Feeling Wanted

It’s a little after 6:30 p.m. and I’m on the couch three feet away from the TV, 360 controller in hand. I’ve just gotten back from a four day trip out of town, where my ability to play videogames was greatly hindered by my complete lack of free time to sit down with Retro Game Challenge. As I was driving across the California wasteland, dozens of new game demos were released, all begging me to return home and try them out. 

I crack open a box of Quaker Oat Squares, lean back and load up Wanted: Weapons of Fate. 

My good friend David made me read the comic book on which the movie version of this videogame adaptation was based. It’s a pretty good read. An average “Office Space” yuppie discovers he is the son of a supervillain assassin in a world where all the superheroes have been secretly murdered. After a couple pages, he discards his “pussy” lifestyle, goes on a shooting rampage at work, kills his unfaithful girlfriend and embraces the amoral lifestyle. 

I note with a knowing smile that the default game mode is called “pussy.” I try to change the setting, but it won’t let me. The other modes have to be unlocked. When I finish the demo 20 minutes later, I still won’t be able to play as anything other than a “pussy,” which hits a little close to home. 

The tutorial shows me how to curve bullets. In the movie, Westly (Westley? Wesley?) learns how to swing his gun sideways, fire, and manipulate the bullets so they whip around corners, dodge through barriers and strike criminals right in the face. Doing this in a videogame sounds pretty cool. It makes me think of Max Payne, where you could shoot someone with a sniper rifle and the camera would follow the bullet through the alley, across the street and right into sternum of a New York gangster. I can imagine a little mini-game where the game slows down and suddenly you’re controlling the path of a bullet, spinning like a heat seeking missile fired across the bow of a Soviet destroyer. 

Except, it’s not like that at all. 

Instead, I hold down the right shoulder button (which I call the “bumper”) and a red laser sight points at the nearest enemy. By tilting the right analog stick, the laser path bows and curves around objects until it turns white. Then, I let go. The enemy, on the other side of a passenger plane full of slaughtered people, stumbles out from behind his cover, and dies. 

I just curved a bullet. And it was curiously dissatisfying. At least John Woo’s Stranglehold showed a slow-motion sequence of your enemy getting punctured by a well-placed shot. Here, I don’t even want to use the curve. It’s more fun to pop out and fire my twin 9mm semi-automatics at people. 

Especially because the guns sound really good. I hate weak sounding guns in videogames. Stranglehold and Max Payne are probably better games, but the weapons sound like potato guns fired under a mattress. In Wanted, I fire and it sounds good. Which is important, because even though the enemies carry Tec-9s and shotguns, I can’t pick any of them up. I jump over a fallen man carrying a shotgun and end up grabbing — not a shotgun! — but a 15-shot pistol clip. Which, last time I checked, is not the standard type of ammunition used in a pump-action shotgun. 

I duck back into cover. This is a Gears of War shooter. Move from cover to cover and flank your enemies. Come up behind them, hit the B button, slash them in the face with a knife I didn’t know I had. Each position links to another one. Push the left stick forward until the green indicator appears, then press A. Sprint forward, slide,  my back hits the wall, guns at the ready. Press the Y button and I move in slow motion, giving me time to fire 12 steady shots at the two guys advancing on me. My back hits the wall and both men hit the floor. 

It’s got a nice sense of speed to it. Gears of War is more methodical. Advance, lay down suppressing fire, hole up in one location and mow down as many Locust soldiers as possible before moving up. Wanted encourages motion. It wants you to press forward, lightening fast. The quick character movements attest to that. As an enemy crouches down to reload, I’m spinning across the room, coming up behind him like the angel of death with a @#$!ing handgun. 

In the middle of this, my Mom walks in. I’m 24 years old and I still live at home. My Mom still comes in, once a week on Thursday, to clean my bathroom. I offer to do it myself, but she just does it anyway. She carries in two trays of cleaning equipment. I turn down the volume, because the cries of “You’re dead mother@#$!er” will probably rub her the wrong way. 

