Get your fat space ass back here!

Mr. Thomas Stearns Eliot demonstrated that he was often full of six different kinds of shit, but he nailed one particular axiom in “The Hollow Men,” which is oddly relevant to the financial ball-gag that Sony finds stuffed, Ving Rhames-style, in its yawning skull-cave; there’s a gulf of difference between the idea and its execution, or between that which we envision and that which we achieve.

If a writer cannot say what he intends, or a painter can’t put to canvas his vision of a sunset, it’s often because he holds undefined premises which thwart the transition of his ideas from the conceptual to the perceptual; namely, he attempts to write or paint with either a misplaced standard of creation (aiming for A and hitting Schenectady), or one so poorly defined that it produces only stream-of-consciousness drivel and/or 20th Century poetry.

Similarly, if a formerly successful corporation such as Sony begins to hemorrhage cash from every orifice, it’s important to identify the defective premises which serve as the catalyst for their pending, though yet avoidable, demise. Since arrogance and calamity seem to be SOP at SCE these days, and since competition is essential even to a trompe-l’oeil market economy such as ours, I figured I might as well help them out.

Prayers, Too Broke, and Stoned

If your business strategy includes forcing potential customers to embrace an unproven (and therefore unvalued) technology such as Blu-Ray, and you’re charging slightly less than the GDP of Luxembourg for the privilege, expect consumers to be, shall we say, slightly fucking hesitant. Asking would-be early adopters to fork over a month’s rent just to get their mitts on your glossy black box and its requisite accessories attains an altitude of marketing hypoxia unmatched since Dean Kamen set out the change the very nature of transportation in malls cities around the world, at $5000 a pop. Thanks, Dean. Yes we can.

If your tech strategy includes intentionally making your hardware difficult to develop for, requiring a higher investment and a lower return for developers, don’t be surprised when guys like Gabe Newell, who’s made a game or two in his day, admit that they’re a couple of little blue pills short of a full-on quarterstaff for your coyly inaccessible machina. Longer, more difficult development cycles mean fewer games per studio, which means less profit in an industry with a mosquito-dick margin; as a result, expect to see your third-party royalties dry up like Richard Simmons on hormone replacement therapy.

If your distribution strategy includes issuing a new hardware SKU every sixteen days, ensuring that even the most concupiscent Sony fanboys can’t keep up with your lasciviously schizophrenic appetites, expect to see on-the-fence adopters retreat in confusion and resentment at the constant state of feature entropy.  Between the elimination of the card reader slots, the loss of PS2 backwards compatibility, and fewer USB inputs, you’ve taken more meat away from the table than Jenna Jameson. Decidedly not good eats.

Chuan-Li lamented the shortsightedness of his getaway plan after barricading himself in the men's room of the only donut shop in Beijing.

This Is the Whey They Whirled. NNNN.

If your software strategy includes letting anything as remotely hideous as Haze appear on your system as an exclusive release, please hasten to solicit the services of an exorcist, because clearly you’re possessed by a 5th-level Demon of Perplexing Judgment, and it’s only a matter of time until the green puke and the crucifix make an appearance. Similarly, if the very best exclusive third-party title that you can offer contains the not-so-latently-homosexual vision of a man named Solid Snake grinding his junk into the sand in six different trouble spots around the world while exchanging erotically charged radio banter with a repressed anime fan and searching for Big Boss (also known as Naked Snake), I’ll pass, thanks. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

If your downloadable content strategy includes full Playstation 3, PSP, and PSOne games (+1), yet many of these games are priced the same on your network as they are at brick and mortar retail outlets (-1), without appreciable acknowledgment of the lack of manufacturing and distribution overhead, there’s no incentive for anyone to buy from you. Price and convenience are both crucial components of any business, but price, specifically the perception of value, trumps convenience every single time. Also guilty of this is Microsoft, which is under the impression that $15 is reasonable for the shitty Xbox Originals that they offer on Xbox Live; anyone who would today pay that much for Grabbed by the Ghoulies or Raze’s Hell indeed ought to have his ghoulies grabbed and perhaps pummeled and twisted into odd balloon-animal shapes.

Lest this seem like a fanboy rant, realize that there is no room in the games industry for misdirected standards; it is crucial that SCE survives this hardware generation, if for no other reason than their demise leaves my primary form of entertainment solely in the hands of the people who created Windows Vista. At this point their biggest faux pas seems to be the forced adoption of Blu-Ray, which at launch drove the cost of each Playstation 3 into the technological stratosphere; though their reasons for including it were sound (betting on Blu-Ray becoming the hi-def format, along with a drastic price drop on TVs capable of displaying images in the Blu-Ray-native 1080p resolution), this betrays an engineering standard completely divorced from gaming, as Blu-Ray’s benefit only fully emerges in the arena of home theater. Its value to gaming is purely peripheral.

If SCE is to survive, at least some of the aforementioned issues need to be addressed and remedied in the current console round. If they are to thrive into the next generation, they need to become the company they were ten years ago, which operated with a penetrating, singleminded focus on games and only games, and which made theirs the best-selling consoles for over a decade.

“Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar”

Behold the One True Version of Super Stardust, for I could not find box art for the PSP version!

A few months ago, I wrote in another venue about a number of truly horrible games which I enjoyed quite a bit in spite of their glaring shortcomings. I have no problem admitting my fondness for games like Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel and Draconus: Cult of the Wyrm; conversely, neither do I skitter into the crumb-filled crevice between the counter and the stove when the light of slavish adoration for all things Nintendo hits me squarely between the antennae. While I acknowledge that Super Mario Sunshine Galaxy 64 World Bros. and its various multi-genre spawn are – technically and aesthetically – very good games, I’d rather stab myself in the face with a frozen Koopa turd than play any of them for longer than three minutes.

Since most game reviewers are survivors of public-funded, government-run education (and to those who draw themselves up in haughty indignation, proclaiming “well I went to public school and I turned out okay”; get over yourselves – I went to public school too, and am only now recovering), it comes as no surprise that most reviewers have never been taught how to think objectively. Most hold the subjective as their standard of criticism, subscribing to a philosophy of intellectual hedonism which proclaims “I like it, therefore it is Good,” as opposed to the objective “it is good, therefore I like it.”

The nature of objectivity demands that consideration be given only to what an object is, not to what it is not or what the observer wishes it to be. It demands that evaluation must be gleaned from the attributes of the entity to be judged, from the object of thought (the game) rather than from the subject of thought (the reviewer).

So why does it surprise me when I read a review for Super Stardust Portable from a professional outlet which amounts to nothing more than a 700-word rant about how much the game is unlike its PS3 counterpart? I should know better by now, so I guess I’m just stupid, but I downloaded the game anyway for no other reason than to invalidate the reviewer’s illogically subjective premise.

Lo, game devoid of bananas, horses, and clowns of disconcertingly ambiguous intent, I pronounce you unworthy!

The key to objective evaluation lies in the ability to think in terms of essentials. At its core, Super Stardust Portable – like Super Stardust HD – is an arcade shooter, an homage of sorts to Asteroids, Galaga, Centipede, and Defender, with a dash of Geometry Wars Galaxies thrown in for flavor. It employs two very basic strategies – shoot stuff, don’t die – with various sub-strategies rounding out what happens to be a very satisfying experience on both platforms. The fact that the PSP’s design necessarily changes the gameplay should have little or no influence on the determination of SSP’s overall value, provided that the game’s essentials survive the translation, and they do, with one caveat.

