Manufacturing Badassery

Devil May Cry 4 and the Asskicking Arms Race

In the hack-and-slash action genre, market success depends on establishing a game’s protagonist as a grade-A badass… and there's an arms race going on. Run-of-the-mill Navy SEALS, ex-Green Berets, veteran Marines and hardboiled cops might as well be tree surgeons. Even the go-to Asiatic badasses, samurai, ninja and kung-fu masters need much more than bushido, ninjustsu and the Mantis Fist to turn heads. Gimmick after grim gimmick piles up, and last year’s over-the-top asskicker looks this season like a 19th-century gentleman pugilist.

Ninja Gaiden’s “super ninja”, Ryu Hyabusa, can absorb enemy essences and unleash Ultimate Techniques? Well, maybe he can get a job hassling skateboarders down at the mall now that God of War’s hate-driven, deicidal maniac Kratos has made the scene with his pair of demonic, whirling chain-daggers. And who’s going to relegate Kratos himself to appearances on game shows and faded-celebrity reality series?

Devil May Cry 4 developer Capcom would dearly love their new series lead, Nero, to be that Kratos-killer. The former star of the Devil May Cry games, Dante, once the Crown Prince of all stylish slaughter-artists, was getting a bit long in the tooth; sure, he’s a half-demon, but who isn’t these days? His ridiculously outsized sword, legendary though it may be, is still a sword, and even juiced with magic power his twin .45s are still recognizable as something akin to real-world guns. Old, and, for the purposes of vicarious videogame violence in a novelty-driven market, busted.

The new hotness: Nero, an update on the Dante model. The series-trademark overcoat is still there (no badass is complete without swirly outerwear, unless they wear sci-fi armor or go shirtless) but as a younger dude Nero’s hip-hopped it up a bit: now he wears it with a hoodie vest. On the gun side of things, at first glance it seems the kid’s gone old-school with a Dirty Harry-style revolver, but even the “most powerful handgun in the world” isn’t badass enough for the 21st Century; look closer, and you’ll see Nero’s massive handcannon is actually double-barreled, one above the other. Badasssss!

Nothing says “totally awesome” like having one of your arms replaced by something other than your own flesh and blood -- Capcom’s own Bionic Commando was a pioneer in this area, with his extending cyber-arm. A part-demon like his predecessor, Nero has opted for his requisite arm-replacement to take the form of a spooky, glowing, Geigeresque demon limb called the “Devil Bringer” which, as the name suggests, serves to bring devils closer, via telekinesis, so Nero can smash them into the floor, throw them around or, preferably, chop them up with his sword.

The sword, now, that’s the piece de resistance. I can just imagine the brainstorming session that came up with Nero’s blade. Nero needs a sword, and it needs to be outlandishly big – that’s a given. But Dante already brought a seven-foot blade into the series; where do we go from there? A demon sword? Nah; we blew our demonic quotient on that totally rad arm, and demon swords are a little played out besides. A fire sword, maybe? Pfft; yeah, my grandmother loves flaming swords…she read about them in the Bible.

Well, what, then? Our boy will get slaughtered in the marketplace with some manky off-the-shelf hunk of steel, no matter how baroque we dress it up. What do we do with the sword? With what do we gimmick it? What’s the most badass thing?

How about… how about motorcycles? Motorcycles are still pretty badass, right?

Oh, my darling readers; in that moment, badass history was made. In the asskickin’ arms race, Nero’s sword is the hydrogen bomb. Of course it’s enormous; without demon blood or whatever you’d need a forklift to move it. Adding to its mass is, I guess, some kind of internal engine; the sword’s hilt is a replica of a motorcycle handlebar – complete with brake lever forming the handguard – and before he gets into tough fights, Nero actually revs it up like you would a bike -- RUNNN-nunnunnunn-RUNNNN-nunnunnunn-RUNNNNNNNUNNNUNNNNUNNNRRRRR! – and it starts flaming and smoking and vibrating and does a ton of extra motorbike-based damage to whatever hapless hellspawn happens to get in the way. “Kawasaki Ninja” has a whole new meaning.

