Having shambled, traipsed, skittered, perambulated, and once even sashayed through nearly forty soul-crushing years of life experience, and having traveled somewhat extensively around portions of the globe which I never thought I’d see, I’ll readily admit that there are some things which I will simply never understand:
Italian driving. Southern cooking. Cricket. Everything in Saudi Arabia. Californians. Games that wrest control from the player every thirty seconds so that the developer might include things that do absolutely ’sto cazzo to enhance my enjoyment of the experience, things which include but are not limited to a mind-numbing quantity of cut scenes and unnecessary shorter cut-aways depicting nothing more than the main character receiving instructions on what goal to accomplish next while I slowly chew the inside of my face to tattered bloody shreds and consider a hobby less likely to cause a life-revoking embolism and/or fucking stroke.
If you take me out of your game with such threadbare conventions, if you constantly remind me that I’m playing a game by repeatedly forcing me to stop playing your game so I can watch some clueless shitheel jabber away on his Super SpyGear Invisible Headset™, I’ll stop playing once and for all so you and your cherished cut scenes can enjoy some special alone time together. Nothing, and I mean nothing, riles my goobers more effectively than a game that’s got its head jammed so far up its own ass that it won’t kindly step the hell out of the way for just a lil’ while and let me take control. That’s all I want. Just get out of the way and let me play. Dick.
Some might call this breaking the immersion, and they’d be right. I call it flushing sixty bucks down the pooper, because that’s what I did with Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Conspiracy (RLTBC) on the PS3. Anyone keen on purchasing this game should instead hand three twenties to a homeless guy and let him tap dance on your face for three hours; this way you’ll have helped someone in need and had much more fun in the process.
Immersion is one of those words that’s tossed around like a Marlboro in a truckstop urinal, yet I’m not convinced that even half the developers working today understand what it means or why it’s important. It’s the reason why characters in TV shows and films never look directly at the camera, or why novels are no longer written in the second-person; it destroys the suspension of disbelief and reminds the viewer that hey, this mess ain’t real. When it comes to interactive entertainment, the chrysanthemum of death blooms the moment that your shit ceases to be, you know, interactive, and instead becomes some wanna-be Argento’s vision of artistic sepulchral effluvium.
Get over yourself and trust me to play your game already. You don’t need to take me out of the action and pull back from the main character so I can watch him hold his finger against his ear while the mystical man in the sky issues orders from high atop his double-walled redoubt of questionable accountability. You don’t need to zoom in on the forced, unskippable hand-to-hand combat segments, of which there are far too many and which last far too long. (Jason Bourne has a gun, so why does he bother going toe-to-toe with some slack-jawed ‘roid monster as precious seconds bleed off the magical timed segment clock in the upper-right corner of the screen?) Why not just shoot the prick in the knees and move on?
We can dance if you want to…
The timed button press once again rears its misshapen frontal bone as the mass mailing must have gone out to every developer on the planet; include trite, overused mechanics in all forthcoming games or turn in your mouse ears, motherfuckers. The takedown feature, which enables heavy damage/finishing moves once successfully landed strikes fill the corollary meter, offers only canned animations that further distance the player from the violent action, again reminding me that I have very little to do with what’s happening on-screen.
Not that I have a problem with gratuitous gaming violence. Quite the contrary. I have a problem with being led by the septum through every environment while the game randomly prompts me to “press this button now!” so I can watch in-game animations of the action instead of feeling as though I’m part of the action. None of the game’s intended cool moments occurs naturally; each is as planned and as painstakingly choreographed as as space shuttle landing, and about half as much fun to watch.
While RLTBC provides satisfying sound effects for events such as head shots and well-timed punches, the graphics fail to impress in every regard, including excess aliasing and muddy textures. Dodgy graphics are usually the easiest aspect of a game for me to forgive, but only when the rest of its waterfowl are linearly arrayed and loudly vocalizing, and this is far from the case with Bourne. The controls are passable enough, in spite of some odd decisions regarding button assignments (switching weapons with the L2 button, for instance), but the UI could have been better, as it’s difficult to discern when an action is possible through the contextual pop-up at the bottom of the screen. I suppose this is okay, though, because action is a secondary concern in a game so impressed with its own pedigree that it pauses to flex its action movie pecs in my face at every eye-gouging opportunity.
This is what I get for reviewing three consecutive media tie-ins. My burgeoning optimism for the genre’s rehabilitation has been thoroughly brained by a recidivist amnesiac tool sporting a Mr. Rogers cardigan and a gun that’s useless at closer than fifty feet.
Serves me right.
