Gaming Round-Up
Aug. 1st, 2005 01:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexxkayFirst up, a link to a great article on Game Violence.
This weekend was the first one in ages that it's been cool enough to stay in the library for a long time, so I got lots of gaming in.
Finally finished off Half-Life 2. Overall, an excellent game. The compare-and-contrast with HL1 is interesting, and shows a lot of the design changes in the industry since then.
Most obvious is the difference in content. Increased demands for quality translate directly into less quantity. Fewer levels, fewer weapons, possibly even fewer monsters, though I'm less sure about that. Overall playing time is significantly less, though that's not necessarily a bad thing in these days when I rarely get to spend a whole weekend playing. The one place that the tech is clearly a problem, in my mind, were the excessively long loading times. Any game that prompts me to have a book handy by the computer is spending way too much time loading...
HL2 has a notable lack of traditional Boss Battles, where you need to do something specific and tricky to beat a one-time only foe. Instead, they make liberal use of Mini-Bosses: monsters which, when you first meet them are almost overwhelmingly difficult, but whom you will later on be able (and forced) to defeat in multiples. Again, the quality push translates into using fewer, more re-usable assets. They did a very good job of giving each monster type a distinct set of behaviors, and of introducing them in a way which explained by demonstration, not exposition, what those behaviors were.
Speaking of exposition, the story was, in most respects, very similar to HL1. That is, there was remarkably little of it, and it reached no satisfactory conclusion. On the other hand, the *world-building* was similarly excellent, and conveyed subtly through lots of environmental and behavioral elements.
The character animation technology is stunning. The range of facial expressions is enormous, and the simple detail of how characters follow you with their eyes when you move makes a huge contribution. There's still a long way to go: I'd put the physical acting skill of these avatars at about that of lower-grade B-Movie actors. But the mere fact that I can put them on the same *scale* as a human actor is an enormous step forward. To some extent, I find it incredibly annoying, since it has significantly raised the bar in what other games (such as the ones I'm working on) will be expected to deliver. It's curious that they invested so much effort into that technology, since they don't actually *use* it all that often. But one of the businesses Valve is in is licensing out their technology to third parties, so perhaps it made sense from that point of view. It sure does demo well!
In the penultimate sections of the game, you often have a squad of freedom fighters following you around and helping out. This seemed cool at first, but I found it ultimately greatly dissatisfying. The reason? They *all* die. No matter how carefully and conservatively you play, the designers have decided that you will go through some areas alone, and have thus scripted in places beyond which your friends *will* get killed, no saving throw. In HL1, you occasionally had a guard helping you, but if you were careful, you could leave him behind in an area of (relative) safety, where you could believe that he survived. Not so in HL2, unless you were one of the two Named Characters. And they give you so *many* helpers, that you start recognizing the re-used faces and voices of previously slain comrades. So the final emotional result was not human compassion, but to merely treat these people as temporary power-ups, expendable resources. In a game with so many clever tools and techniques for increasing emotional attachment, this failure is disappointing.
Although there are numerically fewer weapons than in HL1, this isn't a significant drawback. Each weapon you *do* have has an important functional role that is distinct from the others. Well, the two machine guns are fairly similar, but aside from that. The best new weapon is definitely the Gravity Gun, which totally transforms the gameplay, by turning random environmetal crap into weapons and/or armor for you. [I was going to correct the typo in the last sentence, but decided not to -- most of what you use as weapons *is* made of metal, after all.] The only weapon more fun than the Gravity Gun was the AntLion Pheremone Bomb, which can turn some previously threatening monsters into your own personal army. Unfortunately, this is only used for one extended sequence in the game, and never afterwards. It is a seriously kick-ass sequence, though! The "Hopper" mines, which you could repurpose to act on your side, were an interesting idea, but not well supported by the designers -- they almost never gave you situations where you could use these as purposeful traps.
Late in the game, there is a sequence which threatened to push one of my Most Hated Game Cliche buttons: the player is captured by the enemy, and all his weapons are taken away. But it was a bit of a fake-out. They left one weapon behind, and, apparently accidently, super-charged it. So I only had one tool left, but it was an Ultra-Powered Gravity Gun. Turns out that, once you have that, you don't really *want* much else! Flinging enemy bodies through the air is hugely fun.
The visual design of the final area had a marvelous sense of vertical scale, of a sort that I usually only see in some Star Wars games. On the other hand, the clear visual influence of Monsters, Inc (the door storage facility) detracted some from the drama for me.
The game ends awfully abruptly. There is a climactic battle, but I was really expecting it to be an act break, not the end of the game. For one thing, they'd been carefully visually intro-ing a new monster that I never actually got to fight. Other than that, the pacing throughout is superb. New enemies, weapons, and environments are always introduced just before you get bored with the old ones.
