Why women are the best video game characters

The game industry has been slow to make use of women as protagonists in video games, sometimes due to the idea that the dudebros only want to play as males.  Didn’t Tomb Raider in all its guises sell more than 35 million copies?  But anyway, my point isn’t that female protagonists are more inclusive or less sexist; it’s that they make the games better.

Why?

Um… a kimono with ripped off sleeves? Really, Sam?

1. They can emote.

This struck me when playing Tomb Raider.  There,

• Lara expresses terror, pain, horror, and occasionally despair
• She cries big snotty tears when her mentor dies
• When she rescues her friend, she gives her a big hug
• She can express self-doubt (and still kick ass)
• If you do nothing, she’ll sometimes hold herself as if she’s feeling cold (as she probably is, getting rained on in that tank top)

Besides the new Lara, the best example is Beyond Good & Evil‘s Jade.  Although she wields a mean dai-jo, she also takes care of children, is attached to her uncle, and relies as much on her camera as on her martial arts skills to foil the enemy.

The way our brains are set up, if we see an emotion expressed, we feel it to some extent.  This is an essential tool for the storyteller.  To put it another way, it’s hard to care for a character when they don’t themselves express any involvement in their situation.  That’s one reason why Black Mesa, though gorgeous, is emotionally lifeless.

Of course, this power can be abused, producing sentimentality, but the challenge for video games is to show emotion at all, not to mop up excesses of it.  Likewise, there are many emotive male actors, but they’re rarely video game protagonists.  Whether it’s Master Chief or Gordon Freeman, the norm is steely stoicism.

The effect in Tomb Raider is not to make Lara look weak, but to make her human and real.  (The second half of the game doesn’t have as much of this, and I think it suffers because of it.  The climax, for instance, is by any objective standard a hellish experience, and its only effect on Lara seems to be to make her a little moody.)

The idea here isn’t that women are “more emotional”.  The idea is that people have emotions, but that our current social expectations allow women to show them more openly– which makes for more relatable characters.

The Big Games these days are generally about big emotionless male bruisers who go on (carefully justified) killing sprees.  People often lament the sameness of the games, but usually suggest that they need better stories.  I’m suggesting that they need better characters… less John Wayne and more Humphrey Bogart.

2. They subvert the genre.

One way to make a story deeper and/or more fun is to subvert the genre.  There’s some attempt at this in (say) Bioshock Infinite: the main character is a killing machine, and the game suggests (after letting the player shoot people for twelve hours) that that’s kinda bad.  But ultraviolence with a smidgen of doubt is not much of a real questioning of the genre.  (I found that Far Cry 2 successfully depicted the amorality of mercenaries shooting up the Third World… so much so that I lost interest in continuing to play it.)

Subverting gender roles is inherently interesting.  Tough guys who have to do something female-associated can be used for extra comedy or drama (Lone Wolf and Cub, Kindergarten Cop, Some Like It Hot, Mrs. Doubtfire).  Badass women are more interesting than badass men– they’re less expected, so there must be some backstory on why they’re doing what they’re doing.

What do you do when you’re a hot girl with bluish skin?  Take over Steelport.

I tried Saints Row 3 with both a male and female protagonist.  Even with all the silly elements, playing as a male made the game seem more crass and cliched.  Playing as a female, it becomes pure absurdist fun (especially with Rebecca Sanabria’s voice acting– she can be tough as nails when needed, but most of the time she communicates that the Saints boss is just having a hell of a great time).

The best reason to play Mass Effect as a female is Jennifer Hale’s awesome voice acting.  But her gender helps too.  MaleShep is another dull, stoic space marine; FemShep is intriguing.  Little is made of her gender, but based on our own society and even the sex ratio we see in ME’s human worlds, we can guess that this is a person who has had to be twice as calm, twice as authoritative, twice as tough as any man, to get where she is.

3. People like underdogs.

If you’re going to go up against the bandits, zombies, draugr, crazed criminal overlords, mad cultists, or whatever, you’re going to need some skills, and a reservoir of strength and endurance.  To do it all with a smaller body is all the more impressive (which is why it takes more skill to dominate a TF2 game as a Scout than as a Heavy).

In Oblivion, the initial skill values depend (slightly) on your sex.  They removed this in Skyrim, which is more inclusive but seems a little defiant of realism.

It does worry me a bit when Catwoman swipes at a thug with her clawed gloves… that would cause pain, but it’s not going to knock him out.  It’s a lot more convincing when she’s faster and more athletic than Batman, and uses her legs or her whole body to slam into a thug.  120 pounds of fast-moving superfreak to the face– that would hurt.

Catwoman demonstrating that momentum is mass times velocity

Mirror’s Edge never explains the gender dynamics of running, but being smaller could be an advantage in scrambling over the rooftops and fitting into tight spaces.

4. Gender and sex offer narrative possibilities.

Sex is fascinating, and that’s without getting into the biological mechanics.  I always wonder what it’s like for Zoey, the only female in a group of four zombie-apocalypse survivors.  Is there a lot of pressure on her to hook up?  Or would it be so uncomfortable if she did that the three guys kind of agree to not bring it up?

