the Rings”) scenes like those AUJ tacks on would be entirely natural and very much expected.  If one wished to contrast the loyally adapted and nearly-unaltered book scenes against the contemporary ones, that greater sense of weight, thought, dimension, and perspective offered by the new stuff would have to be the watermark to look for to really perceive the difference.  For while there are a few scenes that are pure indulgence (bunny sled chase sequence, anyone?), most of them are genuinely smart embellishments that add to the depth of the experience.  I will concede, however, that hardcore book lovers, those types who know Tolkien's legendary appendices almost as well as the story itself, will likely love it a little bit more than your average viewer.  This is because a considerable quantity of the added material comes not from “The Hobbit” at all, but from the reams and reams of notes Tolkien recorded in the decades-long process of molding Middle Earth.  Some people say that's slick and cry foul.  I say it's all fair game.

Having said that however, I will hasten to add that while nothing feels out of place, there is some stuff that probably should have seen the back of the cutting room floor anyway.

Some purists cry excess at the notion that Tolkien's characters and their motives could possibly be improved upon, claiming more screen time means more chances for the clarity of the tale to be lost. However, the joke is on them, I think.  Indeed, the flashbacks and dramatized backstory billeted (only a tad excessively) in the film's first half flesh out the need to undertake the quest far better than Tolkien himself ever communicated.   I know – blasphemy and the Devil take me for a whoremonger and a liar. But it's true.  I re-read “The Hobbit” mere days before seeing “AUJ” and I found myself wondering then, as I wondered during my first read years ago, why exactly the company of thirteen dwarves felt compelled to retake their ENTIRE kingdom at that time and place.  Wouldn't it be wise to wait for backup?  An army, perhaps, of your barrel-chested colleagues?  And for what exactly?   Your treasure? We know, of course, that the dwarven stronghold of Erebor within the Lonely Mountain is full to the gunnels with gold and jewels, but the kingdom itself is a desiccated wasteland, and the guardian of said treasure is a giant dragon who eats cities and farts fallout. I'm all for impossible quests, but I found Tolkien's explanation, which in the book was one drunken boast shy of “climb the mountain because it's there” to be arbitrary and bordering in unbelievable.

Jackson and company, with the first of many effects-laden prologues, reveals to us not alternative or heretofore unguessed motives, but a depth and intensity of the motives already touched on in the book on a level Tolkien never tried.  Erebor isn't merely a dwarf fortress; it's part of, or at least kitty-corner to, a teeming city full of colorfully-dressed maidens, playful children, working stiffs, and innocent civilians who are all freakin' slaughtered by the dragon Smaug with just a few paltry broadsides from his fiery breath. As grossly inappropriate as this comparison may be, the attack on the once-lush kingdom was made to look like a fantasy version of 9/11 – a savage, unprovoked blitz that had no military or strategic value whatsoever; a cowardly and wanton act of pure terror and callous, almost gleeful execution of helpless bystanders whose only sin was showing up for work that day. Hell, the dwarves HAVE to face the dragon. Their need for retribution burns so hot and so fierce they would rather run screaming into the lizard's maw than spend one more day alive and guilt-ridden for having survived.  Does Tolkien ever explicitly state this? No.  Neither does Jackson's film, but it does come much closer to presenting a believable and relatable motive, which in my mind makes for a better picture.

I won't belabor the point with a deconstruction of the whole film.  Suffice to say such embellishments and indulgences are to be found throughout 'AUJ'.  Most of the time they work.  A couple of times they don't.  If I had to point to the best of all these 'film-not-book' segments, it would be the 'council' scene about midway through when Gandalf confers with the always-radiant Cate Blanchett as Galadriel and everyone's favorite elderly baritone, Christopher Lee as the soon-to-be traitorous Saruman the White. Together with Hugo Weaving's Elrond they discuss the seemingly disparate odd happenings as possible portents of the return of Sauron; an event we as an audience know is inevitable but about which the various sagely guardians of Middle Earth are still ignorant.  I've never shouted advice to characters on a movie screen before (a matter of personal pride), but I was tempted when watching that scene. “It's SAURON fercryin' out loud!!  Don't listen to Christopher Lee; the guy's made a career out of playing maligned horror loonies!  Hasn't anyone ever read into the fact that he's called Saruman the WHITE but his staff is almost entirely BLACK??  It's called symbolism and foreshadowing and we learn about them in high school English!!”