As I no longer have the reflexes of my youth, I played the game on Easy, and got pretty much the experience I wanted. I still died occasionally, but not often, with a few exceptions. Most of those were simply me failing to realize what the necessary step to continue past the deadly situation was. Although, arguably, the fact that I had trouble realizing the solutions to those areas was a failure of design. In one particularly difficult situation, I noticed the use of a technique that has been being discussed around the office as a way to increase player fun by subtle "cheating" on his behalf. In HL2, at least on the Easy difficulty level, when your health hits 10%, you seem to become temporarily invulnerable for a few seconds. This makes it much more likely that you will notice your dire peril and retreat in time, rather than suffering through a death-and-reload situation. Most players won't notice this sort of cheating, but almost all players will have a more fun experience because of it.
Also this weekend, I played two more levels of the Thief 2 fan expansion pack, one set in a brothel, and one set ina fancy hotel. It continues to be quite excellent, and nearly up to professional standards. They did a really good job of weaving the story around the events in Thief 2, so that they are clearly happening in the same world, at approximately the same time. All Thief fans should play this. The only reason I haven't finished it yet is that one really must play Thief games after dark, and so I can't get in more than a single level a night in the summer (and that only when the weather is cool).
Finally, I've started in on the latest Grand Theft Auto. It starts pretty slow, but it looks to have even more open-ended gameplay goodness than the previous installments. It's moving more and more towards RPG territory as the series progresses; the player now has stats and skills to track and improve, and more built-in appeaance customization options than ever. The tech has also improved, in that loading times are almost non-existent.
Naturally, I also downloaded the infamous "Hot Coffee" sex patch. I'm using the version that doesn't interfere with the gameplay flow, however, so It'll probably be some time before I see the content in question. One thing that is clear from the included readme, however, is that the female nudity (as seen in the video I linked to earlier) was generated by the mod-maker, not the game developers. In the game developers' version, the women are (skimpily) clothed during the sex sequences, thus avoiding the "holes in the shoulderblades" clipping problems. Which datum leads me to believe that these sequences *were*, in fact, fully completed before being pulled at the last moment.
If I may quote directly from the D.O.J. report, “Recently, the offending rates for 14-17 year-olds reached the lowest levels ever recorded.”And for lagniappe, a response to that article.
The lowest levels ever recorded. In other words, the Playstation era has, in fact, produced the most non-violent kids ever.
This weekend was the first one in ages that it's been cool enough to stay in the library for a long time, so I got lots of gaming in.
Finally finished off Half-Life 2. Overall, an excellent game. The compare-and-contrast with HL1 is interesting, and shows a lot of the design changes in the industry since then.
Most obvious is the difference in content. Increased demands for quality translate directly into less quantity. Fewer levels, fewer weapons, possibly even fewer monsters, though I'm less sure about that. Overall playing time is significantly less, though that's not necessarily a bad thing in these days when I rarely get to spend a whole weekend playing. The one place that the tech is clearly a problem, in my mind, were the excessively long loading times. Any game that prompts me to have a book handy by the computer is spending way too much time loading...
HL2 has a notable lack of traditional Boss Battles, where you need to do something specific and tricky to beat a one-time only foe. Instead, they make liberal use of Mini-Bosses: monsters which, when you first meet them are almost overwhelmingly difficult, but whom you will later on be able (and forced) to defeat in multiples. Again, the quality push translates into using fewer, more re-usable assets. They did a very good job of giving each monster type a distinct set of behaviors, and of introducing them in a way which explained by demonstration, not exposition, what those behaviors were.
Speaking of exposition, the story was, in most respects, very similar to HL1. That is, there was remarkably little of it, and it reached no satisfactory conclusion. On the other hand, the *world-building* was similarly excellent, and conveyed subtly through lots of environmental and behavioral elements.
The character animation technology is stunning. The range of facial expressions is enormous, and the simple detail of how characters follow you with their eyes when you move makes a huge contribution. There's still a long way to go: I'd put the physical acting skill of these avatars at about that of lower-grade B-Movie actors. But the mere fact that I can put them on the same *scale* as a human actor is an enormous step forward. To some extent, I find it incredibly annoying, since it has significantly raised the bar in what other games (such as the ones I'm working on) will be expected to deliver. It's curious that they invested so much effort into that technology, since they don't actually *use* it all that often. But one of the businesses Valve is in is licensing out their technology to third parties, so perhaps it made sense from that point of view. It sure does demo well!
In the penultimate sections of the game, you often have a squad of freedom fighters following you around and helping out. This seemed cool at first, but I found it ultimately greatly dissatisfying. The reason? They *all* die. No matter how carefully and conservatively you play, the designers have decided that you will go through some areas alone, and have thus scripted in places beyond which your friends *will* get killed, no saving throw. In HL1, you occasionally had a guard helping you, but if you were careful, you could leave him behind in an area of (relative) safety, where you could believe that he survived. Not so in HL2, unless you were one of the two Named Characters. And they give you so *many* helpers, that you start recognizing the re-used faces and voices of previously slain comrades. So the final emotional result was not human compassion, but to merely treat these people as temporary power-ups, expendable resources. In a game with so many clever tools and techniques for increasing emotional attachment, this failure is disappointing.