Where will this mad rush to ever badder badassery lead us? Thanks to the bloody-minded quest for total awesomeness, the world’s videogame characters between them have the capability to kick the asses of every human being on the planet ten times over. And there’s no end in sight – the fact Nero is Japanese will only motivate North American developers to redouble their efforts, and it’s anyone’s guess what abominations lie beyond the sword-that’s-also-a-motorbike barrier.

For the sake of the children, I urge restraint. In Montreal, in Vancouver, in Boston and Seattle and Dublin and Paris, I beg all game developers: walk away from the zero-sum game of badass one-upmanship. Disarm. Return our gameworlds to the core values they were based on, where a simple ex-Special Forces commando who witnesses his family mercilessly slaughtered by the mob could wreak honest vengeance with a good, solid M-16. Where a young ninja, armed only with the volcano-forged, blood-quenched blade that belonged to his betrayed father, could hope to one day earn himself an international marketing deal. Where just ripping a dude’s head off was a treat, and we were happy to have it.

"The shiny guy always worries."

Aw.

Year in Preview: 2008

It’s that time of year, again… time for columnists to look back at the hefty bastard of a year that was, look forward to the terrifying vortex of the year ahead, manufacture quickie best/worst lists padded out with cheap jokes. Vacation time, wine-numbed… money for nothing, cheques for free…

So let’s do this timeslip-style, next things first. With which electronic diversions are we going to be desperately digitally anaesthetizing ourselves as the Historical Inevitability of 2008 force-marches the world toward another Republican American presidency?

I actually said the following in a phone conversation last week: “I don’t know… I can’t think of anything I’m really looking forward to next year, other than maybe LittleBigPlanet.”

Long-distance silence from the other end, then: “Um… dude? Aren’t you forgetting something?”

Oh, right! Grand Theft Auto IV. Sure! Yeah! I’m super hot in the pants for the next installment in my all-time favorite series of sandbox urban – and sometimes rural; nothing like taking out competing thugs combine-style – gangland mayhem! Some Eastern European flava this time, too, all ex-KGB and Russian Mafia, sleazy tracksuits in unlicensed NYC backroom clubs with no name and armored front doors, flippin’ souped-up Maserati-analogues off suspension bridges in hi-def, ragdoll rocket-launchering everything in sight…

… by myself.

The heartbreak of the small-town gamer who is not also a high-school student! What the hell good is a GTA game to me without a cackling couchful of Stoney Drinkichuks passing the controller around, entertaining each other (endlessly!) with exciting new feats of virtual erring-do? Screwdriver rampage! Three-tanker freeway explosion pileup! Helicopter decapitation! Ha-HAAA-hahahahaHa-ha…haaahhhhh… It’s not going to be the same. I’m thinking of putting a GAME BUDDIES WANTED poster up on the tavern bulletin board alongside the ads for horse trailers, mobile homes and tax revolt. Or, you know, just kicking it online…

… with the foulmouthed, trash-talking, callow, suburban idiot hordes of the “gamer community.” No, thanks. Is it any wonder I let time and chemistry rinse dreams of a new GTA i.v. from my forebrain, replacing them with fuzzy fantasies of little burlap munchkins cavorting cooperatively in a user-created Smurfland of whimsical soft-sculpted challenges? LittleBigPlanet looks like etsy.com meets Super Mario Bros. by way of The Lost Vikings; if any online scene is going to be free of OMG LOL NOOB FAGGOT BITCH, might it be this one? I could see myself trading Murder Simulation for hours of caring and sharing, taking out Frowny Freddies with my cuddlethrower, hug grenades and full-auto OK-47.