Firing with the face buttons is not ideal, but it works well with some minor adaptation by the user; the hardware cannot adapt to the game, after all, so Finnish developer Housemarque did a rather commendable job of adapting the game to the hardware as best as could possibly be done. The rest is up to the player, who will either enjoy himself or not, but to accept the Big Media Outlet reviewer’s assertion that the game is not ideal and therefore should not exist in its PSP iteration is a brand of elitist perfectionism that can only be advocated by someone who does not (and perhaps cannot) create anything.

I see no value in assigning an arbitrary score to a game (which is I why I stopped doing it here), so when I read a review from an outfit I trust(ed), what I’m looking for is a broad assessment of design elements and fundamental mechanics. When a reviewer can only tell me “well, it’s not as good as the version on the $499 console, so if you like that version, don’t buy this one” I must hoist a skeptical eyebrow and silence the blaring bullshit detector. Adoring a game on a particular platform – or a previous game in a series, for that matter – does not warrant performing a subjective hatchet job of the same game on another, decidedly less capable platform, provided that the game in question is fundamentally (aesthetically and technically) sound. In other words, with complete disregard for the source material – if Super Stardust HD didn’t exist – what would be your evaluation of Super Stardust Portable? That is the foundation of objectivity.

When judged as it should be (on its own merit) Super Stardust Portable is fast-paced, good-looking, and loads of fun, and it succeeds in spite of some severe platform limitations. If flashy arcade shooters are your thing, and you’re not averse to a slight mechanical learning curve by firing with the face buttons, it’s well worth the $10 PSN price tag.

It’s probably a bit misleading on a blog called “This Game Sucks” to review a five-year-old game that doesn’t suck at all, but temporarily rebranding the joint “This Game Was Well-Reviewed By Critics But Largely Shunned By Fanboy Dicks” would be impractical. Tempting, but still impractical.

Upon its release on December 3, 2003, Deus Ex: Invisible War had some crazy-ass venti-sized shoes to fill. Coming out on the heels of what many still consider to be the best PC game of all time must have been like following the Beatles on Ed Sullivan; that luckless magician could have juggled chainsaws and solved quadratic equations while playing “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” on an ass-clenched kazoo and it wouldn’t have made any difference; at that point, nobody was paying attention anymore. Similarly, Invisible War could have presented Michio Kaku with a tidily giftwrapped, ready-for-prime-time Theory of Everything while lovingly polishing John Malkovich’s head to a shimmering luster, yet flaming idiots across the globe still would have derided it for being dumbed-down and “consolized.”

One of the things that hurt Invisible War wasn’t that it was “dumbed-down;” it was actually a very intelligent game that dealt with sophisticated themes and sub-themes, such as the appropriate roles of government and religion, dependency on and rejection of technology across varying socio-economic strata, and the manipulation of fear as a catalyst for corporate profit. Timeless stuff, to be sure, but where Invisible War floundered most was with its inevitable comparison to its older sibling.

Deus Ex was a masterful game in part because it contained multiple elements that reinforced some of the most fundamental mechanics of play and survival known to humanity (collection, customization, and feedback). The spatial inventory was a terrific way to peruse and interact with everything you’d collected throughout your time in the game world, and the distribution of goal-based skill points was helpful in creating a system of feedback (points awarded) and reward (improved skills), along with enriching the personal stake that each player had in the game by allowing the customization of skills and abilities.

Who do I gotta fuck to get a waffle?

The omission of the skill points and the limited upgradeability of the nanoaugs (three levels of upgrade in IW, four in DX), coupled with the limited upgradeability of the weapons (only two upgrade slots available for each), is largely what spoiled Invisible War for those who’d waited three-plus years for its release; the illusion of a player-driven experience was severely hampered — if not altogether eliminated — by the many limitations and restrictions on the choices that were available for solving problems. Consolidating the lockpicks and the multitools into a single, multi-function device is an example of how something can make sense from a design perspective (eliminating seemingly redundant mechanics), yet at the same time work against you by limiting the scope of the player’s involvement in the game’s extrinsic fiction. The same can be said for universal ammo; it might have made sense on the drawing board, but in practice it helped to remove the player from the fiction that he crafted for himself while playing the game. (While playing as a sniper, finding 30.06 ammo is rewarding and specifically significant to that individual experience.)

Even today, five years later, Invisible War’s biggest problem (bigger than universal ammo and no skill points and fewer overall choices) is that most people are incapable of analyzing anything beyond the context of their own experience. Anything they like is Good, and anything they don’t like is Bad, and as far as they’re concerned that’s the end of the story, but such subjective, dogmatic valuation is ultimately flawed, because, as Steve Martin once pointed out, it excludes metaphysics. This means that there are specific criteria that determine the “good” or “bad” of any game, and which exist independently of personal preferences and opinions.

When evaluated on its own merit, Invisible War is a great game. It’s only with comparison to the original Deus Ex that it suffers, simply by virtue of the fact that it’s smaller in both depth and scope than the first, but when judged for what it is instead of what it might have been, I challenge anyone to formulate a credible argument against the game’s intrinsic virtues.

I’ve liked plenty of bad games (Pirates: The Legend of Black Kat, Too Human, Jedi Power Battles), but this doesn’t mean that I would be justified in abandoning all critical faculty and upholding my personal preferences as empirical truth in order to label these games as patently “good.” Too much of that goes on already, leading to the subjective existential nightmare we call “popular culture.”

Both the PC and Xbox versions of Invisible War are rife with low-resolution textures and frequent load screens, and the PC version ran slowly on even the most advanced gaming rigs of the day, but in spite of its aesthetic shortcomings it remains imminently playable even today. It provides a badly needed foray into the arena of player-driven customization and expression, in spite of the fact that it doesn’t stand up to its progenitor; with the lone exception of the intrusively frequent area transitions it can hold its own against any first-person shooter released over the last five years. While it lacks the moral barometer of BioShock, and the tight, immersive presentation of HalfLife 2, it feels less like a watered-down rehash of its predecessor than does BioShock (in regard to System Shock 2), and it’s much less likely to force a fight than either of the two, giving the player the option to determine when it’s best to sneak, and when it’s best to go in with the enemy Paste-O’-Tron running at full-blast.

Any unfavorable assessments of the game which are based on nothing but the fact that it’s not Deus Ex should also be considered at face value and judged for what they are; mindless fanboy rants inspired by an inability to evaluate anything beyond the relativistic borders of personal opinion.

It was recently revealed by an Eidos employee on the company’s forums that Deus Ex 3, which is in development at Eidos Montreal, will employ a regenerating health system. To many die-hard Deus Ex devotees (and I’ve discovered that there really is no other kind of Deus Ex devotee), this is akin to a devout Catholic discovering that beneath the stately papal vestments, Hiz ‘Oliness routinely sports Spider-Man Underoos. With skid marks.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Spider-Man Underoos, or skid marks, for that matter — you just don’t want to think about them rubbing up against the pontiffular posterior. (Some things should at least maintain the illusion of being sacred, after all.) By association, there’s nothing wrong with regenerating health in the proper context, but that context is not a Deus Ex game, nor any game that would call itself an RPG.