Dragon Age Origins actually makes your party dress in medieval bikinis at one point.

FemShep probably makes it a point of principle to never use her gender for anything, but others are not so pure.  Your character in Fallout 3 and even more so Fallout New Vegas can occasionally use gender or sex to their advantage.  Perhaps the best example is Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, where you can solve or alter some situations by seduction.  (And why not?  If you’re a vampire you’re already pretty much a lost soul; no need to act all chaste.)

Games take a wide, wide detour around sexual threat– the only game I can think of that mentions it is Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, and that’s with NPCs.  That’s probably just as well.  Still, replacing it with cannibalism is kind of silly, and we’d might as well acknowledge that there’s an underlying danger to (say) Catwoman that Batman doesn’t really face, and that makes her insouciance all the more interesting.  In Tomb Raider, it should add a certain chill to that scene where the cultist grabs her before trying to strangle her– and it probably would if it weren’t so frustrating figuring out the damn game mechanic at that point.

 

Now, you may well respond that the ultimate goal should be gender neutrality– that we should able to be a badass male or a badass female, a caring male or a caring female.  That’s fine, and sometimes it’d be a great advance simply to have more female characters– I wish TF2 would implement Chemical Alia’s female characters.  But for now, the best corrective to all the boring badass males is a little femininity.

 

 

Tomb, or something, raided

I finished Tomb Raider.  I thought you’d want to know.  (Early thoughts here.)

How’d they freight all this iron to an island no one can leave?

Overall impression: it’s a great game.  It took about 18 hours, which curiously is how long TR Underworld took too.  I expect it’s more replayable though… at least, I have a hankering to play through it again, perhaps doing more to find all the hidden tombs and other goodies.

The final boss fight is pretty annoying, but I got through it.  The dodge mechanic seems really wonky… the general idea is to hit Shift, but this doesn’t really help as you need to get behind the dude.  So I was mashing some combination of Shift + Left + Space, which sometimes worked, and then I’d generally miss his unprotected back, and… it’s not a fun fight.

The game is most fun when you can explore an area and figure out the tricks to move forward; I also liked when there was an opportunity for stealth.  The greater number of enemies is good overall, but some of the fights were more grueling than fun.

The overall was to move from scared, fragile Lara to badass avenging angel.  It works, but I think the timing is off.  She’s basically finished the transition halfway through… what does that leave for the next game?  I liked the more human Lara, and didn’t want to see her disappear entirely.  By the end of the game, when her shipmates talk to her, she’s got to Batman levels of coldness.

Some review suggested that her shipmates didn’t add much and could easily have been disposed of.  I tend to agree, mostly because they’re almost always shallow and useless.  The game has to keep coming up with dumb reasons why only Lara can go off for the next McGuffin… why not take a hint from Arkham City (or Max Payne 2) and occasionally let us control one of the other characters?  The snotty betraying guy is also a minus; neither his motivations nor his eventual comeuppance are convincing.

As for skill trees, it turns out not to matter much.  I ended up with almost all of the skills and gear upgrades, and with a little more collectible hunting I’m sure I could get them all.  This seems like a bit of a lost opportunity to enable different styles of playthrough.

 

Raiding tombs

First, the new Tomb Raider is half off on Steam, right now.  Get it.  Are you getting it?  What is wrong with you?

What should we call this game? TOMB RAIDED? OK then!

I’ve played about six hours so far, which the game tells me is 23% complete.  The basics of the TR franchise are doing completely terrible archeology, in the form of jumping athletically around ancient ruins and destroying ancient mechanisms, with an occasional murder along the way.  Combat in Underworld was pretty unserious, as shown by the mechanic of Lara automatically targeting the nearest enemy.

In the reboot it’s very serious.  You have to aim… hell, you have to aim (RMB) then fire (LMB), which is tricky if an enemy is closing on you.  Enemies will jump out at you, or throw fire grenades, or have bulletproof shields, and you can get taken down quickly, so it can be intense.  (At the same time, they’re very supportive, in their own way.  They’ll shout out “She’s killing us all!” or “Watch out, she’s a good shot!”  Which is a nice change from “I never liked that Catwoman bitch.”)

The Big Thought behind the reboot is that Lara is no longer the frigid, double-pistol-wielding wiseass of the earlier games– she’s a young girl who’s hurt, terrified, and has never killed a human being before. Plus, they’ve taken the opportunity to redesign the character– even in Underworld she had this weird elongated face.  Now she’s rather cute:

There is no medicine mechanic, so I don’t know how that wound healed up

All this might be challenging to the Cheeto-fed machistas who seem to make up the most vocal fragment of the gaming market, but I think it’s refreshing.  It can be fun to play a superhero who makes everything look effortless, but I like the way the new Lara reminds you that what’s she’s doing is hard and scary and it hurts.  And how she has to talk herself into trying new things.  And how she says “I’m sorry” to the first deer she kills.