Another option: Culdcept Saga, the newest in a (relatively) obscure Japanese series of Monopoly-meets-Magic: The Gathering games. This is seriously crunchy-nerd territory, The Eye of Judgment without the bonus humiliation of having to go out and buy physical trading cards. Playing Culdcept might be – as most of my journeys into online Fantasy are – a sort of desperate replacement for the kind of tabletop social gaming I’m half a lifetime away from, in this case maybe taking the place of all-time-fave daywaster Talisman. Did you all see that Talisman’s back in print?! To think I almost dropped $US 250 for a used copy on eBay…

Oh, wait… check it out! How did I forget about this? Talisman’s coming to XBox Live and the PS Network. Sorry, Culdcept Saga, false alarm. Nevermind.

Also in 2008, we’re going to see Fable 2. Am I looking forward to this? Only in the literal sense that, if I’m looking at it at all, “forward” is the direction I must face – because, looking back, I only see how pissed off I got playing the first Fable three years ago. Not that it was a bad game in absolute terms, but in the vicious context of over-promise/under-deliver it was an astounding kick in the balls. Somewhere in the haze of development, this epic, genre-changing, cradle-to-grave, boy-to-man, living-world, moral-choice fantasy masterpiece became a two-sitting, genre-confirming, over-beautified, trivial action RPG. But, check it out! in Fable 2, you have a dog! Awesome! My math here is simple: low expectations = pleasant surprises.

Actually, that’s a pretty good New Year equation in any case; is it too late to get it made up in to one of these festive banners made up of glittery metallic letters, something I can string up over the punchbowl? Bionic Commando, Too Human, Iron Man, No More Heroes… LO.EX=PS.

But Spore? Super Smash Bros. Brawl? Fallout 3? Those will all be fantastic, right? Right?? Right; because with some games there’s a (high) threshold below which expectations cannot be pushed without sacrificing one’s humanity.

Firday Freakout: "Park my bricks"

...posted a day late, appropriately.



Ten years in development, folks.

Undergrad Gaming

It’s an idyllic winter’s night in a gaming household. I’m sitting at my grandfather’s desk with a mug of hot tea and a jar of peanuts, killing time – that is to say, doing research – with a series of minimalist Japanese point-and-click browser adventures (“The plane broke down. Escape from uninhabited island”) while from the next room comes that sweetest of holiday sounds: the crunchy shatter of virtual targets, the BLING of points being racked up, the occasional exultations of victory, the more frequent curses of defeat.

I’d underestimated Link’s Crossbow Training, and the futuristic Wii Zapper gun-conversion doohickey it’s bundled with, in the first assessment. To even a medium/soft-core gamer, it’s a pretty slight experience: ten three-stage levels’ worth of shooting galleries, each stage clocking out at sixty seconds, with the Zapper as cute but inessential novelty. I played it with my nongamer fiancée, burning through the whole thing in less than two hours, and when we sort of shrugged and put the Wii away I figured that was that.

The next afternoon she pokes her head into my office, a strange glint in her eye. “You know what I think would really reduce some stress?” she asks, rhetorically. “Shooting some goblins.” She mimes cradling the Zapper, and I recognize the glint: she’s got The Fever. Link’s Crossbow Training may be slight and light, but that’s what you look for in a gateway drug.

The meh reviews the package received illustrate a problem with absolute numerical game ratings; comparing the LCT/Zapper combo to a fully realized game is like comparing “Essential Japanese for Travelers” to The Tale of Genji. More than just a trivially diverting virtual popgun experience, Link’s Crossbow Training is nothing less than a grammar of videogames.

Gamers seldom consider the mass of convention and idiom that supports modern gameplay – we don’t have to consider it, because it’s second nature. We don’t have to puzzle out how an onscreen radar works, for example; we don’t have to relearn each time the fundamentals of moving through virtual space, let alone relearn the trick of perceiving the onscreen image as space. But for complete newcomers – they’re rare, but they’re out there – these fundamentals of the medium are baffling as hell, rapid-fire babble in an unfamiliar language. LCT offers a way for these poor souls to at least get up to the level of “Hello, my name is…” and “Where is the train station?”

Gaming 101 is simple target shooting, the first stage of each level. Point the aimer, pull the trigger. Concepts introduced: what an aimer is; what a trigger is; basic menu navigation; scoring and score multipliers; target evaluation and selection. Importantly, the shooting-gallery stages introduce that most basic of videogame drug-rushes: beating your own high score, knowing you can do even better, and being offered the chance to try.