While the developers of Deus Ex 3 maintain that it will be a role-playing game, the notion of regenerating health (in lieu of inventory health packs) belies this classification because of a single, irrefutable premise; regenerating health requires non-action. Sitting behind a wall waiting for health to regenerate before moving on is a mechanic that essentially forces the player to stop playing the game in order to continue playing the game, and by extension removes two components which are vital to any kind of role-playing; inventory management and player-determined action.

The spatial inventory from Deus Ex succeeded because it struck a familiar, comfortable chord with many RPGers, whether their RPGing bicuspids were cut on the table-top or on phosphorus dots; the inventory presented a quantifiable index of their progress throughout the game, basically becoming the players’ visual representation of their character. Taking stock of your inventory and determining that you’ve got three health packs, four bioelectric cells, two rounds of 30.06 ammo, six Sabot rounds and a lock pick, and then making it through a particularly tough area of the game explicitly because you prudently hoarded your health packs is immeasurably more satisfying than making it through the same area simply because you’re good at hiding behind shit. Removing the illusion that the player is in complete control of his avatar’s condition drives a wedge between the player and the fiction that he’s created for that character independent of the game’s story, and in any RPG, that – more than blue spiky-haired emo protagonists – is the kiss of death.

Any game which, through the use of regenerating health, would force the player to adopt a tactical approach to all combat situations cannot in good conscience consider itself an RPG, since by definition a role-playing game affords the player the opportunity to – go figure – play a role, and adopt a style that appeals to his or her individual preferences. Take BioShock, an absolutely great game, which contained elements of character-building in available health and tonic upgrades; a magic system in the plasmids, with EVE serving as mana; weapon upgrades (two levels for every weapon in the game), and a system of morality (rescuing, harvesting, or ignoring the Little Sisters); for all its RPG tendencies, BioShock is most definitely not a role-playing game, in spite of the fact that it incorporates various aspects of player choice on multiple levels.

Enough of this complicated thinking bullshit, just let me blow stuff up and teabag total strangers!

Why? Because BioShock provides no alternative to the use of weapons or plasmids, essentially forcing the player to fight in order to succeed. Its lack of a visible inventory also separates the player from the fantasy of his own experience, as though Ken Levine and company did everything they could to distance the game from the supposed console-sales-killing moniker of “role-playing game.” In spite of the fact that BioShock feels as though it really, really wants to be an RPG, it falls short in several crucial areas, and was no doubt hamstrung by acquiescence to the marketing department’s concerns over focus group objections. The lack of a visual inventory, coupled with there being no way to review which tonics were installed without visiting a Gene Bank, ultimately hurt the game by intentionally placing a barrier between the player and any sort of feedback about the character’s status, aside from health and EVE status.

Deus Ex 3’s regenerating health feels, at this point, like the much of same thing; a marketing decision. No doubt someone at Eidos uncovered a statistic showing that games with regenerating health – Halo 2, Gears of War (2), Call of Duty 4 – move like buttery ass at the Playboy Mansion, and in a mind-bending contortion of cause-and-effect, determined that regenerating health contributes to good sales. This brand of logic seeks to reap the effect and benefit of hot-selling titles, without first attending to the cause; in this case, the Deus Ex franchise name alone is going to move copies of Deus Ex 3, in much the same way that Halo: Combat Evolved is what sold six trillion copies of Halo 2 within forty-eight hours of its release, and not the fact that it required the player to sit behind a barrier while watching Master Chief’s health bar refill. The same goes for Gears of War and Call of Duty 4, which sold well because they were good games that happened to have regenerating health. This correlation fallacy, or cum hoc, ergo propter hoc (with this, therefore because of this) belies an inability to reason, and in the case of Eidos (as they proved with the release of Invisible War), also indicates a basic inability to market honey to hungry bears.

Making design decisions based on reaching the maximum number of consumers is fine, provided those decisions are supported by one or two objective facts, and not marketing department head-up-its ass false correlations. If, on the other hand, the decision to include regenerating health honestly had nothing to do with marketing, and is simply an attempt to get the player to progress through the game in a certain, developer-determined manner, that’s different. In that case, no one has any business referring to Deus Ex 3 as a role-playing game.

Of course I’ll play it anyway, regardless of its health system, and I’ll probably even enjoy it. Rewarding the concept of not-doing, or forced passivity, in any game that purports to be an action-RPG seems more than a little absurd, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be a solid experience.

It just won’t be a Deus Ex game.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the Wii, and noted that two of the system’s best games — Resident Evil 4 and Okami — were cursed with an overeager implementation of Wii Remote function. I guess I was only half wrong; while Resident Evil 4 will never earn a complete play-through on my Wii (I’m not shaking anything in order to run, thank you very much), Okami has been getting buckets of overtime lately, and it turns out that its control is only half cursed.

When it was first released on the Playstation 2 in September of 2006, Okami earned not only its share of critical acclaim, but also a predictable amount of consumer indifference. After all; on the double-y chromosome prison planet of deathmatch, capture-the-flag, teabag-happy, adolescent ambulatory testosterone emitters, who has time for a sumi-e style, artistic action-adventure game in which you play as the Shinto sun goddess Amaterasu incarnated as a white wolf? Who’s going to dedicate thirty-to-forty hours of their lives to a game whose unifying design principle is not one of destruction, but of restoration and renewal? About 330,000 out of a worldwide base of over 140 million Playstation 2 owners, that’s who. (Gears of War, by comparison, has sold 4.7 million copies as of May 2008, with far fewer Xbox 360s installed worldwide.) So whaddaya know, it didn’t sell as well as Capcom had hoped, but it did okay enough to warrant a port to the Wii. Judged by that criteria alone it’s no better or worse than Ninjabread Man or Rebel Raiders.

Okami was developed by the now-defunct Clover Studio, purveyors of the unique-yet-frustrating Viewtiful Joe, its uniquer-yet-frustratinger sequel, and the quirky-yet-craptacular God Hand. Each of these games might accurately be classified as a beat-’em-up, although the Viewtifuls at least possess the distinct virtue of being, you know, good, while God Hand moseys into town and takes up permanent residence at Miss Kitty’s Lodge and Saloon of Everything Shit.

Okami is an amalgamation of all the good and bad from Clover’s previous titles, mostly the good, yet it managed to accomplish that most seemingly insurmountable of all gaming tasks these days; it got me to play my Wii. What’s more, it got me to enjoy a lengthy, fairly deep single-player game on the Wii, with near-flawless utilization of the Wii remote. Indeed, what is this thing called “hope?”

As noted before, most Wii titles desperately try to cram all their input gestures into the Wii Remote, and the result has been an entire library of games in most dire need of a telethon. (Almost a billion and a half dollars have been raised by MDA every Labor Day since 1966, and we can’t get Jerry Lewis anywhere near Dewy’s Advenure? The fuck is up with that?) Forcing the use of the Remote/Nunchuk in a game like Death Jr.: Root of Evil — which might have actually been playable, or God forbid, fun, with the Classic Controller — makes as much sense as it would if Jamba Juice forced their patrons to consume their smoothies with a fork; it might not be the best tool for the job, but since they’ve invested rather heavily in four-pronged polypropylene flatware, you don’t get a choice. Just grab your extra large Mango-a-go-go and your Peanut Buttter Moo’d and get the fork outta here.