Plus, you know, heroism is about what you do, not what you feel.  As it happens, I’m reaidng a book about war and battles right now and you know, outside of glorifying propaganda, soldiers are scared.  They learn to function with the constant and well-justified fear, but it doesn’t go away.  Lara’s fear means she’s a human being.

There was some controversy before release because one developer talked loosely about an attempted rape scene.  Perhaps they changed it, because there’s nothing like that.  There’s a point where Lara is trying to sneak past a bunch of insane cultists who seem to be massacring an entire village.  One of them captures her and touches her; if you do nothing, however, he kills her.  So it’s an attempted death scene.

And it pissed me off, because it was a complete mystery how to get past it.  The screen tells you to press F– I pressed the hell out of F and watched Lara getting strangled about a dozen times.  She also moved on to the next bit of fight a couple times, seemingly randomly.  I could not figure out what the damn game wanted me to do.

Finally I did, with the help of some Internet comments.  Feel free to print this out and paste it near your screen:

• Some concentric white circles appear on the screen.  The outer circle is shrinking.  When it reaches the inner circle, that’s when you mash F a few times.  A red icon appears, but if you press F then, it’s too late.
• This happens at least one more time.

There are a couple more bits to the fight, which are a little unclear in my memory, but also easier to figure out.

It’s a really annoying mechanism, which they use in a few other places.  Developers, please don’t do this “press a key at the exact right moment in a cutscene” thing… or if you do, at least give accurate instructions.  There’s a couple other baffling minigames… e.g. at one point Lara has to tune a radio, and there is just no feedback on what to do.  (For reference: hold down right arrow till something happens.)  The best I can say about these sequences is that they’re pretty rare.

The game often takes control of the camera… on the whole this is probably OK, as it makes the experience more cinematic and can show off some of the game’s lovely views:

Build a little enclosure around the ladder? Why? What could go wrong?

But also, frequently, the gameplay merges seamlessly into cutscenes, and this can be confusing.  Many games distinguish the cutscenes visually (e.g. by adding black bars above and below the scene), which at least tells you that you can’t walk around or shoot anything.  Half-Life 2 is famous for having scenes play out while you retain full control, though admittedly this works better with a protagonist who never talks.

Ah, while I’m thinking about weird things… there’s a scene where Lara makes a big show of using her last match… to build up an already roaring fire.  This is one of several elements that sometimes make it seem that the developers were trying too many things and couldn’t keep it all together.  That early deer kill, for instance, is preceded by Lara saying she’s hungry and making it a whole objective to Find Food.  She was shipwrecked less than a day ago, so it really shouldn’t be that much of a crisis, but fine, it looks like the game will make hunting food a gameplay thing.  Only it doesn’t– after the deer scene, it doesn’t come up again.

The game does keep throwing new things at you; mostly this works and adds variety.  You play for something like an hour before getting any weapon, for instance– which is actually pretty neat.  Several hours in, they give you a “rope arrow”… I’m not quite sure how an arrow with a rope tied to it can tie a knot, but it does, and it gives you a new mechanism for extending your parkour, so that’s all good.

Also neat: you often have a choice in how to approach enemies (or in how to climb up somewhere).  It’s not exactly a stealth game, in that you still kill them; but you can snipe from afar with arrows, or sneak up behind someone and do them in, and this approach has advantages over going in guns blazing– such as not alerting all of their buddies.

I also appreciate how there’s cover, but no cover mechanic.  If you approach a low wall or crates, Lara will crouch down automatically.  It makes complicated cover mechanics as in Deus Ex look awkward.

There is an XP mechanic, so that you can upgrade Lara’s skills and weapons.  You can theoretically specialize as Hunter, Survivor, or Brawler, but some skills only unlock slowly, with the effect that you pretty much have to spread out your skills.  So I don’t know how customizable the game experience is; maybe it’ll be clearer later in the game.

Bottom line, it’s really well done.  I’ve only played one previous TR game, Underworld, and I liked it but it was definitely a toy– a very artificial world with predicaments and characters at a James Bond level of camp.  Sometimes a move into more irony (as in Saints Row) works; but sometimes making it more real, more gritty, more intense is the right thing to do.  It was hard to put down and I’ve got work to do right now, but I’m anxious to get that done so I can go back to being Lara.

 

Rage coda

I finished Rage.  It is indeed about 21 hours.  At the end it gets very sf-ey, with the bafflingly over-engineered corridors familiar to us from sf movies:

Drywall and flourescents would’ve worked fine

The final mission feels strangely incomplete.  The final boss fight consists of a bunch of charged-up mutants– monsters you’ve been fighting all along, which can be easily disposed of if you bought shitloads of wingsticks and pulse rounds.  And that’s it.  You kill a bunch of them but not, you know, any particularly large ones, there’s a little cutscene, and you’re done.  It’s much less hard than many of the previous missions.

