Bloody hell. Must be strong....
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Monday, November 14, 2011
<Shocking, Uncharacteristic Negativity>: X-COM ENFORCER
Would you believe I didn't like this game? Hold on, let me get you a screenshot.
Okay, NOW do you believe I didn't like this game?
You know, for all the things Interceptor does wrong (such as replacing the delightful tactical combat with the worst TIE Fighter game in the history of galaxies far far away), at least it's actually an X-COM game. Enforcer, on the other hand, is a run-and-gun adventure in which you shoot crummy looking aliens with crummy looking guns while a scientist yammers incessantly at you in an infuriating fake lisp. Imagine that in your brain for a second.
Are you imagining it?
Pretty terrible, right? Okay, now make it half as fun as you're thinking and you'll probably be pretty close to what playing X-COM Enforcer is actually like. Your character is slippery, there's very little feedback from the environment, everything looks lousy even when you adjust for the graphics tech of the time, and the whole game seems to take place at arm's length, constantly denying you any chance to get personally involved.
Gee SB, why don't you tell us what you really think?
Okay: I HATE YOU. Almost as much as I hate the scientist in this game. He has officially earned a spot on my Most Hated Video Game Characters list, right between Navi and that motherfucker from Excitebike. God, what a dick.
First of all, he has some incredibly cliche narration. Whoever wrote this guy's dialogue just took notes while watching every 80s movie about science nerds. Secondly, the lisp is really grating and he goes out of his way to include S sounds in his sentences. He can't just ask you to defend the lab from the aliens; no, it always has to be "THTOP THOTHE INTHIDIOUS OUTTHIDERTH FROM THMASHING MY THIENTH TO THMITHEREENTH!" Finally--and somehow I find this even more annoying than the gratuitouth lisping--he speaks in that awkward stilted manner so commonly reserved by lazy Hollywood writers for geeks and nerds. For example, one of his first lines of the game is "The invaders are drawing closer by the nanosecond!" While this is technically true, I can't help but note that THIS IS NOT HOW PEOPLE TALK AND WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH "SECOND"? IS "SECOND" NOT SCIENCEY ENOUGH FOR YOU OR SOMETHING?
Whew. Sorry for the outburst. I think a big part of my tremendous distaste for Interceptor and Enforcer comes from my respect for the earlier entries in the series. If crappy games have a beloved franchise attached to them, it's so much worse than them just being crappy games in a vacuum; imagine, if you will, an alternate timeline in which the Sonic the Hedgehog team ruined that beloved franchise by producing a terrible game with mechanics only barely related to its namesake. It is not only that they have produced garbage, but that they have besmirched what came before, in effect going back in time and stealing some of the wonder from our remembered childhood selves.
Truly a horrifying concept. Let us all give thanks that we do not live in a world where such an atrocity has happened over and over again with terrible clockwork precision for like 15 years.
Okay, NOW do you believe I didn't like this game?
You know, for all the things Interceptor does wrong (such as replacing the delightful tactical combat with the worst TIE Fighter game in the history of galaxies far far away), at least it's actually an X-COM game. Enforcer, on the other hand, is a run-and-gun adventure in which you shoot crummy looking aliens with crummy looking guns while a scientist yammers incessantly at you in an infuriating fake lisp. Imagine that in your brain for a second.
Are you imagining it?
Pretty terrible, right? Okay, now make it half as fun as you're thinking and you'll probably be pretty close to what playing X-COM Enforcer is actually like. Your character is slippery, there's very little feedback from the environment, everything looks lousy even when you adjust for the graphics tech of the time, and the whole game seems to take place at arm's length, constantly denying you any chance to get personally involved.
Gee SB, why don't you tell us what you really think?
Okay: I HATE YOU. Almost as much as I hate the scientist in this game. He has officially earned a spot on my Most Hated Video Game Characters list, right between Navi and that motherfucker from Excitebike. God, what a dick.