The point at which a game has me shaking my controller like Team Chihuahua in the Iditarod is the point where I punt that shivering bitch across the yard and seek a less strenuous pastime, such as hummingbird wrangling or Red Savina tasting. Thankfully, in porting Okami to the Wii Readyatdawn mostly eschewed the lascivious Remote fixation that keeps other developers sipping at the margarita of mediocrity with spastic, tequila-sloshing abandon, and instead opted for that most elusive nuance of Wii development; subtlety. Mostly.

Ssssausages!

While Okami’s controls are far from perfect, they provide the finest example of what the Wii might become in the hands of a developer concerned with simply making a good game, instead of consistently trying to find a way to justify a gratuitously simple input. Okami uses Remote gestures only for the many Celestial Brush techniques and combat; that’s it. While combat with the Remote is frequently imprecise and sometimes tedious, the Celesital Brush is the finest use of the Remote that I’ve yet seen in a Wii title — sure, it’s often as imprecise as the combat, and on many occasions requires repeatedly drawing the same symbol over again in order to produce the desired result, but if there’s a logical model to which other developers should aspire when designing the Remote-based input for their Wii project, Okami is it.

Some people don’t like to criticize that which is popular out of fear that they might be accused of being unsophisticated, or have their insecurities flayed and exposed to the world for the mass-consumption lemmings to point at and laugh and ridicule at their leisure. While this might not indicate the impending death of objective thought, it certainly sends it an FTD bouquet and inquires about its will.

That said, the Wii remote is poorly designed. I know it’s supposed to entice non-gamers into picking the damn thing up and bowling a few frames with their cronies as they knock back a few Milk of Magnesia cocktails and reminisce about V.E. Day, but frankly, I could give less than a hammered shit about non-gamers. In their fevered haste to invite other folks to the festivities, Nintendo has forgotten about those of us who’ve been here for years, streamers and party hats gripped faithfully at the ready as we’re elbowed to a musty corner of the rec center to make room for the New People With Money. Kind of like when you were a kid and your mother would whip out the good plates and order the fancy takeout because “company’s coming.”

Okami controls as though it were designed for the Wii Remote, but that doesn’t excuse the hardware’s failings; it needs to be completely reworked so that it more closely resembles the Nunchuk while retaining its motion-sensing capability — move the A button to the rear, similar to the C button on the Nunchuk, and group the remaining face buttons (+, -, 1, 2, Menu) in an accessible cluster right beneath the new analog stick so that your hand doesn’t cramp like a bastard after an hour of playing. (Oh, by the way, we’ve added an analog stick.) Give the thing a more hand-friendly shape, again, like the Nunchuk, and we’ll have something we can work with. For crying out loud, the layout of the basic TV remote is nearly sixty years old, and it’s not getting better with age. Why imitate it? To encourage the technologically inept to pick it up and play, of course.

Popularity is the new standard of quality, and though objectivity might not yet be dead, its carnations are wilting and the lawyers are warming up the probate. Nothing can be improved by appealing to the same mass of consumers who’ve turned the nine shitty mini-games in Wii Play into the system’s best-selling title. Nothing.

Hardware should exist to assist the software, not the other way around, and Okami is the perfect example of this principle at work; it was made better by its appearance on the Wii, but it is not defined by it. No doubt a must-buy for Wii owners who are tired of the same old party games and 20-year-old Nintendo retreads.

Will Rogers is widely remembered today for his assertion that he never met a man he didn’t like. From this blanket of quaint, homespun naivety we can safely unravel two revealing threads about good ol’ Will; first, he was generous in his assessment of his fellow man, which probably indicates that he was kind-hearted, trustworthy, and an all-around good guy himself.

Second; he obviously never worked retail over the holidays, otherwise his most frequently recalled quote would have been something along the lines of “people are dicks, may they all burn.” After all, there’s nothing quite like a daily jostle with the fanatical Wii-seeking public to obliterate your faith in peace, joy, and kittens, so it’s probably just as well that the original Mr. Rogers never manned the counter at Large Specialty Gaming Chain during his eclectic career. I almost wish he had; how often do you see the headline “folksy humorist immolates sixteen with rudimentary butane flamethrower” splashed above the fold on the front page? Mmm, crunchy idiots…

One of the things Will Rogers would have certainly found amusing in his hypothetical interactions with the great unwashed — and believe me, a less hyperbolic description you will never find — is their stupefying inability to receive, process, and retain any amount of information delivered via the spoken word. The more information to be presented, the greater the chasm, and therefore the leap, between ignorance and education, between frustration and instruction, or, if you prefer, between finding out what you want, buying it, and getting the hell out of Will’s store and taking your snot-nosed, window-smearing, dimwitted drooling brood with you.

So a hearty thank-you-sir and a swift knee to the Niagaras goes out to Microsoft and their nefarious electronic offspring, the Xbox 360, which not only comes in three radically different, consumer-befuddling crowd-pleasing retail configurations, but it’s also very possible that whichever package you choose won’t outlast your current carton of Marlboros. A hard drive, play-and-charge kit, headset, wireless controller, pack-in games, memory card, HDMI cable — all of these things are very nice, but even the limited-edition Halo Xbox 360 failed to include that most pragmatic of Microsoft accessories, the return shipping box.

The Halo 360 shipping box could have been an attractive shade of olive green with bright orange accents on the address label and the corrugated seams, but (of course), no packing material. The Elite shipping box might have included some pricey, unnecessary twine, maybe in the form of halon-injected, lead-shielded, gold-tipped, all-black Monster cables, and the Premium would have had a nice chrome box flap and maybe some wider tape. The Arcade 360, keeping with its minimalist theme (and Microsoft’s ham-fisted attempts to woo the Japanese market), would simply include directions on how to fashion your own shipping box using the instruction booklets for Blue Dragon, Enchanted Arms, and Lost Odyssey.

There are a lot of numbers out there claiming to report the 360’s failure rate, but the only ones that I can credibly relate are the ones pertaining to my own experience; I’ve owned four 360s in the 981 days since the system’s release. Three of those have failed; of the three, two were out-of-warranty, as both shuffled off before the new three-year replacement policy took effect. Two lasted a year, the third made it for six months. The latter was promptly replaced by Microsoft with a refurbished unit that has troubles of its own, but which seems to be holding on. So far.

Compare these admittedly esoteric statistics against the fact that I still possess my original, fully functional, new-out-of-the-box Super Nintendo, N64, GameCube, Playstation, PS2, and a six-year-old refurbished Dreamcast, and it won’t take long to spot the quality assurance gremlin afoot in the halls of Microsoft’s R&D. Not only is this intractable beast capering roughshod over the collective buzz of 19 million Xbox devotees, it serves an insidious master whose name, as we have always know it, is Profit.

As it should be, Microsoft is in the game industry to make money. It’s not a case of charity, a beneficent entertainment trust set up to provide those possessing little ambition and fewer prospects with a sustainable hobby; it’s a business, and in order for it to remain a business, it must be profitable. Those who find the pursuit of profit distasteful have never truly earned anything on their own.

That said, the Xbox 360 is the worst piece of consumer electronics that I’ve ever used.

Come and see the violence inherent in the system. Help! Help! I'm being repressed!

