Some People Juggle Geese

It is, I suspect, an unpleasant fact of the human condition that people will collect just about anything; dolls, shoes, livers, porcelain chickens, pewter spoons, knitting needles, grandmothers, road signs, apple cores, old computers, fudge, welcome mats, vintage postcards, tops, unicycles, combat boots, movie posters, and gum.

Other folks collect Jesus-shaped food, broken glass, hubcaps, used bandages, canceled checks, dog food, signed photos of burned-out gym teachers, coupons, pablum, rocket sleds, teabags, and soup.

And then there are those special souls who collect, of all things, other people.

I don’t mean the crazy-ass, paint-me-a-happy-clown, bodies-under-the-stairs kind of collection that gets turned into a Lifetime movie, but rather the socially sanctioned variety that made a mint for the dudes who started Facebook and MySpace, or AOL back when it was relevant.  Thanks to l’internette, friend collecting has taken on an entirely new, and newly profitable, dynamic, a concept which only recently used to baffle me as though I were a linebacker mulling the question to final Jeopardy.  (And to all the summa cum laude linebackers reading this, I sincerely and most humbly apologize.)

I could never figure out the appeal of having more friends than you could ever hope to keep up with on one of these social networks, until a dead woman explained it first to my very significant and quite spectacular other, who in turn obliquely pointed it out to me; of course the point is not the value of each individual as potential or actual “friend” (in the true, unobfuscated meaning of the word) but is instead the number on the page, as in “VapidWank316 has 668 friends!”  This much is self-evident, but what eluded me for so long was the reasoning behind it.  Now I know why, and I’m going to share it with you, Fair World.

Most of the time, there’s a kind of social auto-elevation that occurs when someone makes a friend, either actual or virtual, by virtue of acceptance of and approval from another.  It goes something like this; “Hey, Jane3101 really likes me.  She’s so cool and all — I’m glad she’s my friend because now I can feel better about  myself.”  This is precisely the kind of behind-the-brain automatic thinking that causes someone’s friends lists to swell to a sufficient length and girth to make Ron Jeremy blush with self-conscious detumescence.

The way it works for me is “Hey, Jane3101 seems to like me.  I guess this means that she’s okay.  Good for her, then.”  In other words, the only elevation taking place here is that my opinion of her rises when I find out that she likes me.  For me, other people are not a means towards some self-aggrandizing end, but are instead an end in themselves — some are ends worth pursuing and maintaining, and others (most) … not so much.

Welcome to my friends list. Resistance is...well, you know.

I cannot stand the concept of The Group, nor will I tolerate being lumped into a pasty, indistinct friendship bouillabaisse by those flitty, flighty socialites o’ malaise who send mass emails and those wonderfully impersonal “this is what happened to us this year” holiday updates, simply because the thought of actual personal communication (as opposed to social communication) is as anathema to them as is the thought of  telling their screaming, unwashed brood to shut the fuck up, lest someone might drag them into the Olive Garden’s bathroom, one by one, and beat the holy Roman piss out of them with a toilet brush.   If you’ve ever sent one of those horrible, “this is just how much I could give less than a shit about you” letters to someone who’s supposed to be your friend, please, for the sake of decency, be promptly and thoroughly ashamed of yourself.

If you’ve flypapered so many people into your address book that you no longer have time to write to each of them individually (which means, you know, as individuals), if you’ve reduced the concept of “friendship” to nothing more than spamming everyone you know once or twice a year with some insipid family newsletter (or worse — using Twitter to simultaneously yammer at anyone who wants to listen), please, once again, GFY.

I am not a piece for anyone’s collection.  I am not a means towards anyone’s end of improving their self-esteem.  I don’t give a shit how many friends you’ve got on Facebook, and I don’t particularly care if you care that I don’t care.  If you’ve got to “squeeze me in somewhere” when you come to town, don’t bother; I don’t find time for the people who matter to me; I make it.

The word “friend” used to mean something, back before it was lured into the that seedy-looking van, tied up, abused, and later pimped out onto the streets of our new electronic society by a few soulless corporate twats in Hugo boss suits, as little more than some dazed, makeup-smeared marketing gimmick.  A friend is no longer someone you go to the movies with, or shoot some hoops with, or fix your car with.  A friend is a now cyber commodity, a means by which those in control of these services can increase their companies’ value — a notion to which I offer a hale and heartfelt “eat me.”