Gaming 140, comprising the “Defender” levels, builds on that. These stages are basically rail shooters; Link’s position is fixed but the player can and must look around the game space to find targets. Here, benign bullseyes are replaced with fearsome enemies. They’re all one and the same to us stone-cold virtual killaz, but for an absolute newbie that first experience of a skeleton coming right at you while a warning klaxon blares can be terrifying. Concepts introduced: looking around; awareness of offscreen game elements; basic radar use; sangfroid in the face of marauding undead.

At the 200 level, the “Ranger” stages take the student through their first full-on FPS experience, giving them control over Link’s movement through the space. Here are introduced the final concepts needed for basic interaction with the modern games medium: perception of three dimensions in virtual space; use of a control stick in moving a character through that space; basic gunfight tactics; advanced radar use; exploration of the environment. Upon completion of the course, advanced students may attempt their first-ever Boss fight for extra credit.

Thanks to Link’s Crossbow Training and the Zapper doohickey – technically unnecessary, the physicality of clutching a gun can’t be overestimated as a teaching aid – I’ve watched my girl go, in a few short hours, from “What? What the fuck? I don’t get it!” to happily striving for Gold and Platinum rankings and trading high-scoring tips over morning coffee, from flailing miserably to navigating the game’s combat courses with a confidence and precision that’d get her though Halo multiplayer without embarrassment. I’m really quite proud.

Of course, like any good school, LCT offers students plenty of opportunity to experience – and learn to cope with -- those intangible challenges of the gaming experience that can’t be taught in a classroom: the remorse over blowing hours of time chasing meaningless medals, the clammy feeling of gamesweat, the first twinges of carpal tunnel syndrome, the perceptual vertigo of returning to the real world.

I just pray she doesn’t get The Dreams.

Firday Freakout: A Message From the Queen

Wax Mannequin. "God bless all the children, each dear one... meow meow meow meow meow meow!"

No! I wanna play dolly!

One of my favorite Simpsons moments comes during the hearing in which the family is suing the Sea Captain’s “all-you-can-eat” seafood restaurant for false advertising. Pressed to tell the court what they did when they couldn’t find another all-you-can-eat fish place to satisfy Homer’s cravings, Marge breaks down and sobs: “We went fishing!”

I’m right there, sobbing along with her. That’s what can happen when you get a taste of something and it simply isn’t enough; you take whatever you can find that might sate that hunger, desperately cast your line. But even the finest line-caught trout, shining silvery in your bucket, isn’t the same as a restaurant-poached salmon, or even a manky plastic basket of deep-fried shrimp, unless you can go all Gollum-style and dig in right there on the pier. Still, you’re so hungry for fish you’ll take whatever the water puts on your hook…

Extended metaphors aside (I’m not really hungry for fish; apparently, I have to cut down if I want future generations to know the joys of sushi), it has been a hard few weeks of craving, ever since those schoolyard pushers over at BioWare gave me my “first one’s free” taste of Mass Effect. But it’s not so much the sci-fi RPG gameplay itself I’m jonesing for – though, you know, duh -- it’s the primary, adventure-starting act of character generation itself. Those few sweet minutes of tweaking an avatar’s face, facts and stats have had me itching.

Any – or maybe just many – old-time Dungeons and Dragons players will tell you the same thing: the purest joy in role-playing gaming is the making of your character, the process of turning rules, points, dice rolls and wish-fulfillment power fantasies into a brand-new, never-before-seen spellcaster, karate man, mutant laser-eye dude or hired killer. A new character, all pristine on a fresh sheet unmarked by grimy eraser-scars and pop-stains, represents a pure product of imagination and fantasy, a clean idea not yet grimed up by the frustration, compromise, disappointment and tedium of actually playing the game along with four or five other nerds and their own (clearly inferior) little dream-puppets.