It’s a weirdly meh game given that they’ve done a lot of things right.  Once you have the right drivers, it’s beautiful, even more so than Fallout 3 or FNV.  The voice acting is good, and you can talk to most anyone.  The racing sections offer a change of pace and a challenge, though I really really hate WASD controls for vehicles.  The fighting missions have just enough challenge and variety.

But I find I don’t have any great desire to play it again.  I think it’s because they’ve skimped on toys and story.  The closest thing to a fascinating toy is the remote controlled mini-car, but there’s precisely one mission where it’s useful.  As for story, they’ve got one, but they didn’t bother to add explorable background material (as in Fallout or Dishonored), there’s no character you care for, and no one is particularly distinctive or funny or scary.

 

Rage

Yet another jaunt through Post-Apocalyptia. In this case, not that it really matters, the culprit was an asteroid impact. You wake up from a Vault– sorry, an Ark– and are immediately enlisted to go kill people. And you do, without question, because you’re one of those video game freaks who never talk.

At first I couldn’t play the game, because it had horrible, constant flickering. New drivers solved the problem, fortunately.

This is the first game I’ve bought because it was featured on Dead End Thrills. Because it’s gorgeous.

Well, gorgeous in the peculiar way of Post-Apocalyptia: ruined or repurposed industrial detritus and raw rock.  It’s striking how many video games feature this environment; I suppose it speaks to a certain ambivalence we have about our grandiose, maddening civilization.

One review I read complained that Rage is less a game than a glorified tech demo.  There’s something to this, but it’s way less bothersome if you picked it up for $5 at a Steam sale.  It’s true that the story is pretty minimal; it doesn’t have the RPG elements or pathos of Fallout, nor the over-the-top humor of Borderlands.  It’s basically about two things:

• Sidling through destroyed structures clearing them of bandits and/or soldiers with the armory you carry about your person.  This part goes pretty well, so long as you remember to use cover.  After a few missions, you can basically buy all the ammunition you need, so it’s mostly just a matter of remembering to keep out of the open.  (Memo to video game enemies: popping your head up in the same location each time leads to no good thing.)
• Racing your buggy and cursing the stupid WASD controls.  Srsly, designers, please learn from Borderlands and let us control direction with the frigging mouse, which has the fine control of a frigging steering wheel.

My major complaint would be that it’s all way railroaded.  You’re given the chance to decline missions, but there’s no point in doing so; there’s only one path through the story.  There are side missions, but most of them are trivial.  The world is pretty large, but again there’s no real point to exploring it closely, as the vast vistas are just territory to drive through on the way to your next quest point.

Even the bandit nests are railroaded.  That’s a plus in that it’s hard to get lost, but a minus in that there’s rarely an alternate way to proceed (a la Dishonored).  This applies to your toys, too.  E.g. you get a remote-controlled, exploding car, but you can’t really use it all over, only in the few places the level designer put in.

Also, the inventory management is just confusing as hell.  The mousewheel cycles through your guns, as it should, but some get skipped for no reason I’ve been able to figure out.  You get quick-use items that are all triggered with one key, which basically means that the wrong one will be selected all too often.   So you have to select which item to use, then hit Q, and sometimes you have to go to the inventory screen instead.  I’d really rather have had quickkeys for healing / explosives / wingsticks / other toys.

Story is a bit overemphasized in game reviews, probably because it’s the bit that games share with novels and movies and thus feels like Art.  Still, it’s definitely a weak point here.  There is a story here– something about an Authority– but it mostly just relies on the tropes of Post-Apocalyptia.  There’s always bandits, some high-tech authoritarians, and a smattering of kindly though gun-happy settlers.

Oh well.  Did I mention how pretty it is?  Also, the character modelling is awfully good, much better than Fallout or Skyrim.  I’m not done with it, but it looks like about 20 hours of gameplay, which is just about right.  (Any less and I’d feel cheated; much more and the lack of a compelling story would make it feel tedious.)

 

Dishonored

I stayed up way too late last night finishing Dishonored. Or should I say Deushonored Ex? No, because that’s not the name of the game, but my point is that it’s very reminiscent of Deus Ex (and indeed it shared a designer).

One similarity is that the basic plot point is that you’re a security specialist who spectacularly fails at his job.

You are the bodyguard for these two characters. You fail.

You play Corvo, Lord Protector to the above Empress for less than five minutes.  (By the way, kudos to the designers for the Empress’s stylish pants.  Gowns with big bustles would be more Victorian, but good conworlding should avoid slavish imitation.)  Adam Jensen’s boss was awfully forgiving of his big screwup, but the new Lord Regent is not; you’re not only fired, but framed for the murder.  Perhaps you could say you’re dishonored?  Nah, framed is better.

Anyway, it turns out you have allies, the Loyalists, who hang out in a pub and send you on missions.  Like, oh, say, Deus Ex, you can execute these either by stealth, sneaking up behind people and choking them into unconciousness, or you can just shoot and/or stab them.  Oh, and like some other games, Deus Ex for example, you get some magical powers to help you stun and/or kill dudes.