15 minutes later and I’ve completed the demo twice from start to finish, minus the tutorial sections, which only need to be played once. When I’m done, I’ll walk to my brother’s room and ask him about it. 

“So, you didn’t like the demo?” I ask. 

“Not really,” he says. He’s hunched over on his couch, playing Killzone 2. He’ll later tell me that he’s already beaten the single player campaign, despite only owning the game for a few days. 

“I kind of liked it,” I say. “It reminds me of a better Army of Two.”

“After playing Killzone, anything with graphics that aren’t amazing is just, like, no.” 

Which probably says a lot about how Wanted: Weapons of Fate will do. Releasing soon after games like Killzone 2 and Resident Evil 5, I can’t imagine this blowing people away. But me, I seriously want to play it now. 

If only to hear the gunfire.

Work through the pain

I’m almost embarassed to confess my love of Gears of War 2. It’s just got this totally shit reputation. Once you admit it in front of people who love Ikaruga, but thought the Dreamcast version was better, you’ll never get invited to the cool parties. As far as they are concerned, you’re no better than the 10-year-olds on Xbox Live who talk about “tea-bagging” guys in Halo 3.

This is idiotic. I remember reading Kieron Gillen and the other Rock Paper Shotgun bloggers — who I normally respect and love — totally bitch and moan about Gears in the 2008 Editors Choice Top 50 games on Eurogamer. The main complaint seemed to be that only neanderthals and hillbillies would play a game about beefy men with chainsaws on their guns. I suspect that people with this attitude also can’t appreciate professional wrestling for fine tuning the art of beating people with steel folding chairs. 

People who don’t “get it” complain about the grey and brown color scheme and the underlying homoerotic, “Football players slapping each other on the ass” undertones. To them I say: Pfft. I guess when compared to deep, sexually androgynous Square Enix characters and saving the princess of a magical fungus kingdom, Gears of War must seem like “Top Gun” for the Xbox generation. But, then, what’s so wrong with “Top Gun?” It has jets and explosions and Val Kilmer. He played Gay Perry in “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” which was a fabulous send up of detective noir thrillers if you haven’t seen it. 

Like all the best ideas in the world, the mechanics behind Gears of War 2 are amazingly simple. Press a button to duck behind cover. Move from low barrier to low barrier to flank your enemy. Pop out and fire a few shots. Then, chainsaw a guy in half as he tries to crawl away. Because we take no goddamn prisoners. 

It’s so easy to pick up and learn that my non-videogamer friend David came over one night, grabbed my white 360 controlled (the black one is mine), and battled through a 15-level horde match before we got our asses handed to us. Gears of War is probably the closest you can get to paintball with your friends without actually having to enter the wilderness. Lead game designer Cliff Bleszinski once said “You don’t just want to be shooting dudes, you want to be shooting guys while crazy stuff goes on and switches it up a little bit.” And that’s what the game does. It introduces you to some awesome core concepts, then changes your approach to each battle with tiny, new elements from start to finish. 

There are thrilling little moments. A Locust steps behind you, unloading a clip into your exposed backside. You pitch forward, spraying blood. “MEDIC!” Oh fuck, you can just feel death creepin’ up on you. The screen is red. All you can see is the damn ground as you crawl to cover, “MEDIC!” Your buddy, on the other side of the map, pinned down by enemy fire, makes a mad dash towards you. “HANG ON!” He screams. Remember that scene in “Full Metal Jacket,” when Eightball is pinned down by enemy sniper fire? Like that, then, except every character is Arnold Schwarzenegger and carrying a .50-caliber machinegun and the sniper is a bleached-white underground lizard man. 

So, it is with absolute sincerity that I say: Gears of War 2 is the game for real men.

Death and Rebirth

Let’s talk about loss. 