Role-playing video games – especially single-player games – don’t have the same limited-only-by-the-imagination quality of the tabletop, though, even when they offer as much freedom of characterization, or a convincing simulation thereof, as Mass Effect. The options for your character’s profession and background are relatively few, and choosing from a handful of dialogue choices isn’t the same as extemporizing your character’s words, but let’s be honest; in practice, imagination can be quite limiting. Ninety per cent of characters’ backgrounds are plucked straight off the stockshelf, and a similar portion of players’ improvised dialogue comprises hackneyed threats and other tough-guy inanities. More important than character itself is external detail: “Yeah, I guess my dad was killed and I swore revenge, whatever; anyway, I’ve got these glowing red eyes, right, and these two wicked swords that…”

The magic of character creation in a game like Mass Effect is exactly in these externals, starting with the hours spent tweaking your character’s appearance in the face-building tool. This can be obsession at its best, fiddling with the scores of little sliders that adjust your Space Marine’s skin tone, the length of the bridge of the nose, eye shape and size, chin strength, lip poutiness, brow thickness, cheekbone height, haistyle, makeup…

Makeup? Yeah, makeup; given the choice – in videogames, not on the tabletop -- my characters will always be girls. Maybe there’s some sort of theory-level psychological reason why this is so, something about being able to use a play environment to safely experiment with gender roles or something, but it really boils down to simple aesthetics: in a dialogue-heavy game like ME, the camera’s either right up in your character’s yammering face or following obediently behind, and if I’m going to spend 100-plus hours in this virtual world I’d rather have my field of vision filled with the face and backside of a simulated pretty girl.

But it’s not all Weird Science wank fantasy, a digital Pygmalion trip. Building a character at the facial-detail level creates a deep investment in the game world, a bond of significant power. My cravings right now are not so much for the opportunity to whip up some kind of fantasy asskicker – I’ve been desperately downloading freeware and shareware RPGs, the role-playing addict’s cheap fix, and they haven’t cut the jones – but for making that investment, feeling that bond… and then playing hundreds of hours of action-packed, sci-fi dress-up-dolly. I’d felt that connection forming at BioWare’s press day, and having my bonding time with “Irene Shepherd” cut abruptly short gives these pangs their special bite.

So, it’s back to Oblivion, I guess; I’ve got to do something before I go crazy and start searching craigslist for a local LARP chapter. Gronking again through that played-out world, trying to find bits of unplayed game, doesn’t really appeal to me, but that’s a secondary problem which can be smoothed over with gallons of Gallo; the character customization is there, the face-creation is there and the dress-up dolly is there, even if the novelty’s gone. It’ll be another couple of weeks before I’ll be served fresh fish, so for now I’m going fishing.

plink plink plonk plink...

Man, this show would have been ten million times better if they'd let Worf keep it this consistently real...

Also... it's weird, but I get such a Mike Winters vibe from Dorn's delivery, here...

Game writers on writing games

BioWare's Drew Karpyshyn and Ubisoft's Clint Hocking talk craft. Originally appeared in the Toronto Star

When the Writers' Guild of America, the trade union representing TV and film writers in the U.S., announced at the end of September that video game writing would be honoured at their 2008 awards ceremony, it was a bit of an "arrival" moment for games. Granted, the recognition might have something to do with the WGA's desire to organize the caffeine-fuelled legions putting words in the mouths of countless ninjas, wizards and lone-wolf Marines, but still. The award is acknowledgement of games as a form on par with movies and TV, and of writing as an integral part of their creation.

We've come a long way from the days when "INSERT COIN" and "GAME OVER" might comprise a game's entire script; even today's most button-mashy of action games are expected to offer something resembling a compelling storyline. The poster-genre for the game writer's task is the role-playing game, in which players must inhabit a character and make story decisions that branch the plot along multiple lines. Dialogue is king ... and there's plenty of it.

"We have 20,000 lines of dialogue," says senior designer Drew Karpyshyn of Edmonton game developer BioWare, describing science-fiction RPG Mass Effect, set for release Nov. 20. That's the equivalent of 15 to 20 movie screenplays, created by Karpyshyn and five other writers, working with the rest of the creative team. (The new Simpsons Game enlisted the TV show's writers to come up with 8,000 lines – a full season's worth.)