What would stealth games be without this mechanic of poor peripheral vision and quick, safe comas?  It’s a pity you can’t do this in real life.

Anyway, if you go for stealth at all you’ll be spending a lot of time creating artistic piles of bodies, like this:

What Arkham City needed: Body stashing

As with, say, Deus Ex, there’s basically only one way to put people into comas– sneak up from behind.  (Well, as in, say, Deus Ex, there’s also a sleep gun with limited rounds.)  However, there’s a lot more options for getting around, and that makes it a better experience overall.  The skills are disappointingly skewed toward combat, but I relied heavily on  Dark Vision, Blink,and Possession.  The first of these is basically Detective Vision, but the other two are novel and fun.  Blink gives you a short teleport, which opens up all sorts of ways to traverse the maps, including vertically.  It’s kind of like a non-athletic parkour.

Possession is the most fun: at level one you can temporarily take control of a rat or fish, which can be used to get past enemies or take unusual routes; at level two you can possess humans.  This is very useful for getting past electrical barriers, for getting a victim into a quiet location to choke him, or even for evading combat.  If anything it’s overpowered… in the later missions I was just a possessin’ fool.

There’s a Stop Time function that seems like it could be a good time, but I ended up barely using it.  It’s most useful if you’re facing a bunch of alarmed enemies, but if you are, your stealth has already gone awry and it’s frankly easier to reload a quicksave.

I’m a bit spoiled by Arkham Asylum/City, where messing up stealth can almost always be taken care of by disappearing into the heights.  In Deus Ex I got pretty tired of the cycle of quicksave, inch forward and alarm every enemy in town, reload.  Dishonored is a little better thanks to Blink and Possession, which can be used to get out of trouble.

I didn’t do much combat, because it turns out that Dishonored has an annoying morality system.  Nonlethal takedowns are Good; killing people is Bad.  If you’re Bad, you not only get a darker ending (the plague never ends), but more enemies, plus some characters will give you a severe talking-to.  I’m not much of a carnage guy, but still I find this sanctimonious nonsense.  You even get Bad points for killing the zombie-like plague victims, and for killing the guy who actually murdered the Empress.  Game designers, if you disapprove of a certain set of player actions, maybe don’t write a game about them.  It’s just not that hard to do: just don’t give ‘em a gun and sword.

No matter how careful you are, Corvo will screw up again, because a) he’s never read this post on the game designer’s almost inevitable plot mechanism, and b) he’s gauche enough to drink when he’s being toasted.

What comes after steampunk? Steambyzantium? Incapunk?

The game has a nice style of its own… well, not far from the Wonder City parts of Arkham City, but I’d much rather see more games that are vaguely Victorian instead of mediocrely medieval.  Plus, as mentioned, the world here is just different enough to be interesting.  There’s a lot of lore scattered about, and it’s a plus that it’s all in digestible-sized pieces.  (It’s nice that the Elder Scrolls games have entire short stories in them, but I’m not always in the mood to read them.)

Even though each level is fairly constrained, they do a good job suggesting a much larger city.  There are some nice cityscapes, all prettily 3-D-modelled.  (Steam is actually behind on this– Steam games have very clever level design, but don’t have the enormous vistas of Dishonored or Skyrim or GTA or Saints Row.)

I’d say the level design is pretty good, in that I was only completely baffled twice, and I baffle easily.  (My only cavil is on the very last map, where you’re on a lighthouse, and every video game instinct ever says that you should go up to the very tippy-top.  I did, and there was nothing there… my target was a few floors below.  Oh well.  I think the top is used in the Bad ending.)

The setting, Dunwall, is a mixture of steampunk, fascism, and zombie apocalypse.  The city is in the throes of a rat-borne plague, you see, which is said to have killed off a third of the population already.  I read an interview that mentions that this was actually a serendipitous idea to explain the sparsely populated streets– plus, they came up with interesting things to do with the omnipresent rats.

The fascism bit bugs me a little, just because I don’t really like the fantasy trope that a government can turn Eeevil, or be redeemed, based on the personality at the top.  Yes, I know, Hitler, but the whole problem with Germany was that it had very shallow experience with democracy.  What does it say about Corvo and his Empress that they were an assassination away from being a police state in a death spiral?  All the instruments of repression– the rapacious aristocrats, the oppressive response to the plague, the tallboys and electrical barriers, the Orwellian loudspeakers, the torture chamber– had to have been developed and deployed under the Empress’s rule.

As for replayability, I dunno.  I might do another playthrough now that I know how it all goes, though all the plot elements (cutscenes, conversations, lore books) are a bit tedious to go through twice.  It looks like I got through it in 23 hours, which is nothing for a Bethesda game (I’ve got 111 hours in Skyrim and I never even finished), and pretty light for a $60 game… but that’s OK as I got it for half off.

Anyway, even if I’m not quite as rapturous about it as some of my friends, it’s a good game, especially if you like stealth.