First of all, he has some incredibly cliche narration. Whoever wrote this guy's dialogue just took notes while watching every 80s movie about science nerds. Secondly, the lisp is really grating and he goes out of his way to include S sounds in his sentences. He can't just ask you to defend the lab from the aliens; no, it always has to be "THTOP THOTHE INTHIDIOUS OUTTHIDERTH FROM THMASHING MY THIENTH TO THMITHEREENTH!" Finally--and somehow I find this even more annoying than the gratuitouth lisping--he speaks in that awkward stilted manner so commonly reserved by lazy Hollywood writers for geeks and nerds. For example, one of his first lines of the game is "The invaders are drawing closer by the nanosecond!" While this is technically true, I can't help but note that THIS IS NOT HOW PEOPLE TALK AND WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH "SECOND"? IS "SECOND" NOT SCIENCEY ENOUGH FOR YOU OR SOMETHING?
Whew. Sorry for the outburst. I think a big part of my tremendous distaste for Interceptor and Enforcer comes from my respect for the earlier entries in the series. If crappy games have a beloved franchise attached to them, it's so much worse than them just being crappy games in a vacuum; imagine, if you will, an alternate timeline in which the Sonic the Hedgehog team ruined that beloved franchise by producing a terrible game with mechanics only barely related to its namesake. It is not only that they have produced garbage, but that they have besmirched what came before, in effect going back in time and stealing some of the wonder from our remembered childhood selves.
Truly a horrifying concept. Let us all give thanks that we do not live in a world where such an atrocity has happened over and over again with terrible clockwork precision for like 15 years.
Recipe for Disaster: X-COM INTERCEPTOR
Excessive cursor ghosting is the only fun you have to look forward to.
Enjoy it while you can.
5 cups Least Interesting Bits of X-Com With all the Pretty Sprites Excised
1 Space Station Made of FOUR ENTIRE POLYGONS
1 Reasonably Amusing "I Brake For Sectoids" Bumper Sticker
3 tbsp. Worst Parts of the Old X-Wing Game
1 Total Refusal to Run Gracefully on Modern Hardware
8 gal. Mediocrity
Mix dry ingredients in a big, crappy bowl. Rub Mediocrity all over body until rash forms. Then throw the rest of it out, or whatever. Nobody cares.
Disappoints 8.
Alternate recipe: Place large iron bucket over head. Bang bucket with wooden spoon for three hours or until unconscious. Easily as fun as playing X-COM Interceptor.
Pictured: Worst part of game.
Also pictured: Best part of game (the bumper sticker).
Addendum: It is thoroughly ridiculous that you have to lead your targets so much. You are firing lasers over a distance of kilometers. THIS IS NOT SCIENCE.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Playground for the Xenocidal Imagination: X-COM APOCALYPSE
I have now written two posts about X-Com games without saying a single useful word about the series, so let me address this: I love X-Com. I love tactical combat and I love shooting aliens and I love base building and I even love managing the supplies of a massive international defense force down to the very last rifle shell. (Can you believe my friend Mike calls me a "spreadsheet gamer" like it's a bad thing?) The second game is almost as good as the first, owing to it being almost exactly the same game. The fourth and fifth unfortunately failed to recapture the magic or indeed be fun to play at all (more on that in the next few posts). And the third?
The third is one of my favorite games of all time.
It's not a perfect package. X-Com Apocalypse is buggy and frequently feels unfinished, but that owes more to the incredible ambition of the developers than to any lack of skill on their part. While the scale of the story is much reduced, confined to a city instead of patrolling an entire planet, the scope of the project itself is much greater, for it aspires to that most noble of video game qualities: simulation.
What's so great about simulation?
That's a stupid question.
What's great about simulation is the way that it puts the narrative into the hands of the player. While only some games come with a riveting prepackaged story about saving princesses or fighting dragons or committing genocide on indigenous populations, every game has a narrative built from the actions of the player. Even Super Tecmo Bowl!
In many games, the developers' story and the player's narrative overlap tremendously due to linear plots and a tight system of triggers and responses. This is usually because some developer worked really hard on the story you guys and dammit you WILL see all the witty dialogue he wrote and all the cool explosions he scripted. In other, better games, however, the developers spend less time rigidly defining a path for the character to create and instead simply do their best to simulate a world in which things behave as you expect they might and the player can build his own solutions. Of course, the really beautiful things happen when the player doesn't account for everything and his solution goes horribly awry.
With my small, primitive brain, I cannot imagine the sort of thing you are describing. Can you provide several examples?
You're in luck, in fact. And I appreciate your honest apprehension of your own mental capacity.