Any other company selling any other product with such abysmal reliability would have folded like an origami wallet two years ago, but because of Microsoft’s Mariana-deep pockets, the 360 survives — and thrives — in spite of itself. Part of this is due to Microsoft’s class-action-averting policy of providing a three-year warranty on all new 360s sold since mid-2007, but this changes nothing with my first two systems, nor does it help thousands of others who’ve watched $300-$400 disappear in an out-of-warranty, red-ringed puff of smoke after a year or less of reasonable operation. (And by reasonable I mean: kept in an unobstructed, well-ventilated area, never left on when not in use, and played for an average of fewer than two hours per day.)

The 360 sports the widest selection of software for its generation — even if we include Nintendo’s new policy of allowing anyone with a thready pulse to develop a Wii game as long as it includes Wii Remote functionality — but what good is a diverse library of games if your six-month-old system is consistently in transit, or worse, a $400 paperweight? Does an impressive array of titles mitigate the 360’s substandard durability? The short answer is no. By itself, the 360’s library isn’t enough to airlift the hardware to Profit General, but when considered alongside other factors, it becomes clear why Microsoft hasn’t pulled the plug and sunk all of the money it loses on the 360 into building daycare centers and puppy hospitals.

So what keeps Xbox owners like myself, those of us who’ve been burned twice and singed once, coming back for more? What keeps us lining up to be smacked in the ‘nads by something which, by all rights, should have died an ignominious death shortly after its release? The long, convoluted answer, as always, is content.

With the 360, games aren’t the whole picture. What Microsoft did with the original Xbox was to create a cohesive community in Xbox Live, but with the 360 they offer a much more customizable, player-driven experience; Gamertags and Gamerscores give the user a personal, irreplaceable stake in the system, touching on satisfying core gaming mechanics such as collection, customization, and feedback to keep us returning again and again to the diner o’ dysfunction for yet another heaping plate of abuse. Most have too much invested, financially and emotionally, to simply walk away. So we don’t.

And therein lies the reason why the underlying issue of quality has yet to be rectified by the Redmond Raiders; those of us with more disposable income than sense refuse to relinquish an attachment to something which has nipped us in the goobers not once, not twice, but for me, three times. So we continue to buy games, and pay Xbox Live subscriptions, because ultimately, the means justify the end; the 360’s content cannot be found anywhere else. And that’s worth a busload of Microsoft Points.

Generally, the 360’s game library is shit, but that’s a problem endemic to gaming itself, not just the 360. With all-too-rare exceptions, such as 2k’s BioShock and Bethesda’s Oblivion, the 360’s gaming palette is a forgettable morass of soot and poo, comprised mainly of testosterone-fueled, latently homoerotic shooters designed to appeal to anyone who must first borrow a brain cell in order to break one in half. Roger Ebert might be a boob, but even a broken boob is right twice a day.

The Xbox 360 succeeds in spite of itself. Its content, though largely puerile, simply cannot be matched by any other console or even the PC; the collection of achievements, which leads to the broader accumulation of the Gamerscore, coupled with the exchange of social play and the Xbox Live Marketplace, and the customization of the Gamertag and Gamerpics, strike so many fundamentally satisfying chords that the systems themselves could have a shelf life comparable to that of the average loaf of pumpernickel, and we’d still fork over the cash to play.

Like the Wii, the 360 treads perilously close to the notion that the value of an experience lies not in its content, but in its context. Unlike Nintendo, however, Microsoft realizes that such value must emerge intrinsically from the games, instead of extrinsically from the hardware; they’ve formulated a seamless blend of content-based context to create an appealing experience which is somehow much greater than the sum of its parts.

Will Rogers also offered a lesser-known quote; “let advertisers spend the same amount of money improving their product that they do on advertising and they wouldn’t have to advertise it.” To most of us, this would make perfect sense.

But to a company that never met a dollar it didn’t like, it’d just be bad business.

“The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.” –Mark Twain

He lived in a world of fire and steel, a world forged by muscle and sweat, by blood and pain. During his seventy-four years, he witnessed the end of an inhuman institution, the advent of transcontinental rail travel, and the first powered flight. His life was punctuated by periods of both personal and professional success and failure, and he experienced highs and lows of financial plenitude and near-destitution. He was acquainted with happiness; nothing more than a polite, hat-tipping familiarity, to be sure, but he was on a first-name, backslapping basis with suffering, and tragedy was his lifelong companion.

He was born with the comet in 1835, and predicted that he’d die with its return in 1910. He did.

Mark Twain realized better than anyone that untapped potential enjoys the same practical application as no potential at all, that is, undelivered promises and neglected dreams are of no benefit to those lacking the ambition or wherewithal to see them to fruition. It’s easy to make plans, after all, to conspire to success, but plans and promises without attendant accomplishment have no virtue. Often the phrase “it’s got potential” is a euphemism for something more along the lines of “this sucks, but it doesn’t have to.”

When the Playstation 3 was released in North America in November of 2006, it had two distinct advantages working in its favor; first was the fact that sixty-thousand million PS2s had been sold since 2000, giving the brand some considerable installed loyalty. The second, which hasn’t yet panned out as well as the first, was its versatility. With built-in b/g wi-fi, media card readers of every ilk, Blu-Ray and DVD playback, backwards compatibility down through the original Playstation, Bluetooth connectivity for headsets and controllers, USB ports, HDMI outputs, the Playstation 3 seemed poised to conquer the entertainment world as the first jack — and master — of all trades.

Instead of bursting onto the scene, its nostrils frothing and flaring, its flanks doing whatever it is that flanks do, the PS3 limped out of the gate with a rather weighty satchel o’ sales inhibitors strapped around its formidable girth.

Though Sony’s monolith was, at the time, the least expensive Blu-Ray player on the market, it was the costliest game system since Trip Hawkins’ exorbitant performance-art nightmare opened to a worldwide audience of crickets and tumbleweeds back in 1993. With the top-of-the-line 60-gigabyte PS3 priced at $599, many of the Playstation faithful found themselves embroiled in a sudden, seedy affair with Microsoft’s $399 Xbox 360, which enjoyed a year-long head start over the PS3 and thus boasted a wider selection of games. (Rumors persisted about a $499 20-gig model of the PS3, but to this day I’m convinced they were, in fact, merely rumors, as Sasquatch has been more frequently sighted in the wild than the 20-gig PS3.) For many, it was a simple case of price-to-value ratio.

Asking consumers to purchase a big-ticket item on faith — that is, asking for patience regarding the game library — is one thing, a given for a console launch, but requiring them to purchase an unproven technology like Blu-Ray, driving the cost of the item into the technological stratosphere, that’s just cousin-humping stupidity, no matter how reasonably priced the PS3 might have been in comparison to stand-alone players.

People don’t approach buying a game system based on what it will do for them outside of gaming, and they certainly don’t make such purchases intellectually. They seek intellectual rationalizations for them — such as the mental acrobatics involved in buying a sailboat to help impress potential clients, which will in turn improve business — but the underlying motivation for purchasing big-ticket items is always, always emotional. Blu-Ray had no demonstrable emotional value to anyone at the time of the PS3’s release; it carried intellectual appeal, sure, but that’s as far as it went. After all, movie fans weren’t lining up to buy the Playstation 3 because of its Blu-Ray capabilities that November. Gamers were lining up to buy the Playstation 3 because of games, but they had to accept — and pay for — the unproven proprietary Blu-Ray format in order to even get their foot in the door.