Game developers have been seeking an answer to death for the last several years. In the early days, players were given “lives” which could then be “lost” to reach a “Game Over,” which required the use of more quarters to “continue.” This was a financial move. If the player cannot lose, there is no incentive to continue paying. The challenge, therefore, becomes the stimulus to drain your pocket change. 

When arcade games came home on consoles, game developers weren’t sure what to do. “Oh no,” they must have thought, “we have to copy the arcade games exactly, or we won’t be able to call it a ‘home arcade’ system!” Never mind that gamers were no longer going to be dumping quarters into the machine and begging their parents for a pay day advance on their allowance. Arcades were popular, so home systems, or “consoles,” needed to emulate this as close as possible. 

So, the game design mentality stayed the same. Players were given a set number of lives to complete the game and, since there was no coin slot, a set number of “continues.” I can just imagine the board meeting that thought this up. A bunch of Japanese men in business suits, frowning through a thick haze of cigarette smoke. “What happens if they run out of lives?” The boss says. In the back, a 12-hour-a-day programmer decked out in tweed raises his hand and says, “Well, why don’t we just give the lives system extra lives?” The boss keeps frowning, his face going red. “I mean,” the programmer continues, “we already have the code for giving a player three tries. Why not just use it again, giving them three tries to use their three lives?” He cracks a nervous smile. A vein in the boss’s forehead starts to throb. “It’d be lives to the third power,” the programmer chuckles. 

So the boss kills him, is what I’m saying. He shouldn’t have been in that meeting anyway. But they use his idea, because why not? Using the same code means less work. 

Thus, for years, we’ve been locked into this two-decade-old game design mentality, where players are brutally punished for failure, and for no other reason than that’s what we’ve always done. Why, it wouldn’t be a videogame without three little Marios or Pac-Mans or 1-Ups in the top, left-hand corner. Developers have only started to abandon this archaic mentality in the past several years, but there is still some residue clinging to the bottom of the hull. 

What I’m trying to say here is that there is no reason why gamers should be presented with failure in a videogame. When I die in Call of Duty: World at War and a quote from Winston Churchill about how war is hell comes up on the screen, does that deepen my experience from the game? Of course not. It takes me out of the game. Much like how we are supposed to buy into all of the world military politics of Metal Gear Solid when Col. Campbell keeps saying “Stand in front of the ladder and press the X button to climb,” dying in a videogame takes you out of the experience. It breaks the flow. It gives you that minute to pause and say, “Is it worth another go, or should I just jerk off instead?” 

I’m not asking for easier games, or even games like the old LucasArts adventures where death was impossible. What I want is games that turn the idea of death into another gameplay mechanic. In Braid, you can rewind time to the point before your death and continue playing. In Far Cry 2, getting shot down means one of your buddies comes to your rescue, dragging you to relative safety, occasionally getting killed himself in the process. The new Prince of Persia features a magical character whose sole purpose is to keep you from death so you continue playing.

Game developers are always complaining about how people never finish games anymore, then turn around and give the final boss 999,999 hit points and a cure-all regeneration spell to use mid-combat. I say, enough of that shit. If I fail, tie it into the game. Maybe, if I’m routed by the enemy in Supreme Commander, I then play a new mission that reflects my previous failure. Say, the enemy is stronger this time, or, I’m in a new location, because my army had to retreat. Or, hell, go the Prey route, have death send you to an ethereal otherworld where you can bite and claw your way back to the land of the living. 

Just stop with the punishments, already. I don’t play games to endure hardships. I play them to escape reality, to have fun, to experience things that could never happen in my lifetime. Just give me the animus to do that. 

And for all you retro-is-cool, I love my 8-bit heritage hardcore gamers out there: You’ll always have Tower of Druaga.

Let’s get ready for huuuuuuuunting!

I have a dream.

This dream involves murder.

It’s no one you know.