 

New Vegas secured

I decided I might as well finish Fallout New Vegas, so I did.  It turns out I was only about two hours from the end.

Hey, House, you’re ugly!

I have mixed feelings about the ending, though in part I think it’s because almost all video games have problems in the endgame.  More on that in a moment.

A minor annoyance is all the running around.  In this big open world, the ending is designed so that you’re constantly shuttling from one place to another, with loading screens popping up constantly.

The hardest part of the ending is not anything you have to fight, but avoiding fights.  I had to replay the Hoover Dam bit several times in order not to kill NCR, ‘cos I don’t really have anything against them.  It wasn’t really obvious how to do this, and it’s annoying that Stealth Boys, plus a Sneak of 100, did absolutely nothing to prevent conflicts.  (On the other hand, as I was talking to Lanius, I decided, fuck this speech challenge shit, mask boy’s gotta die.)

It’s a bit weird that the very last bit of gameplay involve Yes Man explaining that he’s going to get an assertiveness upgrade.  It sounds ominous, but the designer has explained that he meant only that it was intended to mean that he would henceforth answer only to the Courier.  It’s still a strange note to end on.

As with Fallout 3, it’s rather unsatisfying to just end the game.  You get a slideshow but little feeling of what it means to have an independent New Vegas.  I think FNV makes an effort to give you some meaningful choices– you can go evil with Caesar, or go conventional with the NCR, or take over for yourself.  But you don’t get to see any of it.  (Also, the slideshow suggests that Freeside was even more lawless afterward… why?  We have a frigging army of Securitrons now.)

As I said, though, I think it’s just a special case of the general problem: it’s hard to wrap up a video game in a satisfying way.  Most action games choose the option of:

• Big boss fight.

And that’s kind of it for options.  Games differ in how hard the final fight is, from nearly impossible (HL2 Ep 2) to big ol’ climax (Dragon Age Origins) to standard (Saints Row 3) to kinda minimal (FNV).  But it’s tricky to get a final boss fight to really work well– to use all your skills plus offer rewards plus wrap up the story.

To put it another way, what makes a game fun is, unsurprisingly, the gameplay.  And that’s pretty varied.  It may involve:

• noodling around an open world taking on whatever challenges you find (F3/FNV, Borderlands, Saints Row 3, VTM Bloodlines, Fable III)
• solving puzzles (Portal)
• stealth and occasional fights (Arkham City, Deus Ex)
• parkour (Mirror’s Edge)
• moving around a quasi-linear path fighting enemies and using neat toys (HL2, Singularity, Dead Space, Mass Effect)

But the final boss fight usually doesn’t resemble the main gameplay, so it doesn’t quite cohere.  It works better if the game has been puncutated by boss fights, as in Arkham City or Borderlands 2, though even in such cases you generally can’t use stealth or sniper skills.

There’s also the problem that the story has to be wrapped up, which generally means cutscenes or reduced player choices.  (The poster child for this problem is Dreamfall, which pretty much turns into a movie at the end.)

Ironically, it all may not matter much, because if the game was really good you probably want to play it again immediately, perhaps on a harder setting.

 

Honest Hearts

All done with Fallout New Vegas DLC now– just finished Honest Hearts.

It feels like the fastest and slightest of the four DLCs, though that may be because my level is in the upper 40s and even a Giant Cazador doesn’t faze me.  (I recall a time in the very early game when I was trying to explore the mountains and first discovered Cazadores as well as how unavoidably they could massacre a low-level character.)

Spectactular place, Zion:

The main quest gets you involved in a tribal war– repercussions of the larger war outside, as one side is allied with Caesar and the other is assisted by Caesar’s ex-general Joshua.  There’s some heavy material here– the role of religion, civilization vs. tribalism, vengeance vs. protection vs. pacifism– but overall I think the developers bit off more than they could chew.  You basically make one big fat choice, and it appears the actual battle plays out about the same either way.  There’s no option to join or help the Bad Tribals.  (Not that I wanted to, but the main game and the rest of the DLC allow you to take the really evil path if you want to.)

Plus I think the game doesn’t quite manage to avoid the colonialist mindset.  The tribes are obvious nods to Native Americans, though it seems only the Dead Horses are supposed to be actual Natives.  The ‘good tribes’ have Indian-like names and speak broken English, and mainly attack with melee weapons– out-Westerning the Westerns, as 19th century Native Americans were quite happy to use guns.  The tribes seem to be easily manipulated; all three tribes are effectively under the leadership of Caucasians.

I don’t think the developers intended to be quite this regressive; but I think ending up with this infantilizing picture is almost inevitable if you start out with the idea of “tribes vs. civilization” and don’t really look beyond pop culture for your research.

Anyway, I don’t mean to be terribly negative.  The DLCs as a whole are pretty impressive, and I think all of them are more satisfying than the main New Vegas storyline.  Plus Zion turns out to be a treasure trove of Xander Root and Broc Flower– which we learn early on in FNV are the principal ingredients in Stimpaks, but which are annoyingly rare in the Mojave.