Many of them, myself included, didn’t bother with the PS3 until a year later (I got mine used, with a steep discount); thus with the inclusion of Blu-Ray, Sony committed a little bit of marketing suicide, and priced the PS3 beyond a reasonable emotional purchase. It forced otherwise interested consumers to rationalize paying a significantly higher price for something that had little or no value to them, but which they could certainly talk themselves out of intellectually. As Sony no doubt has learned in the intervening eighteen months, once you let the brain into the limo, the party’s over.

Another thing which worked against the Playstation 3 upon its launch was a decent selection of games with no system-selling title among them. (Please note; “decent selection of games” doesn’t mean the same thing as “selection of decent games.”) While this might be the case for most, if not all, system launches, consider the combined effect of spending $750 on a system and two games, and then having nothing better to play than Call of Duty 3 and Resistance: Fall of Man (which is, by the way, a game whose appeal utterly mystifies me). But that’s a review for another time.

Sacks, Fifth Avenue

Did the early adopters, those financially intrepid folks who set the tone for word-of-mouth feedback for any product, walk away from their paycheck-sized foray into the next-gen Playstation experience feeling like they’d made a good decision? Did the gotta-have-it meme set the world on fire as it did with the concurrently released Wii, or was the Playstation 3 like a Ferrari on a dirt road — an overpriced block of underutilized fancy hardware with nothing to do but wait for some pavement to appear beneath its wheels? Perhaps both, but I’d wager it was more of the latter.

Of course no one expects a system to stun the world right off the starting block, but a year and a half later still so little can be said for the PS3’s exclusive library that it hardly bears mentioning. With the recent release and subsequent drool-fest over Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriotic Libertines, or whatever the hell it’s called, Sony has what many consider to be the first exclusive must-own Playstation 3 title, though personally, I’m still waiting. Nothing against shitty writing, or stilted dialog, or horrible characterization, or dated, special-case design, or any of its myriad other rectal-cranial concepts (which no doubt remain dear to those who purportedly “grew up” on MGS), but I hated the fucker.

So it falls to the likes of Heavenly Sword, Folklore, Eye of Judgment, Lair, Untold Legends, and Time Crisis 4 to extricate the lowing beast from the mire of exclusive crap, and frankly, these games just aren’t up to it. Apparently, any Playstation 3 game is doomed to a life of mediocrity and/or dog shit cookies unless it contains a colon in the title, as the system receives a considerable boost from games like Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, but even these respectable gents don’t have the legs to carry Sony’s hamstrung bovine into profitability.

Yet another potential inhibitor of sales, backwards compatibility, is really a component of a larger problem, namely that of ambiguous product identity. No fewer than four different versions of the Playstation 3 have been released in North America alone: the 20 and 60 gig launch models, each which offered hardware backward compatibility to older Playstation titles, and though the 60 gig also sported flash card readers and wi-fi b/g, the 20 gig did not. Later, in 2007, the 40 gig model was released, which offered no backward compatibility at all, and no flash slots, but it did have wi-fi connectivity. The 80 gig PS3 was released in August 2007, and it offered software emulation of older titles, plus flash readers. The upcoming (September 2008, if this particular Sony release schedule can be believed), 80 gig model will lose all backwards compatibility, the flash readers, and 2 of its previous 4 USB jacks, but it will retain the wi-fi capability.

While this isn’t an issue for most people — I don’t know anyone who bought a PS3 in order to play PS2 games — at best it’s confusing, and at worst it conveys an image of constant removal, of less value for the same money. The persistent shifting of SKUs and features and hard drive sizes speaks of poor leadership and a misguided corporate direction, as even Sony can’t decide what they want you to be able to do with their system. All of it can be traced to SCEA hemorrhaging cash due to its Blu-Ray fiasco; instead of producing a simple, reliable machine that played games well, Sony is forced to consistently triage arterial bleed-outs by removing, taking away, and trimming down the PS3’s features in order to cut costs.

Instead of putting an affordable console into as many hands as possible, they tried, yet again, to force a proprietary format onto an unwilling, unready public, not just in North America, but around the world. In the process they priced themselves out of the game, and they keep aggravating the injury by constantly fiddling with it.

Sony is big on theatrical grandstanding (those of you waiting for Gran Turismo on the PSP, or LittleBigPlanet, or Playstation Home feel free to argue); they’ll promise the world, then, a year late and absent advertised features, they’ll deliver a town. It’s difficult to root for such arrogance, not to feel a little bit of smug satisfaction when it falters because of its own pig-headed decisions, but I’ll say this for them;

The Playstation 3 might not be perfect, but it’s got a lot of potential.

About a hundred years ago, around the time that our proto-human ancestors slogged out of the mire and hooked webbed thumbs around the first molto grosso frappalattachinos, a previously unseen event of gratuitous consumerism swept the land, catching even the most rational bystanders in the wake of its impulsive fervor.

It turned grandmothers into modern-day, handbag-swinging incarnations of Attila the Hun, and transformed unassuming shoeshine boys into rabid canines of disrepute. In hindsight, it directed a revealing spotlight onto an entire generation that, a few years before, had renounced its grubby flower power poverty and loaned its collective contralto — and disposable income — to a full-throated aria of conspicuous consumption.

When mile-wide polyester lapels and platform heels gave way to tie bars and Capezios, when disco sighed its long-overdue death rattle into the Aqua-Netted tresses of glam-metal, a few of us were there in the delivery room for the birth of the Cabbage Patch Kid. And as a witness to the ensuing insanity, I can testify that never before had such a dimpled tyrant been from its mother’s womb untimely ripped.

Trust me, if you weren’t around then, or were too young to remember 1984 and this particular nightmare of cultural bugshittery, consider yourself as fortunate as those folks who missed the last tub out of Southampton in the spring of 1912. Countless news reports surfaced about people camping out at toy and department stores, fighting over tiny bundles of cloth and vinyl with puckered faces and stringy hair, features which prompted many at the time to question whether Tammy Faye received a royalty for every Kid sold. It was like living in a surreal year-long collaboration between Norman Rockwell and H.R. Giger.

Twenty million Cabbage Patch Kids were sold in 1984 alone. That’s one for every ten residents of the United States at the time, or one for every popular vote by which Ronald Reagan won that year’s Presidential election over Walter Mondale. Twenty million.

By comparison, over the first eighteen months of its release, the Nintendo Wii has sold 24.45 million units worldwide–a fact which proves, if nothing else, that hysteria repeats itself.

Humans are, by and large, gregarious animals. We gravitate to other humans, using evidence of social proof as a means to determine whether a particular experience is desirable, or even safe. (“Hmm, lots of people over there. Must be no cheetahs.”) Unfortunately, as is often the case with social animals, this leads to a diminished capacity to make rational, independent decisions about situations which less discriminating members of the herd consider worthwhile, often in overwhelming numbers. Proof, you say? Vanilla Ice has sold more than seventeen million albums. Let’s move on.

Popularity alone cannot be regarded as the sole barometer of quality because it precludes our most valuable individual faculty, one which trumps even social proof as a survival mechanism: that is, objective judgment. As easy and attractive as it is to be lulled into a stupor by the gently rocking tide of head-up-its-ass emotionalism that forms the basis for every decision we make these days — from where to go on vacation, to what foods we eat, to how we’re supposed to address each other — the ol’ omniscient Eight Ball consistently tells us that those who think well, live well. And whether we like it or not, thought, and therefore life, requires judgment. Good judgment.

