I work for a company that runs local newspaper sites around the country, and nearly half our visitors still use IE 6. We design accordingly. Seventy percent of our visitors come from search engines, almost most of which persist in going to Google and literally entering our URLs in the search box. We hate it, but know better than to try changing their bad behavior- only government is that dumb.
Going along to get along, and giving people what they want is a time-honored tradition amongst all forms of media, the video game industry not excluded. And it's not because we're a bunch of cowards- it's because it works.
Which is why titles like The Club don't come along every day. Albeit an unfinished product, The Club innovatively challenges gamers by forcing them to play the done-to-death 3rd person shooter in a completely non-intuitive, often frustrating manner. Like a Tolstoy or Kingsley Amis novel, The Club must be played for hours before it has any hope of being understood, much less enjoyed.
As each event in The Club's killing olympics is based on score, and, above all, score is based on a combo multiplier that decreases increasingly faster as it grows, you must continue fragging without hesitation, but also space out the kills just enough to buoy the multiplier across distances and time trials.
In gameplay terms, this means actively unlearning everything you know about the shooter genre: instead of taking cover, you should take the hit. Instead of searching for secrets, you should search for the exit. Don't walk, or sneak, or crawl or jump or lean. Run. If you're not running, you should be sprinting. Don't reload between firefights- if you have time for that you're not getting in enough firefights. Shoot everyone that moves, but remember not to shoot them all at once.
What often makes the difference between first and second place in an event is memorizing the location of combo-boost skulls hidden throughout the level, disciplining yourself not to blast them until the right moment, and recognizing when that moment is. You'll get a certain number of "attempts" in each event, and should expect to use most if not all of them, even if you can make it through on the first try. Believe me, the satisfaction of deriving and honing a routine, and then flawlessly executing it like some kind of dusted figure skater is worth the repetition.
In later stages you'll balance the use of attempts for practice against hedging your bets on the likelihood you'll be killed, which is especially fun five events into a tournament and struggling to claw your way past second place. Do you play it safe and go for the silver, or risk losing your last attempt and thus the entire tournament?
Sure they cut corners. The Club lacks sufficient difference between events and characters. It squanders the opportunity to create rewarding and succinct tournament storylines, like Tekken or Twisted Metal. Characters never interact or directly compete with each other, and you can't punch people. But this could all be rectified with a sequel, and The Club truly deserves one.
If you haven't expanded your horizons for mindless killing yet, I recommend you do so.
The Club: ur doin it wrong!
Hitman - Blood Money: A good man is hard to find
There is nothing better in this life than getting paid to do what you love, which I guess is why I’ve always been so fond of the Hitman series.
Actually, there are many reasons:
To start, there’s 47. We’ve walked in many (unconscious or dead) men’s shoes, he and I, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned about him it’s that he’s not a judging man. Yes, he believes people should maintain a standard of professional discretion and strive for self improvement by learning from our mistakes, but if someone were to tire of exploratory subterfuge and lurking in bathroom stalls with hypodermic needles and just blast their way through a job, well that’s on them.
47’s never been much of a conversationalist, but I’d sooner drink a beer or catch a fish with a cloned sociopath than some angst-ridden spiky-do in shortpants that doesn’t know when to shut up. Also he still reads local newspapers. Solid Snake is a fucking geriatric but do you ever see him pick up a copy of the Shadow Moses Sun-Times when he's in town?
47 gets a chuckle from the police blotter but his favorite has always been Marmaduke...
Hitman also doesn’t fuck with the program. Like Ratchet & Clank, I know what to expect from this franchise, and I get it. In fact, the most significant addition to Blood Money is not multiplayer garotte-offs, downloadable 47 facial hair upgrades, or a spunky sidekick, but that guards no longer become suspicious of your disguises when they see you run. This may make the game a little less realistic, but if I’m going to spend my night repeating a sequence over and over and over to get it right I’m grateful to not have to do it at a snail’s pace. And anyway it’s rather silly to strive for realism when not a single bodyguard or federal agent can recognize an infamous albino assassin with a barcode on the back of his bald head just because he dons a chef’s hat.
Talkin' Pain
In all of gaming history there has never been a bigger drama queen than Max Payne. His brooding bullet time touched our hearts at the dawn of the decade, let him touch you once again.
Eventually everyone lets you down in this cold, cruel world. You lose the ones you love, and the snow keeps falling until it buries you alive. Thus I will not expect any game or quote suggestions from you fickle reader types.
Just Cause: Letter to a John
How is it that a highly trained covert operative can hoist himself out of the driver’s seat and onto the roof of a moving car, launch into the air with a magic retractable parachute, leap onto the roof of another moving car, squeeze through the window into the driver’s lap, open the door, hurl them out in the road and take the wheel without so much as drifting into the other lane, yet it’s beyond him to perform a drive-by?
Unidad de disparo? No lo entiendo.