Amazingly, Mass Effect is, says Karpyshyn, "far and away our smallest game, in terms of BioWare standards. Because of advances in digital acting and the cinematic feel of the game, we can now tell more by saying less.

"We do try to follow a lot of cinematic rules. But we have to be careful; (games) are very different from a movie. The player isn't passively watching, they're actively involved and they can steer it in a number of different directions."

Writing for those directions bulks up an RPG's script; characters may need several sets of dialogue to accommodate the role a player has chosen. A simple example is in the Knights of the Old Republic, BioWare's 2003 Star Wars title, where the fundamental choice is between Dark and Light sides of the Force. Through their choices, the player character will become either a Jedi saint or a Vaderesque paragon of bastardry, and non-player-character attitudes will vary accordingly.

The contingencies multiply fast; as Karpyshyn puts it, "How can I let the player make significant choices, steer the conversation as they want, but still manage to control the amount of content so that every time they make a choice it doesn't double the amount of work?"

Mass Effect's answer has been to offer the freedom of multiple side quests while keeping the plot's "critical path" within a matrix of four possible endings. "This was a difficult lesson to learn," Karpyshyn says, "but we (had) to come to the realization that spamming the player with options is not something they're necessarily going to enjoy."

Clint Hocking, creative director at Montreal's Ubisoft, comes at the problem from a different direction. His current project, the first-person shooter Far Cry 2, is more action-oriented than an RPG like Mass Effect, but has the same requirements for managing player choice.

"The most important thing for me is to stop thinking of story as something that we write and then integrate and the player then experiences," he says. "Game stories in general are going to evolve to a point where the player is playing the story the same way you'd play Tetris."

Hocking's approach to realizing this in Far Cry 2 is to develop a style of game writing that takes those player statements and retroactively justifies them. "The player is making statements about what he's interested in by the actions he takes," Hocking explains.

"Instead of providing the content that tells the story that we've written, we provide an encyclopedia of content that the game calls on to provide the meaning, rationale and background for the decisions the player has made. We detect who you shoot and when and then we provide the `why.'"

For Hocking, any comparison between games and film breaks down, as players given real choice will naturally act to defuse the situations ("Don't go in there!") that, in traditional narrative, create drama.

"A lot of the most powerful tools of filmmaking need to be abandoned in order to make a game that equals or surpasses a film. When people say, `You need to make your game more cinematic,' what they're really saying is, "You need to make your game better.'

"It's not the `how' that we need (from film)," says Hocking, "it's the result. We need to be targeting the same emotional results. The `more like movies' that people are asking for is the hard decision that makes you tremble and weep, and I think we have the ability to do that now."

Clearing off the Cobwebs

Three months? What the hell have I been up to? Well, in addition to moving south to Nanton and getting (poorly) adjusted thereto, I...

...attended the best wedding reception, ever; considered the return of the Lapsed Gamer; attended South Country fair, and had a romantic moment ruined by drunken carnies; experienced the badass, eye-of-the-tiger side of Mario; mourned the passing of Klondike Days; lost myself for a while in the Marvel Universe; experienced Mario again, this time in his dimension-bending incarnation; said a mopey goodbye to Edmonton; played the shit out of BioShock; shrugged indifferently at the mediocre Doctor Strange animated film; thought some more thoughts about BioShock; searched for sexiness in a stack of ancient Nintendo Power magazines; got a cracklike taste of Mass Effect that still has me itching; hated the living shit out of RPG disaster Two Worlds; sat my ass down in a beanbag chair; slogged through maybe half of Heavenly Sword; interviewed Everyday Shooter creator Jonathan Mak; gushed over Phantom Hourglass maybe a little bit more than I should have; rocked drunken Halo 3 with a bunch of Slashdot geeks; got kind of creeped out playing The Eye of Judgment; and, finally, took stock of my virtual shoebox of "old-school classics" and came away kind of disgusted with myself.

All those words... why am I broke?