Lately, that which passes for good judgment ought to have a smoldering Marlboro tucked neatly into the corner of its mouth before being stood against a fence and shot through the spleen. Twice. With harpoons. Witness the aforementioned popularity of Cabbage Patch Kids, Vanilla Ice, and now the Wii.

In any entertainment medium, and gaming in particular, content is king. No amount of specular, parallax-mapped visual sleight-of-hand or 3D auditory snake oil would be sufficient to render playable such noxious turds as Haze or Alone in the Dark, simply because their content — essentially their gameplay — is so birdshit-abysmal that their presentation becomes irrelevant. Similarly, the film version of Dungeon Siege was not made watchable by the presence of Jason Statham, John Rhys-Davies, and Ron Perlman, all of whom I otherwise like, because its content lived somewhere in the neighborhood between Cheesy Street and Complacent Boulevard. Presentation can certainly slip a few poisoned daggers into an experience (Hayden, my boy, I’m looking at you), but under no circumstances can it resuscitate it.

Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. My mind is going.

While a novel or a film’s content is judged by criteria such as plot, pace, and characterization, games kneel before an entirely different council of masters. Fundamental elements of good gameplay are often a combination of various satisfying mechanics, including — though certainly not limited to — customization, collection, and feedback. World of Warcraft and collectible card games such as Yu-Gi-Oh leap into the fray as examples which offer all three of these mechanics.

So by what criteria, then, can the merit of a game system be judged? By its raw, polygon-pushing graphical might? By its processing power? By its system memory? A developer-friendly architecture? These are all fine and desirable elements of a well-designed game system, but each is simply a facilitator of presentation, mere technological specifications which exert no true influence over the lone indicator of a system’s long-term value in either the marketplace or, where it really matters, in the living room.

A system’s greatest virtue lies in its game library. Or in other words, its content. Yet for most people, buying a Wii is not a rational decision based on the value of its content, but an emotional one, rooted in the need to feel a sense of belonging, acceptance, and social relevance.

What Nintendo has has done so well with the Wii is to obfuscate reality to the point where people rely not on their own judgment to determine its value, but on the judgment of others. It’s by far the most popular console on the market, with demand long outstripping supply, so therefore it must be desirable; twenty-four million people around the world can’t be wrong.

Can’t they?

To date, McDonald’s has more than 31,000 restaurants worldwide, with sales in 2007 totaling over $22 billion.

In 1972, Richard Nixon received over forty-seven million popular votes against Democrat George McGovern. You do the math on how many people can be wrong about something.

Since it was designed around a different goal than most gaming platforms, namely that of bringing people together to play, by its very purpose the Wii must appeal to a much wider demographic than those other consoles. Hence the advent of the non-threatening, TV-style Wii Remote, the purpose of which is to entice Grandma into playing without intimidating her with ten different buttons to press as she constantly glances down at the controller and tries to discern “which one’s B?” If you can move your arm and press one button, you can play play most Wii games. And that’s fine.

What is most unequivocally not fine is that games like Okami and Resident Evil 4 — two rare exceptions to the third-party Wii developer’s practice of shitting in a nice white box and calling it a game — often shoot themselves in the face with what is perhaps the Wii’s most glaring shortcoming: requiring the use of the Wii Remote in games which would be better played with the Classic Controller. In other words, upholding the Wii as an end in itself instead of as a means to an end.

When the purpose of playing any game is no longer the game, but rather the hardware behind the game, that is the death knell for creativity. When game mechanics must be shoehorned into a little white stick in order to fit the console manufacturer’s idea of how games should be played, instead of the console manufacturer acting as a facilitator of creativity by stepping out of the developer’s way, that’s when I raise a cautious, skeptical eyebrow and check the shelter for supplies and a can opener, just to be safe, because the end — so sayeth the prophets – is extremely fucking nigh.

Like anything else designed to appeal to everyone, the Wii does nothing particularly well, offends no one, and certainly makes no pretense to, and no attempt at, greatness. A year and a half into its life cycle, it has no Viewtiful Joe, no Pikmin, no Rogue Leader. It will never see the likes of Oblivion, or BioShock, or Grand Theft Auto IV, games which exist solely as an end unto themselves, and which are free from the persistent requirement of justifying the very existence of the hardware for which they were designed.

In other words, games for gaming’s sake.

Nintendo set out to change the way we play, and that they have certainly accomplished; for the first time in gaming history, content is secondary to context. Marshall McLuhan nailed it; the medium has become the message.

And that message, like it or not, is one we can’t ignore; it’s not about the games anymore.

Welcome to the Wii generation.

Every once in a while, maybe every three years or so, a game is released which presents an irresistible amalgamation of so many flawlessly executed gameplay styles that it not only defies genre classification, it gives classification the finger and punches it squarely in the Gunthers. Such games are usually a joy to play in every regard, from aesthetics to the seamless manner in which the mechanics converge to fashion an addictive, immersive experience. Some of these games can even cure cancer, bathe your dog, and rotate the tires on your car while juggling a family of ferrets.

Then comes everything else. And then, after everything else and a layer of grimy indifference, there’s Omikron. After Omikron, slumped beneath sixty feet of decomposing offal and a lost cuddly little kitten, lies Alone in the Dark.

If you were looking forward to a good survival horror jaunt on the 360, you might as well aggressively court a case of amnesia by slamming your head against the stove so that you can have a fresh go ’round with Condemned: Criminal Origins. While Monolith’s three-year-old launch title isn’t really a survival horror game, it’s still as close as you can get to scratching that itch with your 360, because Eden Studios’ Alone in the Dark (AitD) isn’t really a survival horror game either. Taken on its own merit, playing AitD more closely resembles being stalked by a large bag of sentient poo while walking through a deserted parking garage as you whistle nervously over your shoulder, fumble with your keys, and offer a desperate, sotto voce litany of contrition to whichever unfortunate deity drew the short straw for handling Ambulatory Fecal Monstrosities that week.

That said, Alone in the Dark is not entirely without virtue. The fire looks good. So good, in fact, that Eden wanted to gratuitously exploit their flame-rendering prowess by making the fire the most sympathetic character in the game.

Everything else–from the writing and dialogue, to the voice acting, the controls, the puzzles, down to the tissue paper premise of this insultingly inane exercise in self-flagellation–is unworthy of your time and money. Personally, I’d have had more fun running the New York City Marathon with a bag full of rabid weasels and razor blades taped to my crotch, but that’s just me. I’m funny that way.

The fact that enemies — or “Humanz,” and no, I’m not making that shit up — can only be dispatched using fire simply adds to the rampant idiot factor here, as cracking someone in the head with an axe or, say, three rounds from a .45, isn’t sufficient to take him out, but brushing against him with a flaming chair will result in instant crispification. The fact that the women you meet early in the game are whiny, helpless dolts incapable of performing even the simplest acts of self-preservation only made me want to set ol’ Ed Carnby himself alight with his own smoldering stool simply to put him out of our misery. Using live electrical lines to scale a building only polishes up the dumb and puts it on prominent display in a well-lit velvet-lined case, but at that point I simply shrugged, and uttered a resigned, “sure, why not?”