What is the School of the Americas coming to? They teach torture, but not basic street survival skills? Where’s the accountability?
And I won’t even get into the grabbing of in-flight helicopter and plane tails. Yes, Rico, we’re all very impressed, but what about the basics? You know, like, atmosphere? Exploration? Agency? Consequences? Fun? Your fictional South American country is the size of three San Andreas, and yes, it is very pretty, but you’ve. got. nothing. to. do. here. You latin lovers are all the same: all flash and no fuck.
Tengo una máquina voladora!
Shit, we can’t even talk about politics! You don’t know the first thing about this “El Presidente” you’re trying to overthrow, let alone these pussy ass guerillas you keep bailing out, and you know what? I don’t care. I’m more concerned that you can’t keep it up for two lousy minutes. That spurt of fumbling diddly might get you through your plot-related missions, but it’s never gonna satisfy me.
Maybe you’d be a better man if someone had ever challenged you. If those three helicopters chasing you through the monotonous, mosquito-free jungle might have ever so much as nicked you with their blazing machine guns; if you hadn’t had airlifted agency dirt bikes and dune buggies at your beck and call; if you hadn’t been born with smooth almond skin, luscious black curls, mid-mission checkpoints and regenerating health.
I could never love a man who is constantly trying to be something he’s not. You think a little faux non-linearity and carjacking is all it takes to make you gangsta? I’ve worked with CJ Johnson, sir, and believe me, you are no CJ Johnson. You’re not even Ricky Martin.
And your one attribute I want so much to justify this fling is also the nail in your coffin: calling helicopter extractions to your next mission? I don’t know whether to respect you for acknowledging the mundanity of traversing your in-game world, or to resent you for selling it to me at all. We’re through, Rico. Don’t call.
Una triste. Yo lo tiene.
Lost: Via Nuthin
I'm a fan of Lost, but not at the level of those who think the show and its mysteries were handed down to us by God Almighty. The Lord handed down those mysteries through Battlestar Galactica. Lost, for all its merits, is inscrutably tied to ABC, and thus Disney, and I think this relationship inhibits the show and the directions it can take. Lost doesn't take the huge risks with characters and assets that BSG does, and when it comes to plotholes they've left more dead in their wake than the Cylons killed on the Twelve Colonies.
You could see the game version of Lost as a risky move for the show, and I'll be the first to admit that, faults and all, it's still a far better conversion than Sierra's insultingly bad BSG game. If you want an awesome BSG experience go check out the Freespace 2 total conversion and buy a fucking joystick to play it with, you frakking toaster.
Anyway, Lost game. Right. Lets get to that.
You're slotted into the Lost universe via a never-before-noticed standing-around-on-the-beach not-doing-anything-useful until-spoken-to-by-a-plot-relevant-character character, Elliot Maslow. You have amnesia from the crash, natch, but you've also got a camera, which I think as a tool for interaction pretty well sums up the entire Lost: Via Domus experience. You do a lot of passive observation, running from place to place and chatting up the main cast, but aside from an occasional puzzle you aren't given a chance to have any impact on the island.
Play is extremely linear and designed to ensure you move from one set piece to the next while only superficially skirting the familiar events of the show. This would be great if the environments offered any sort flexibility or meaning beyond just a polygonal tour of a few places on the island. The hatch, for example, is lovingly-realized but essentially dead. Sure you get to enter in the code sequence and push the button (Why does everyone on the show insist on calling the fucking Enter key a button?) but you can't do anything else. Elliot isn't visibly surprised by the hatch's existence or the prospect of taking a shower for the first time in weeks, but then again he goes through the whole game looking like a total stoner.
A good example of the disconnect between the player and the action can be found in one of the smoke monster sequences. You have to cross through a part of jungle by following a series of conveniently-placed markers. Survival only entails holding down the run button and identifying the correct bush- sorry- Banyan tree, to approach, then hiding in it and watching the monster swirl around you from a first person perspective. To a Lost fan this is damn cool: the monster's a genuine threat that will kill you if you fuck up, the sound effects are spot on and it looks sinister...the first time. After you've run, hidden, and watched the smoke monster nine times, it gets pretty annoying. Oh, and after making it through -and I'll spare you the suspense, you're getting moldy dynamite from the Black Rock- you then have to retrace your steps, but this time at a leisurely pace so as not to blow yourself up. If the smoke monster came after me my first choice would not be to saunter away from it.
Throughout the whole 3-hour tour I couldn't tell if I was experiencing a game or an interactive story book. (Look, we've digitized Lost! Done!) In fact, Via Domus is just a really well-packaged marketing tool. I'm amazed at this aspect, because as vapid as the game is, it obviously wasn't programmed by morons. I never encountered any glitches or puzzle-breaking issues. The animations for Locke's face are near astonishing -his gold miner voice notwithstanding. What else was Terry O'Quinn doing? It isn't like he was off filming the Pegasus episode of TNG or anything. It's almost as if the developers, independent of the marketers and PR flacks, set out to make something great but just didn't get the assets or freedom to do so. 