Why does this bother me, and why should it bother you?  Well, if you’re one of those vapid skanks who enjoys collecting people like so many dessicated moths pinned to a entomology major’s display board, it shouldn’t. Go right ahead and be your shallow self, nobody cares. But if things matter to you, and if you’re not one of those too-cool-to-care douchenozzles who just can’t be bothered with any-fucking-thing, if words — specifically the content and character of ideas — matter to you, then you’ll take steps to halt the spread of this particular brand of concept-destruction.

If we permit the use of a particular word to describe something that is patently not that word, then we destroy the thing that is that word. The idea that a photograph of a crucifix submerged in a glass of pee could be displayed in the same gallery and at the same time as a Rembrandt exhibit is in no way an expression of artistic freedom; it is instead a crass perversion of the very concept of art.  The fact that it was funded by an NEA grant says all you need to know about the value of this so-called art and the value of government agencies that distribute these funds.

The best way to ensure the destruction of the concept “friend” is to use the word to describe that which is clearly not a friend. Some ass-clown you met on XBL or PSN is not a friend, regardless of what the corporate knobs who run these networks want you to believe.  This is because — unless you’re James Joyce — words actually have meaning.  So does true friendship.

And I’ll be damned if I’ll be a party to the destruction of either.

Heavy Rain (PS3)

A man chooses…a quicktime slave obeys

Because you silly Americans won't buy anything unless it has breasts on the cover.

“You pick up Armin Shimerman’s performance as Andrew Ryan in BioShock and hold it up to the light. You carefully inspect it for creases, stiffness, and visible seams. Amazed, you put it down again and stand back reverently, because you suddenly realize that you’re in the presence of greatness.”

Two years later…

“You pick up the entire cast’s performance from Heavy Rain and hold it up to the light. Shrieking, you run from the room in horror, because you suddenly realize that it’s worse than you’d feared — it is, in fact, the end of time, and garbage is all that has survived.”

If you liked Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit, stop here. If you liked BioShock, continue from here.

This is the first time I’ve had a game’s presentation ruin the experience for me. Normally, that would be a noteworthy accomplishment, but I guess once you consider that Heavy Rain is not really a game, but an “interactive film noir,” it all makes a kind of murky, poorly acted, badly written sense. Incidentally, this observation is coming from a guy who spent about a hundred hours last summer with Sacred 2: Fallen Angel, so I can say without guile or reservation that piss-poor presentation is generally not a deal-breaker for me.

When presentation is all you’ve got to offer, when your gameplay consists solely of mashing buttons, pushing sticks, and shaking the controller at prescribed times, you’d better be sure that the presentation is polished, buffed, and polished again to rival the sheen on a ferengi bartender’s skull bumps. This includes, but may not be limited to, hiring voice actors who can, you know, fucking act with their voices.

Two of the four major characters in Heavy Rain are voiced by people for whom American English is a second language, and it shows with every stiff, stilted line of dialogue. Since the game is plainly set in Standard Generic City, USA, it would have been nice to have heard more than one or two native voices, which might have introduced a microbe of verisimilitude to the experience. Instead, because of the sophomoric writing and the horrible acting, Heavy Rain feels like an imitation of what someone might expect from an “interactive film noir” (words which, by the way, shall not appear on this blog outside the isolating confinement of quotation marks), with scant attention paid to details of setting and background. If your game is set in the US, even after localization for different countries, you ought to be able to accurately depict such minutiae as the proper number of digits in a phone number.

Look, if you want to make a movie, then make one. If you want to use French or British voice actors, then do so, but for appropriate roles; with all the Americans running around out there, there’s absolutely no reason to have British and French actors speaking with bad American accents and vice-versa. Leon Ockenden, I’m specifically looking at you here, with your portrayal of Norman Jayden. (I’ll see what we can do about Gwenyth Paltrow and Robert Downey Jr.)

This-here's what we in these parts call "gra-too-i-tus," in both the gameplay and the presentation. Get used to it.

There’s no greater insult to gaming than when developers like Quantic Dream consistently strive for the validation of another medium (film, books, theater, oiled hamster tossing, whatever) by making a game with mechanics as shallow and unsatisfying as those found in Heavy Rain, and then trying to pass it off as some sort of evolution of story presentation. Guess what; take away the wonky controls and the pigeonshit quicktime events, and all you’re left with are various versions of a very good-looking, clumsily written movie, with acting straight out of a high school Our Town audition. My ’66 VW Beetle and its three working cylinders had better timing, for cryin’ out loud.