Damn headcrabz.

This is a game that asked me to move a fire extinguisher up one floor in a ravaged building by setting the extinguisher on a lift-elevator contraption, then climbing a nice, wide ledge (wide enough to accommodate a large, metallic, fire extinguisher-shaped cylinder, for instance) up to the area that needed some extinguishing. From there I had to jump off yet another ledge and catch yet another sputtering electrical line, which in turn lifted the elevator and conveniently deposited the extinguisher on the proper level. After wrestling with severe clipping issues, I then climbed back up and retrieved the extinguisher and used it to douse some very attractive flames before passing through a door to the next titillating activity. At this point I’m wondering what would have been wrong with a little lift-drop-climb, lift-drop-climb action to deposit the fire extinguisher on the next floor, instead of making me jump around like a spastic lemur using the game’s shitty movement mechanics.

We’ve all met those special Mensa candidates who are so ass-scratchingly, finger-sniffingly stupid that they fail to appreciate even the depth of their own imbecility, but there’s something endearingly tolerable about a dumb fuck who’s just smart enough to realize he’s a dumb fuck and so doesn’t need to broadcast his idiocy to the world like an Emergency Alert System test run amok. Alone in the Dark is the first and worst kind of stupid; that is, stupid with a pretense to omniscience, an intolerable blend of ignorance and arrogance that makes me want to pummel an effigy of Jerry Falwell with large slabs o’ meat.

Listen, I can play games. Trust me on this. I’m there. I know where to go, what to do, how to figure things out. So when a game assumes that I am, in fact, as chin-bitingly stupid as it is, it’s my first indication that something is inexorably wrong on the order of “blimey, Cap’n Smith, I think we’ve hit sumpin’.” I neither want nor need to be led slack-jawed through every level while the designer has me jumping through hoop after intelligence-sapping hoop like a large performing feline of impending explosive demeanor; it’s the designer’s job to get me, the player, to not notice the hoops, but when they continuously club me over the head with them I’ll not be held accountable for whomever might get eaten.

A little subtlety goes a long way towards keeping me in the experience, but unfortunately for survival horror fans and anyone who likes their games slightly smarter than the average three-iron, Alone in the Dark is about as subtle as a home trepanation kit. Don’t buy it, don’t rent it, don’t even look at it on the shelf.

One of my strangest childhood memories involves square dancing in elementary school gym class. If the image of fifty or so nine-year-olds awkwardly fumbling their way through the most tedious exercise in choreographed conformity on the planet isn’t surreal enough for the David Lynch devotees among you, if you need a deeper hit on the Blue Velvet bong of phantasmagorical mindfuckery, consider that I grew up not in the crispiest golden-fried regions of the artery-choking Neil Young-hating deep South, but in Suffolk County, Long Island. New York, that is. Proof that God has a sense of humor.

While allemanding and promenading around what was, for most of us, our first intentional physical contact with the contemporary opposite sex, I arrived at two heretofore unrealized conclusions; girls smell nice, and square dancing is for knobs. For some reason, even my overly impressionable developing brain didn’t willingly submit to the notion of being ordered around the gym like some vacuous prepubescent paperboy prototype in an Ira Levin novel gone wrong, a fact which further indicts the entire concept of the do-si-do hivemind; at the time I considered Gilligan’s Island the apogee of mankind’s cultural accomplishment, so earning my discriminative ire was no small feat.

Fast forward thirty years. As I played LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures, I had flashbacks of a magnitude that could form the basis for an Oliver Stone film.

The needling question that I encountered while thumbing my way through Indy’s first three sojourns into buckling swashes and violating sacred burial spaces of downtrodden indigenous peoples across the globe (for the indigenous are universally downtrodden, you know), was simply “does this game suck or doesn’t it?” Often it’s difficult to separate the measure of a game from the weight of its franchise, and in this case it’s doubly tough, with Indy tipping the scales in one direction and LEGO adding its thick-crayoned Duplo thumb behind him to help out. While their combined weight is formidable, it’s not enough to save this self-congratulatory yawn fest.

LEGO Star Wars was cute and perhaps even a little original back in 2005, and sold fairly well across most platforms, so naturally LucasArts is going to pound the LEGO game franchise into the ground (like that animated Clone Wars bullshit that just won’t go away) and reproduce the entire Lucas oeuvre; LEGO THX-1138, LEGO American Graffiti, and LEGO Willow are sure to deliver all the whimsical LEGO buffoonery that made LEGO Star Wars fun for about an hour and a half while maintaining a level of complexity that rendered the original game accessible to anyone with four functioning brain cells and all gastropods.

Like many gimmicky concepts that pass for innovative experiences these days, the basic LEGO video game seeks to exploit a minor change in presentation and employ the power of illusion to Doug-Henning that shit into a convincing simulacrum of originality. Nothing about this game survives the hypothetical removal of its Indiana Jones franchise, from its insipid buddy-based mission design to its maddening control mechanics and its infatuation with puzzle-based level objectives, it’s a by-the-numbers Mondrian of mediocrity from start to finish.

No time for love, Dr. Jones

The half-assed fusion of combat and puzzle solving lost me almost immediately, especially when the game so steadfastly and obtusely refuses to understand my instructions; no, I don’t want Indy to stand with his back pressed against that iron post while Nazis mow him down, just….shit. Move, would you? Throw the banana to the monkey, dammit! No, pick it up. Here, I’ll get the…oh, never mind. Pick up those studs and let’s get the hell out of here.

Stud collection has returned as a means by which players can purchase unlockable characters, but Traveller’s Tales should have plucked a petal from their Prince Caspian design daisy and included upgradeable health, as well, or in fact any in-game impetus for collecting other than superficial cosmetic additions. LEGO Indy gives the illusion of great replayability because of areas that can only be reached with certain unlockable characters, but there’s little reason to actually pursue these achievements unless compulsive completion with no regard for tangible value particularly excites you. It’s like climbing a mountain to see a painting of a sunset.

While certain games easily overcome their media roots by offering great gameplay independent of the franchise, LEGO Indiana Jones turns this principle on its head and sneezes on its cojones. Knights of the Old Republic would have been a great game even without its Star Wars pedigree, and the same can be said to a much lesser degree of the afore-reviewed Kung Fu Panda; each provides compelling reasons for accomplishing tasks other than the tired old authoritative standby of “because I said so,” a design concept that in all but the rarest cases results in a rich, satisfying experience. Where LEGO Indy walks smack into its own propeller is with the cocksure assumption that nauseatingly cute cut scenes and a self-referential sense of humor coupled with established franchises equals a winning formula, but nothing trumps gameplay. It’s the single non-negotiable component in all of gamedom.

Being prodded from one area to the next by puzzle after tedious puzzle interspersed with formulaic combat segments designed by narcoleptic koalas, LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures should please only the most ardent fanatics of gratuitous item gathering and anyone of the installed LEGO/Indiana Jones fanbase.

The square dancing that was so unceremoniously foisted upon us in gym thirty years ago taught me one more invaluable lesson; it demonstrated at an early age that carrying out the arbitrary instructions of strangers, with no individual input other than how well you follow orders, is less fun than watching a wake of buzzards circle a puppy farm.

And even if you’re good at it, it’s still square dancing.