 

Fable III

I picked this up during the last Steam sale, and just beat it.  It’s surprisingly good.

Combat is not very hard– though the werewolves can be pretty nasty.  I think I used about half a dozen healing potions for the whole game, but I wasn’t in challenging mode.  You have swords, guns, and magic, and can switch between them easily.  They each have their advantages.  Guns can be used at far range; magic offers both ranged attacks and an area of effect spell; melee lets you block enemy attacks.  I relied heavily on magic, with swords in second place.

Magic missile!

The first part of the game is a standard RPG, where you fight enemies, do quests, explore the world, find allies, and level up.  You start out as a princess (or prince), and your aim is to take over the kingdom from your evil brother Logan.

The tone is all over the place.  Very early on there’s a rather arresting moral dilemma– a Joker choice.  Logan has you decide whether to execute some rebels, or your own lover.  Pretty serious stuff.  Later on the tone is mostly lighthearted, indeed often silly in a particularly British way.  (The chicken liberation, for instance.  Or the snarking gnomes, or the side quest where you break up a marriage.  The wizards running a tabletop game campaign is another highlight.)  Another quest, once you get to the neighboring land of Aurora, verges on horror.  I don’t think any of this is bad; it keeps the game lively.

So, you beat down Logan and become queen of Albion.  And this is where the game gives you a serious shock.  Logan was such a bastard because he was trying to raise money to meet a huge threat– an invasion of the kingdom.  That’s your job now.  To do it you’ll need 6,500,000 gold.  Oh, and you had to make promises to your allies; now they come due, and they add a few million more gold in obligations.

In Oblivion (or Skyrim), you can become master of a guild– indeed, all the guilds.  For this you get a few minor perks and pretty much nothing else.  I always thought it’d be great if, once you ran the guild, you had to face problems at an entirely new level– rather than dungeons to clear, you’d have intrigue to manage, guild rivalries, financial troubles.  Well, Fable III does this.  Becoming queen turns out to be the easy part.  Now you have to raise millions of gold in a limited time.  And all the easy ways will make people hate you.

Pondering. This is not actually the worst makeup I’ve worn in a video game

Fable III has the dreaded good/evil morality, but it’s the only game I know of that makes it work.  That’s because the choices are not just changes in decor, or in a few slides in the post-game wrap-up.  They affect the world– you can ruin entire regions of the map if you like.  And they affect how all the NPCs feel about you.

More importantly, there’s a cost to doing good, and keeping your promises… namely, a cost of about 9,000,000 in gold.  Evil, you see, translates as cheap and easy.  Merely by betraying your friends and becoming a tyrant, you get scads of money and can easily raise the money to face the invasion.  If you take the good path, you have to raise that money in other ways.  That’s a really clever approach and, in fact, a pretty wise moral lesson.

Now, how do you raise the money?  I did most of it by baking pies.

Beyond combat, you see, Fable III is a kind of medieval life simulator.  You can meet people and interact with them to raise or lower their disposition.  You can get married and have or adopt children.  You can buy property or stores and get a share in the profits.  And there are lucrative jobs available– blacksmith, lute player, and pie maker.  They’re variants on a simple minigame.  It’s just tedious enough to make the evil path tempting, but also requires just enough skill to keep you awake.  (As opposed to, say, cutting lumber in Skyrim, which doesn’t even try to amuse you.)

A quarter hour of pie making, plus rent once you’ve bought up all the shops, should net you nearly half a million in gold.  Those are pretty fabulous pies.

(Things I’d Wish I’d Known: maxing out any of the job costs ‘guild seals’, the game’s version of XP.  Don’t waste your seals on more than one job type.)

(For being so evil, Logan is a piss-poor manager; he leaves you only a pittance in the treasury.  Too bad he never learned how to make pies.)

The NPCs are always chattering, and on the whole more interestingly than in Skyrim.  (They’ll even comment on the quality of the clothes you wear– though the clothes have no other function; there’s no idea of armor.)  If you interact with them, it gets all symbolic.  You can dance with them, hug them, kiss them– an interview I found mentions that they purposely made the interactions very tactile, in order to make you care for the little buggers.  (If you want to be evil, there are options for being a jerk, too.)  It’s pretty cute, really.

You can take someone’s hand and lead them somewhere… to bed, for instance.  If you hit E on the bed, you get the very frank options “Sleep” and “Have sex”.  The screen fades to black… but you get a full set of sound effects.  It’s amusing rather than laviscious, but not many American games are quite this accepting.  You can go on to marry your partner and raise children, and you can even have marriages in several cities.

When you interact with an NPC, the game helpfully tells you their sexual orientation.  Disappointingly, I couldn’t find a single lesbian in Aurora.  I did find a lesbian noblewoman, and I bought an expensive house in Albion’s aristo district for her.  Leading her there, by the hand, we were attacked by werewolves and she was killed to death.  Ouch.  I consoled myself with my other two wives, and by renting out the expensive house.