A game can survive bad presentation as long as its other ducks are squarely aligned and squeaky clean. A game like Sacred 2, for instance, makes up for its laughable presentation with excellent collection and leveling mechanics, along with cramming enough content onto one DVD to keep you busy for hundreds of hours, if you’re determined to see everything the game has to offer. It sports a level cap of 200, which would take several playthroughs in order to achieve.

"Don't hate me because I'm beautiful. Hate me because I can't act, or because I'm as expressive as a wet wax dummy run amuck."

Even the venerated Deus Ex is guilty of wielding some of the worst acting this side of silent films, especially with regard to its Asian voices and the protagonist, JC Denton. Deus Ex’s saving throw comes in the form of superior gameplay and the fact that the miserable voice acting is bolstered by some of the finest writing — both story and dialogue — that you’ll ever find in a game. Also, Deus Ex is thematically sound without bashing you over the head with its own intentions, as is the case with Gears of Wars’ oft-exhorted theme of “destroyed beauty” and Heavy Rain’s “how far would you go to save someone you love?” Each of these purported themes has been repeated by the developer ad-nauseum, though neither is truly a theme; background, perhaps, for Cliffy B.’s testosterone-fueled shooter, and character motivation for Monsieur De Gruttola’s “interactive film noir,” but neither developer’s statements are themes in the proper sense of the word. Moreover, if you’ve got to state the theme of your work for your audience, over and over and still over again, you’re doing something seriously wrong in your presentation.

Heavy Rain is not a bad game from a technical standpoint. The controls are often frustrating, though perfectly suited to its thoughtful, adventure-game style, and it’s one of the best-looking games that you’ll find on the PS3. Initially, I looked forward to a change of pace from games like Mass Effect 2 and BioShock 2, but Heavy Rain grew so tedious in terms of both gameplay and presentation that it quickly became a chore to play. In order for the story to be the primary motive for playing a game, it must be presented in a fashion that makes it possible for the viewer/player to credibly suspend disbelief, and in Heavy Rain, this simply doesn’t happen — its ham-handed writing and amateur acting provide two insurmountable hurdles between what might have been a great game, and something that’s merely a mediocre interactive…whatever.

Games — along with those who might shell out $60 for someone else’s work — deserve better than this.

Bioshock 2 (360)

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water

If you’re old enough to remember the above tag line, and can name the movie that it escorted to a kind of breathless box office pulchritude in the summer of 1978, congratulations; you’re a dinosaur. Welcome to the club, and save me a haunch of iguanodon. I’ll show you the super-secret handshake later.

Jaws 2 made almost $10,000,000 in its first weekend; a paltry sum by today’s standards, but considering that it opened in only 640 theaters, and that an adult ticket cost about two bucks back then, I’d say that it did all right. With the exceptions of Richard Dreyfus and Robert Shaw (Dreyfus was shooting Close Encounters of the Third Kind with Steven Spielberg, and Shaw’s character Quint could only have returned in flashback, if you know what I mean), it brought back many actors from the original cast and went on to earn over $200,000,000 worldwide. It wasn’t a bad movie in itself, but the only way it could have stood up to the original was if Adam Baldwin loomed menacingly behind it and silently pounded one fist into an open palm; basically, the worst thing about Jaws 2 was its inevitable comparison to the original, and of course the salt-spattered litter of squirming celluloid rejects that it spawned in later years.

Sticking a “2″ in the title is almost the kiss of death when it comes to judging the quality of a sequel, whether we’re talking about books, films, or video games; the first thing the numerical title sequence is going to accomplish is to beg a comparison to everything that has come before. This is because judging a game on its own merits isn’t easy, especially if your biggest reason for playing it is that it’s a sequel to a game that you loved. Bioshock 2 is no exception.