Consider Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay or Michel Ancel's King Kong. Both are members of the oft-derided licensed game category, and sure, both might have helped incremental sales of their associated media, but Butcher Bay was based on a schlock film and the King Kong movie didn't really need a boost. Both were very good games. I'd say Butcher Bay is one of my all-time favorites, but they were both made with a coherent philosophy and meant to be enjoyed. Not just ogled.
The Legend of Zelda: The Wii'd Whacker
Link may have a bright future in landscaping but I, on the other hand, have no desire to persist in such activities that would impair me from masturbating effectively. In fact I'd sooner sail a talking boat aimlessly across the ocean.
And to think I used to complain that Gamecube controllers were painful...
AVP Requiem: Interpretive Predator
Doomeru: Predator's only weakness? Crap videogame adaptations!
Doomeru: He.runs.so.bad!
Doomeru: And why in fuck are there no trees for him to hide in? Predator does not stroll around shooting shit. He's a scalpel not a mallet.
Doomeru: it’s like they never saw the movie!
Sir Cucumber: it's like they took Gun, put it on Mars, and gave you a triangle aiming reticule...
Headhunter - Redemption: Making an ass out of u and me
In this somewhat-anticipated sequel to the late Dreamcast title, mixed motives move a hokey Clint Eastwood knockoff from a crumbling dystopian future to reluctantly train a plucky girl with limited options but a lot of heart to beat the snot out of people.
But despite being the inspiration for Million Dollar Baby, there isn't much to say about Headhunter: Redemption.
Other than that it gives you no jump button. Instead you're expected to just trot off whatever you're standing on and hope for the best.
I haven't had to deal with this contrivance since Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and that piece of shit left me in tears.
Yet despite this game's uncanny ability to make assumptions for the player, you have to push a button every time you want to pick up ammo.
should I take this ammo for my rifle, or leave it?God I just don't know...Think dammit, think!
24: The Game - a second off my life with every "tink"
Even freedom-hating liberals like myself, who secretly hope for the failure of American troops in Iraq, can appreciate the crack-like entertainment value of 24.
So when I heard that 24: The Game "bridged the gap between seasons 2 and 3," and that I could find out what happened for only $19.99, I didn't take an opinion poll- I went with my gut.
And the intelligence we gained couldn't have been more unexpected:
There are terrorists in Los Angeles. And after hurting the President at the end of season 2, now they want to hurt the Vice President.
Continue Reading >>
What? You were expecting to help Jack Bauer infiltrate the Salazar drug cartel before Season 3 and play mini-games to get him hooked on smack? Terrorists want to kill the Vice President!!! They're attacking CTU again! They kidnapped Jack's daughter again! And his girlfriend! Again!
Oh, and the governor of California is a terrorist too. CTU's not going to figure out why (he looks like a Democrat), and they're not going to do anything about it either, but there it is.
Despite having to muddle through a fatal glitch at 4:28 pm- I wasn't about to cut & run just because of some poor planning- and having to constantly contend with those multiple real-time windows opening up- which are fun when you're watching the show but not so much when you're TRYING TO DRIVE A FUCKING CAR HERE ASSHOLE- this game actually had some fun moments.
defragging the CTU hard drive to protect our precious freedoms
For starters, whenever a terrorist sees you they say "who are you?" and "what are you doing here" like you were trying to sit at their lunch table.
And also- no, actually, that's about it.
The Sopranos: Road to Respect - I'd rather beat prostate
What can I say? Like any pistolino on the planet with half a brain and HBO, I loved the Sopranos. And Gamestop had a three-for-two sale on used inventory.
Buying Road to Respect broke my rule of mediocrity, but I just knew something would make this piece of shit worth it. And something, other than the fact that you can skip all three logo splash screens, almost did.
In the first five minutes you smash a guy’s teeth on the pavement, get a lap-dance, and listen to the real Paulie Walnuts complaining about his agita. You’re right there, in the Bing, just hanging out with Tony and his crew, and hoping they’ll say something else.
And then for the next eight hours you’re running errands for A.J., collecting randomly scattered iPods off the ground, and light-punching people to death.
When we first heard there was going to be a Sopranos game, Doomeru and I joked that it would be a teamwork puzzler in the vein of Lost Vikings: Tony would punch down doors, Christopher would jump over things, and Sil would have the map.
In hindsight we might have come up with a more compelling adventure than the quest of Big Pussy Bonpensiero’s bastard son to earn respect, which begins with the “respect gauge” at 100% and never dips below 96% unless you get tired of mashing the X button and shoot someone in public.
And all I wanted to do was get Tony a sandwich.
Hit the jump to see the best part of this game >>
...and it's straight downhill from there...
