You Didn't Say the Black Magic Word: THE WITCHER, concluded

I intended to make another short video showcasing a montage of the most outstanding moments of the first few hours of the Witcher for this update, but I found it surprisingly difficult to get myself to play any more of the thing. More than once I sat down to play the Witcher, hovered my cursor over the button, and then... you know, games of Blood Bowl need playing, and probably I could catch up on Parks and Recreation, and really I ought to update my blog but wait first I'd have to play the Witcher CRAP BACKPEDAL MAYBE I SHOULD GO FOR A RUN. (If you know me, you know that the very idea of me choosing to run on purpose is a sign of some serious extinction-level desperation.)

So why?
Clearly I think that the game is pretty crummy. More specifically, I have a particular affinity for presentation and writing, and this game... well, I heard that the developers had released an update for the game with an improved script and voice acting and I thought "Oh, that'll help me get through it!" Imagine my disappointment when it turned out that that's the version I was playing already.
But that's a pretty vague and shallow reaction, so I sat and had a good hard think about why, exactly, this game is so repugnant to me. The first thing that came to mind was that it overreaches, by which I mean that it tries too hard to deliver things of which it is incapable. There's tons of dialogue, but the writing is significantly subpar, and the plot as far as I've gotten is pretty weak. The game has cinematic pretenses, but its "actors" lack the articulation (both vocal and generally in the face region) to deliver performances sufficient to make the camera work anything but distracting. In addition, it follows the regrettably common trend of video game graphics in an attempt to make things look as realistic as possible, which always ends up looking bad a few years hence. The game tries and tries and tries, but it doesn't seem to have the resources to accomplish even one of the things it's attempting. So is that it? Am I driven back by all the unfulfilled ambition?
My regular readers (both of them!) will remember that I actually rather like overambitious games. There's obviously a difference between the two, though: the unfulfilled ambition of Apocalypse really has more to do with its technical execution--a lack of polish in the implementation of ambitious ideas--while the failures of the Witcher are of a decidedly more mundane sort. Really, the things I've been talking about at which the Witcher fails are perfectly ordinary: have your voice actors speak in the way that primary speakers of the language speak, write a script that doesn't make the reader groan audibly more than once a minute, design a control scheme that doesn't make it feel like your character is fighting while immersed in cold peanut butter, etc. The failures of the Witcher are less in the camp of "failing to execute grand ideas" and much more in the neighborhood of "basic incompetence". We've all seen basic incompetence before, though. Hell, I'd say that X-Com Enforcer is worse than this game in every way, and I still managed to compel myself to boot that up more than a couple of times.
I wish I had a good answer. Frankly, I just don't know exactly what it is about the Witcher that repels me so. Honestly, there may even be a perfectly good game in there somewhere, but if not even one element of it is going to show up within the first hour, then I simply haven't got the time for it, certainly not with well over a hundred games left in the queue.

And so it is that I say a fond and eager farewell to Geralt of Rivia and his world of combat pirouettes and steely-eyed female cyborgs longing to be human. Hopefully I'll have a better experience with the next game, which is... oh, hell.

In Witch I Express Distaste For A Thing People Like - THE WITCHER

PREFACE: I swear, I actually really like video games. I do. I play them because they are fun and I enjoy them. It is just an unfortunate coincidence that the bottom of my Steam games list has been largely games that I do not enjoy because they are terrible.

Today's update is something a little different. Instead of reading about how I didn't like the Witcher, you get to watch and listen to me not liking the Witcher. It's a Christmas miracle!

Watch me in HD so you can really appreciate the graphics that look like they're from 1998!

SPECIAL DIRECTOR Q&A:

That video is really long and I don't want to watch it. Is there a small portion that I can watch to get the gist?

If you watch for one minute starting at about 41:45 you'll get a pretty good idea of what's going on.

PS: If you don't watch the whole thing, you're dead to me. Also, you AND your +1 will be removed from the admission list for my birthday party. I'm tracking your IP address and I know who you are.

Will there be a part 2? If so, will it be more or less boring?

There will probably be a part 2. Despite all my complaining, I am not going to give up on the game completely because of a bad tutorial area. I may wise up and omit the boring parts instead of trying to cover them with witty soliloquy to make it shorter, though.

What is the name of that piano piece?

Hell if I know!

Your voice is so masculine and beautiful that I want to marry you. Where should I send my proposal?
EDIT: I am no longer accepting proposals. Some of them were really gross. You guys are sick.

Developing An Obsession With Balls: WORLD OF GOO

I still remember the first time I felt it. The jungle was steaming and fetid; sweat poured from my brow. It had been days since I'd seen civilization. I had evaded snarling, snapping fauna and woven carefully through a labyrinth of discarded explosives, remnants of some territorial conflict long past. I was tired and injured, all that remained of my mission--my comrades had all fallen to razor-fanged beasts. or enemy soldiers--but I couldn't stop now, not when the target was so close... to say nothing of the treasure. All that gleaming gold, stolen from the island's inhabitants, just moldering in his coffers. Soon, I thought, it would be moldering in mine. Another explosion dragged me from my reverie back into the real world. The target, right in front of me! The training kicked in, and I attacked. I'll never forget the look on his face.

Racist and inaccurate. A dangerous combination.

Obviously, I was victorious. But as I said, this was when I first felt it. Boss beaten, fruit collected, and that's me winning, but... that percentage on the save file screen. That's not 100%. I won, right? So... where are all my percents?
And there it was: The Pull. Where are all my percents? Where indeed. I suppose I'd better go find them.

The Pull is a powerful force, and it really warped my World of Goo experience. Let me pose a question: What is the difference between...

	and		?
A		B

You might have answered "an adorable little flag". Well, aren't you clever? Clever and WRONG, that is.

Okay, well, obviously there's a little flag in one picture and not in the other. So not wrong, really, as much as incomplete. But that's similar. Whatever, you're still an asshole.

Probably.

ANYWAY, the point is that the flag represents more than just the flag. It also represents anywhere between five and a thousand minutes of my time. How so? Well, in World of Goo you earn the little flag for completing a level with some exceptional distinction, such as an exceedingly low clear time or an extraordinary number of sentient goo balls rescued rather than gruesomely smelted into scaffolding material. It's a fun little bit of additional difficulty, the sort of thing that you ought to be congratulated for achieving. So what does the game call it?

"Obsessive" again? Why is everyone always calling me that?

Alright, I'm being openly mocked, but whatever. There's a thing to do here, so clearly I'm going to do it. But why?

The Pull

What drives gamers to chase that hundredth percent, that last green question mark, or that final well-hidden coin of some ridiculous color? It could be a sense of accomplishment. It could be a desire for some kind of positive reinforcement, a class of weirdos and misanthropes grasping desperately for any kind of approval. (Gamers are inherently bad people, right? We're still doing that, aren't we?) The point is that I spent three entire days trying to sketch out a compelling bit about why I felt driven to spend hours doing just a little bit better in these levels instead of simply completing the game, and I came up with precisely nothing. I don't understand it at all. Maybe the deep secrets that drive compulsive behavior in human beings are slightly beyond the scope of my stupid blog about my inability to stop buying video games.

Of course, when I put it that way, it suddenly becomes clear that those secrets are precisely the point of the whole endeavor.

Steam Sez...

Bloody hell. Must be strong....

<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.

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.

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.