By no standard can Bioshock 2 be called a bad game. It looks good (in spite of some muddy environmental textures), controls well, and tells a solid story, all while keeping the player’s head firmly immersed in the game world — there are no quicktime events, no rapid button-pressing, and thankfully, no intrusive cutscenes that rip you out of the action simply because you walked across a room. In fact, as far as the presentation goes, I’d say it’s as close to perfect as a game can get; it spins a convincing narrative without whanging you over the head with line after line of insipid, badly acted dialogue and character animation that looks more at home in Madame Tussaud’s living room than in what’s supposed to pass for convincing entertainment. CGI characters cannot act, and it bugs the fruity Christmas fuck out of me when developers try to shoehorn that uncomfortably square peg into the soft round hole of my dramatic expectations. Thankfully, 2K Marin, 2K Australia, 2K China, and 2K Uzbekistan along with Arkane Studios, Digital Extremes, and BF Goodwrench, have largely spared us the pathetic spectacle of watching 1s and 0s trying to mimic the accomplishments of Olivier and Brando, by keeping the story where it belongs – firmly in the action, and for that I am extremely grateful.

This CHICK is TOAST!

One of the places where Bioshock 2 falls a bit flat is in its reliance on stationary set-pieces to heighten the tension; it’s way too fond of locking you in a room and forcing you to finish off every enemy in sight before being permitted to move on, which makes the single player experience feel far too much like it’s trying to emulate a multiplayer match. In addition, any game in which resource management is such a crucial component of survival (and, as a result, to the extrinsic enjoyment of the player) being forced to “deal with” three Little Sisters in one particular level was a cheap and shitty substitute for player-directed action, as it removes the possibility of moral ambiguity; in Dionysus Park, the player must either choose the morality of rescuing the Little Sisters, or the immorality of harvesting them, and thus cannot progress until a decision is made. For a game that wants players to take the “reins of authorship,” forcing a choice in that context was a real ass-move.

Like its spiritual ancestor Jaws 2, Bioshock 2 falls hardest in comparison to its predecessor, and since it is a sequel, such comparisons are not only inevitable, but necessary; Bioshock 2′s road to success was cut, cleared, and paved solely by the accomplishments of the first Bioshock, so an entirely objective evaluation is not only impossible, it would render an inequitable assessment of the first game, which had to earn its way based entirely on its own merit. If a game would reap the benefits of succession to an established, bestselling franchise, it must be prepared to be judged against that franchise, and in this context, Bioshock 2 is a vastly unworthy sequel.

Gone are the picturesque and contrasting locales of the first Bioshock, replaced with uniformly deteriorating settings whose humdrum similarity makes it difficult to distinguish one level from another. Gone are the numerous backstories, as characters like Sander Cohen and Diane McClintock are nowhere to be found; there are still plenty of audio recordings scattered throughout the levels, but the subplots contained therein are not nearly as compelling as those found in the first game. One tells the story of Mark Meltzer, a father who came to Rapture in order to find his kidnapped daughter; it’s a premise which one might expect to elicit a powerful emotional experience, but in the end it failed to do so because of the way the specifics of Meltzer’s story were handled. It could have been a perfectly engineered subplot, echoing and integrating the theme of the two games, which suggests that compromised principles and unchecked extremism lead to disaster, regardless of the philosophical spectrum that guides them, leaving only hapless victims like Meltzer and his daughter in their wake. Meltzer’s story accomplishes nothing of the sort, as it fails to hit any of the requisite emotional chords.

The graphics, though impressive in their own right, don’t compare well to those in the first game, either. Players will notice a slight blur on some environmental textures like walls and floors, and the vita-chambers don’t look as good as they did in 2007. Though the two console versions are visually similar, the sound in the Playstation 3 version lacks the fidelity and detail of its Xbox counterpart; water droplets pinging off the helmet of Subject Delta in the 360 version are notably muted on the Playstation 3, along with various other auditory discrepancies, such the sound occasionally cutting out when visiting vending machines.

Again, on its own, Bioshock 2 is a very good game, one whose biggest strength is also its greatest weakness; it simply cannot compare to the first game, and since the first Bioshock is the only reason that Bioshock 2 exists in the first place, is it improper to judge it independently of its predecessor? Yes and no; as I learned with Mass Effect 2, objectivity is a two-way street, as you can enjoy a game for what it is, and at once bemoan everything it isn’t, but the latter is only likely to leave you frustrated. The only way I was ever able to even remotely enjoy Deus Ex: Invisible War was to judge it independently of the first Deus Ex, and anyone who held Bioshock in such exalted regard would be advised to do the same with its sequel.

Enjoy what it is, without  lamenting what it isn’t, and you’ll have a great time.