Much like Gandalf, total enjoyment of this film demands that you enjoy the company of dwarves, for there are many of them and a great deal of the screen is occupied by them at any given moment. Compulsive re-readers of the book will have no problem with this.  Others might.  Only about four of the thirteen are given any real personalities, although some of the more idiosyncratic elements of some of the supporting characters have been preserved.  Most of the dwarves who constitute true characters are also the ones who wear the least amount of makeup and prosthetic features as actors; not an accident, I'm sure. Performance-wise, of course, the tip of the spear is found in the stellar thespianic merits of Bilbo's Martin Freeman, Andy Serkis's Gollum, and Gandalf's Ian McKellan.  No surprise there.

But for a way-too brief cameo by the lovely Blanchett, there is not a woman to be found, making 'AUJ' only the third longest sausage-fest I've ever attended (the other two being ACTUAL sausage-fests in upstate NY).  And let me say, after near-on 90 minutes of dwarf-on-goblin combat, any red-blooded heterosexual man is going to be ready to lick the screen when Blanchett finally does arrive (violence does beget sex after all; let's not pretend it doesn't).  I mean, who cares if she's a telepathic elf who, if my Tolkien 101 hasn't failed me, is actually (Liv Tyler's) Arwen's grandmother?  Right about when you're considering, if not entertaining, your first pee break, ageless Aussie Cate gives you an even more compelling reason to stay in your seat than what you hope is the increasingly open-minded public perception toward pants-wetting.

Finally, a word on the High Frame Rate experience.  I'm a novice when it comes to HFR (48 fps) stuff and the 'soap opera' effect it creates, giving the film the look and feel of a live TV show rather than a bigger-than-life look that can best be described as a 'dramatic elongation' of cinema visuals to which we're all so accustomed.  Novice, but not a beginner.  So I was probably a bit better prepared than most folks when I actually saw it.  Nevertheless, I must report much of the same thoughts that the pros and early critics voiced: it works sometimes and it don't works other times.  When I first saw the sheer volume of mixed reviews to HFR I was taken aback, wondering at how much pussyfooting and half-hearted comments one issue could possibly garner.  But it's the truth.  Wide shots, landscape scenes, and anything with a photorealistic computer effect look incredible – I would particularly cite the mountain trolls scene as one where the all-CGI creatures are stunningly, eye-poppingly real – but closeups, basic movements, or anything with any 'fine' actions like a pen scrawling over paper or a hand reaching for an object, whizz by distractingly fast.  HFR gives your eyes and your brain plenty of credit: nothing actually looks blurry per se; you are SEEING everything correctly; but one has to wonder if the purity of the experience – which Jackson points to as his motive for the change – is worth reprogramming our 24 frame-per-second savvy brains.  Put this under 'we'll see' and look to the future.

Some critics have said the film is too long, too slow, and that Jackson has dug himself a hole; one critic even went to far as to compare 'AUJ' to 'The Phantom Menace'.  While I don't at all agree with the latter, I'm prepared to agree with a percentage of the former.  Again, the book-lovers will adore this film.  As a two-time 'Hobbit' vet myself, I enjoyed and appreciated it.  I also like to think I can appreciate what Jackson and company is trying to do, which clearly is to stretch every Middle Earth muscle they have and revisit Tolkien's world in such a way that it makes you feel as though you stepped back through a ten-year closed portal, putting you right back into the Shire where you can feel the grass between your toes and smell the pungent pipe weed.  But I would also like to be able to look back on 'AUJ' as merely a springboard to the action and intensity of what I hope will be even better Parts Two and Three.  If nothing else, this film has shown me that the rainmakers behind the camera are haven't lost it with age and that the talent in front of the camera is more than up to the task.