Although there are numerically fewer weapons than in HL1, this isn't a significant drawback. Each weapon you *do* have has an important functional role that is distinct from the others. Well, the two machine guns are fairly similar, but aside from that. The best new weapon is definitely the Gravity Gun, which totally transforms the gameplay, by turning random environmetal crap into weapons and/or armor for you. [I was going to correct the typo in the last sentence, but decided not to -- most of what you use as weapons *is* made of metal, after all.] The only weapon more fun than the Gravity Gun was the AntLion Pheremone Bomb, which can turn some previously threatening monsters into your own personal army. Unfortunately, this is only used for one extended sequence in the game, and never afterwards. It is a seriously kick-ass sequence, though! The "Hopper" mines, which you could repurpose to act on your side, were an interesting idea, but not well supported by the designers -- they almost never gave you situations where you could use these as purposeful traps.
Late in the game, there is a sequence which threatened to push one of my Most Hated Game Cliche buttons: the player is captured by the enemy, and all his weapons are taken away. But it was a bit of a fake-out. They left one weapon behind, and, apparently accidently, super-charged it. So I only had one tool left, but it was an Ultra-Powered Gravity Gun. Turns out that, once you have that, you don't really *want* much else! Flinging enemy bodies through the air is hugely fun.
The visual design of the final area had a marvelous sense of vertical scale, of a sort that I usually only see in some Star Wars games. On the other hand, the clear visual influence of Monsters, Inc (the door storage facility) detracted some from the drama for me.
The game ends awfully abruptly. There is a climactic battle, but I was really expecting it to be an act break, not the end of the game. For one thing, they'd been carefully visually intro-ing a new monster that I never actually got to fight. Other than that, the pacing throughout is superb. New enemies, weapons, and environments are always introduced just before you get bored with the old ones.
As I no longer have the reflexes of my youth, I played the game on Easy, and got pretty much the experience I wanted. I still died occasionally, but not often, with a few exceptions. Most of those were simply me failing to realize what the necessary step to continue past the deadly situation was. Although, arguably, the fact that I had trouble realizing the solutions to those areas was a failure of design. In one particularly difficult situation, I noticed the use of a technique that has been being discussed around the office as a way to increase player fun by subtle "cheating" on his behalf. In HL2, at least on the Easy difficulty level, when your health hits 10%, you seem to become temporarily invulnerable for a few seconds. This makes it much more likely that you will notice your dire peril and retreat in time, rather than suffering through a death-and-reload situation. Most players won't notice this sort of cheating, but almost all players will have a more fun experience because of it.
Also this weekend, I played two more levels of the Thief 2 fan expansion pack, one set in a brothel, and one set ina fancy hotel. It continues to be quite excellent, and nearly up to professional standards. They did a really good job of weaving the story around the events in Thief 2, so that they are clearly happening in the same world, at approximately the same time. All Thief fans should play this. The only reason I haven't finished it yet is that one really must play Thief games after dark, and so I can't get in more than a single level a night in the summer (and that only when the weather is cool).
Finally, I've started in on the latest Grand Theft Auto. It starts pretty slow, but it looks to have even more open-ended gameplay goodness than the previous installments. It's moving more and more towards RPG territory as the series progresses; the player now has stats and skills to track and improve, and more built-in appeaance customization options than ever. The tech has also improved, in that loading times are almost non-existent.
Naturally, I also downloaded the infamous "Hot Coffee" sex patch. I'm using the version that doesn't interfere with the gameplay flow, however, so It'll probably be some time before I see the content in question. One thing that is clear from the included readme, however, is that the female nudity (as seen in the video I linked to earlier) was generated by the mod-maker, not the game developers. In the game developers' version, the women are (skimpily) clothed during the sex sequences, thus avoiding the "holes in the shoulderblades" clipping problems. Which datum leads me to believe that these sequences *were*, in fact, fully completed before being pulled at the last moment.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-02 01:51 pm (UTC)There does seem to be lots of research which shows that exposure to violence (in all media) inures young viewers to violence. While they may not rush out to cause violence, they are much less bothered by it.
Hey, that might be good - the US military has used video games as a recruiting tool. Perhaps it has improved military and police reaction times as well; they are used as training tools for agents and police officers.
It might be bad - I recall one study (vaguely - don't ask for a citation) which interviewed people before and after both violent games and control games, and asked them how they would punish someone that had performed a crime. There was a marked result in a reduction of punishment. Whether that was a more measured response or a less measured one, I cannot say.
It is possible that not everyone who uses violent games is affected, but that there is a small minority that is badly affected. This would be analogous to alcohol or drugs, I suspect. Or, maybe the whole thing is fueling a disturbing growth in the choreographed violence market. That would be bad. :-)
My views on media corruption seem to mostly be confined to political reporting, my friend. :-) Although I will make fun of specific examples of "stupid reporting" as I find them.
I make no serious claim as to the global value of gaming, and its impact. I just think the column originally put forward really didn't show very much. It surely didn't refute the little bit of science and research I have seen.
As for myself, and my daughter - I don't have the time to waste on games, so I don't use them. Anna hates violence, even wanting to walk out of movies where people or animals get hurt. (I showed her a mawkish Disney film, Raise Your Voice, where a major plot motivation is the untimely death of the heroines brother as a victim of drunken driving. Anna was quite bothered by this scene, and I had to stop the movie to discuss it with her. Which reminds me, time to post in my LJ...)