Till death do us part. Which will come in about one minute

The game has a kind of clever inventory management system: as a genuine hero, you have an extradimensional sanctuary, and you manage your costumes, weapons, and weapons there– under the attentive eye of your butler.  At least it explains why you always have access to all this gear, something that’s a complete mystery in most RPGs.  It actually works pretty well.

The voices are all delightfully British.  I envy the Brits for having accents that are so well suited to medieval fantasy.  American accents are too uniform, and are a bit jarring amid the cobblestones and thatched roofs.  I thought the butler occasionally sounded rather Cleesean, and it turns out that this is because he’s played by John Cleese.  Stephen Fry, Simon Pegg, and Ben Kingsley are also along for the ride.

I have just a few cavils.  The sanctuary has a map, but it’s awkward for the (fortunately rare) bits where you have to find a place.  (Normally you can just follow the sparkly lights.)  Switching between quests is a little harder than it ought to be.  I also apparently killed a civilian during the attack on the palace, which meant that for about a day half the people of Brightwall complained about my murdering ways.

There are extra weapons you can get in various ways, but they don’t really add much.  (Neat idea, though: many come with attached achievements, which give you bonuses once they’re fulfilled.)  There’s also the option to redecorate your homes, but the furniture options are pretty limited and this too could have been left out.  Oh, and a health HUD would be useful.

I cut the game a lot of slack because it’s trying something really interesting– a fantasy simulation where hacking and slashing is not the solution to everything.  I think it’s mostly but not perfectly successful.  I think it could have used tougher combat and more variety and harder minigames in the relationship-building.  Apparently your spouse(s) can become unhappy, but this never happened to me.  Any relationship problems can be solved by more hugs and kisses, or slightly tedious fetch quests.

I appreciate the game’s switcheroo– the tyrant you thought you were fighting turns out to be doing what he thinks is the right thing, and you’re given the opportunity to do just as he did.  Still, most of the choices are fairly simplistic, and there’s little point in being only partially evil.  It’d be interesting if you had more or different kinds of options sometimes.  (The closest I came was in deciding whether to rebuild the orphanage or build a brothel.  Why can’t we have both?)

Some review I saw called it grindy, but I wouldn’t say that.  The main and side quests are pretty well done, and there’s a lot of near-Pythonesque humor.  Anyway, if you don’t like the grind of having to make all that money, you can just be evil.

 

Dead Money

Just got through another Fallout New Vegas DLC: Dead Money.

In this one, you’re invited to the opening of a new casino out in the middle of nowhere.  I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that things go south.  You find yourself without all your equipment, and tied to three other lost souls… by suicide collars that will all explode if any of you die.  So much for Plan C.

Got a nice armored suit out of it

For the first few missions, then, the DLC recreates the chancy survival of the beginning game, when you value every stimpak and every scrap of ammo.  Which is good; that’s the most compelling part of the genre anyway.

Plus, the pack is surprisingly story- and character-oriented.  Each of your companions is a pretty weird character with a story of their own.  Plus, the story here turns out to be loosely linked to that of Lonesome Road and Old World Blues (as well as to my favorite companion, Veronica).

That said, it’s my least favorite of the three.  This was actually the first DLC, so maybe they were still figuring out how to create a challenge for high-level Couriers.  Their big brainwave: enemies you can’t kill.  I was not thrilled when I killed my first Ghost Hunter and, after a moment, it got right back up again.  But you do get a way to put them down for good not long after.

Their other big idea: a maze of twisty passages, all alike.  The first half of the DLC is set in the Villa, where all the buildings look the same.  Game designers, this is the least exciting way to make it difficult for a character to get where she needs to go.

And then the last section, in the casino itself, approaches Black-Mesa-endgame levels of bad level design.  Basically there are speakers that threaten to set off your suicide collar, and holograms that can shoot you but can’t be killed, and you have to a) find the safe spots where you won’t explode, and b) disable the speakers and hologram emitters.  The thing is, there’s no rhyme or reason to where the safe spots are– very often you have no choice but to run blindly into a death zone hoping that you’ll find a safe spot on the other side.  Often you will, but I think it breaks immersion.  You can’t play as a savvy, wasteland-smart Courier, because running into a death zone is stupid and suicidal.  In a real apocalypse you can’t rely on the goodness of the level designer, or on a walkthrough.

You do get a pretty swanky dress though.

So, it’s a bit of a slog, and you don’t really get any amazing loot out of it. Well, except for money: there is an actual treasure of the Sierra Madre, and it’s comically huge– gold bars that will overstrain your inventory, plus it’s hard to find merchants who can pay for them. But I don’t mind that part; it seems only fitting that the payoff for the biggest treasure trove in Post-Apocalyptia is nearly useless. I have plenty of caps by now anyway, so I’ve set out a gold bar or two in my motel room in Novac, along with the teddy bears, toy cars, space helmet, and glowing bottles of Nuka-Cola.