Imagine for a moment that you're fighting some guys in a parking garage. Some alien guys. Now imagine that you've brought the heavy artillery, grenades and rocket launchers and whatnot because you are very serious about making some alien paste. Explosions are tearing through the place, bodies are flying, and because it's a game you're not thinking about the structural damage you're doing; after all, the roof is held up simply by the programmer's declaration that it exists at that height.
Except here, in this simulation, where it's held up by the columns that you're destroying. And before you've really grasped what's happening, the roof collapses. You sit agape in shock as your best soldiers are crushed, but then you get the message that all the enemy units have been killed and you think "Well, I just discovered a new Plan A," and you've got a fun story to tell your friends (which you totally have because you're not some kind of horrific socially-maladjusted misanthrope).
Or maybe the government agency that controls your alien-busting budget gets infiltrated by outsiders and your funding gets cut. With no plot hook leading you around by the hand, what will you do? Perhaps pull a Robin Hood and take from the rich (everybody else) to give to the poor (yourself)? Entirely of your own volition, you become a shadow organization raiding underworld crime syndicates for cash to mount sporadic assaults on the secret alien shadow government, and that is an awesome story--far more awesome than the one the developers put in, and a big part of that awesomeness is the fact that you came up with it.
And that's really the crux of it. The story you invent is always going to be better than the one that's in the game, because it fits you. It's what you wanted to see, what you wanted to think of. It's the same reason that the movie monsters are scarier when you don't see them. And your story, the story you want, is the story that the developers are putting in when they create that simulation, that real little world for your mind to play in.
The third is one of my favorite games of all time.
It's not a perfect package. X-Com Apocalypse is buggy and frequently feels unfinished, but that owes more to the incredible ambition of the developers than to any lack of skill on their part. While the scale of the story is much reduced, confined to a city instead of patrolling an entire planet, the scope of the project itself is much greater, for it aspires to that most noble of video game qualities: simulation.
What's so great about simulation?
That's a stupid question.
What's great about simulation is the way that it puts the narrative into the hands of the player. While only some games come with a riveting prepackaged story about saving princesses or fighting dragons or committing genocide on indigenous populations, every game has a narrative built from the actions of the player. Even Super Tecmo Bowl!
In many games, the developers' story and the player's narrative overlap tremendously due to linear plots and a tight system of triggers and responses. This is usually because some developer worked really hard on the story you guys and dammit you WILL see all the witty dialogue he wrote and all the cool explosions he scripted. In other, better games, however, the developers spend less time rigidly defining a path for the character to create and instead simply do their best to simulate a world in which things behave as you expect they might and the player can build his own solutions. Of course, the really beautiful things happen when the player doesn't account for everything and his solution goes horribly awry.
With my small, primitive brain, I cannot imagine the sort of thing you are describing. Can you provide several examples?
You're in luck, in fact. And I appreciate your honest apprehension of your own mental capacity.
Imagine for a moment that you're fighting some guys in a parking garage. Some alien guys. Now imagine that you've brought the heavy artillery, grenades and rocket launchers and whatnot because you are very serious about making some alien paste. Explosions are tearing through the place, bodies are flying, and because it's a game you're not thinking about the structural damage you're doing; after all, the roof is held up simply by the programmer's declaration that it exists at that height.
Except here, in this simulation, where it's held up by the columns that you're destroying. And before you've really grasped what's happening, the roof collapses. You sit agape in shock as your best soldiers are crushed, but then you get the message that all the enemy units have been killed and you think "Well, I just discovered a new Plan A," and you've got a fun story to tell your friends (which you totally have because you're not some kind of horrific socially-maladjusted misanthrope).
Or maybe the government agency that controls your alien-busting budget gets infiltrated by outsiders and your funding gets cut. With no plot hook leading you around by the hand, what will you do? Perhaps pull a Robin Hood and take from the rich (everybody else) to give to the poor (yourself)? Entirely of your own volition, you become a shadow organization raiding underworld crime syndicates for cash to mount sporadic assaults on the secret alien shadow government, and that is an awesome story--far more awesome than the one the developers put in, and a big part of that awesomeness is the fact that you came up with it.
And that's really the crux of it. The story you invent is always going to be better than the one that's in the game, because it fits you. It's what you wanted to see, what you wanted to think of. It's the same reason that the movie monsters are scarier when you don't see them. And your story, the story you want, is the story that the developers are putting in when they create that simulation, that real little world for your mind to play in.
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