Imagine a hunt. A battle. A war. Between two warriors of unparalleled skill. Imagine them circling one another, hefting their weapons. Sweat beads down their face, dripping to the ground in the glare of the hot noontime sun. Each man watches the other like a hawk, looking for a twist, a shift, a subtle change in stance that foreshadows a coming attack. When the attack comes, both combatants launch themselves at the other with all the force they can muster, weapons clanging, sparking, smashing together as these gladiators fight to the death.

Now, switch the time frame a bit. Remove the weapons. We’re not talking about the dark ages here. Give them both sniper rifles. Let them loose in the wilderness, the jungle. Have them stalk one another through the steamy African Savannah. Traps are lain. Each finds a roost, a high perch to wait for the other to slip up, step out, reveal their fleshy backside so a .50-caliber bullet can punch through their chest, leaving a sucking, gaping wound.

The idea here isn’t to impress you with my graphic descriptions of combat, but to impress upon you a singular, wonderful idea.

Two people, equally matched, battling for their survival.

My ideal videogame is not one in where I blast my way through a police department (Grand Theft Auto IV), or exterminate an alien species (Gears of War 2), or battle Al-Qaeda (Call of Duty 4) or even build a giant battering ram to knock a giant beachball out of an enemy tank (Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts). It’s one where the entire, living-breathing game world, is just a giant set piece in which I hunt a single enemy that will do everything in his or her power to kill me all kinds of dead.

There are men and, presumably, women out there who think chasing a deer across the wilderness and shooting it in the face is considered “sporting.” I say, to hell with that. When was the last time a deer ever hurt anyone? Chasing a defenseless animal with a high powered weapon is like beating a handicap kid to death for staring at your french fries. You just don’t do that, man.

A real hunter needs prey that can hunt him back. The thrill of the pursuit is only sweet when the tables can be easily turned. So, it is with great reverence that I say:

Wrestling games are the only true fighting games.

When you get right down to it, wrestling is fake. Videogames are fake simulations of occasionally real, but often fake, things. To play a videogame that simulates a fake fight is kind of like masturbating to the memory of the last time you jerked off, but let’s just run with it. WWE: Smackdown vs. Raw 2009 is about as real as fake fighting can be.

In Smackdown vs. Raw 2009, there is a campaign mode called “Road to WrestleMania.” You pick one of seven fighters and play through a scripted  campaign, which features grown men beating each other with metal chairs and sledge hammers. I picked Triple H, due to his long hair and quiet menace. The plot goes like this: You (Triple H, the “Cerebral Assassin”), want to win the WWE Championship. To do so, you have to beat Mr. Kennedy and Edge in a triple-threat tournament. But after you win, the two guys aren’t satisfied. They demand a rematch, a two-on-one handicap match, where you maim them something fierce. Grunting, you face off against Randy Orton, the current WWE Champion. But, aha, Mr. Kennedy and Edge aren’t satisfied! They jump into the ring to fight, ending the match! Mr. Kennedy comes from behind, he’s got a sledgehammer—Oh gawd! Orton just fended him off! The current champ is defending his rival! What could this mean for WrestleMania?!

And so on. It’s all posturing and big sweaty men thumping each other on the chest while reciting what is best in life: namely, tornado tag matches and body slamming a 260 pound man through a wood table.

What I like most is that these games are slow. Unless you are Bruce Lee, a real fight takes time. Two men, circling each other, looking for an opening, taking jabs before one rams a shoulder into the others’ gut and knocks him to the ground. It’s dirty, is what I’m saying. Real fighters don’t stand around, spinning combos together to knock the other man out. No, they use every advantage they have to hurt their opponent, to make him bleed. Each fighter in Smackdown vs. Raw 2009 is equally matched. They can grab and throw each other, counter each move, turn the tables with a elbow drop to the head—OH!!! That looked like it hurt! Then, when all else fails, you can throw the guy from the ring and pound him in the audience.

I returned my copy of Smackdown vs. Raw 08 to get the latest version on PlayStation 3. The logic behind this, aside from a smoother interface, was that I have more PS3 controllers in the house than I do Xbox 360 controllers. And, really, you need friends to play this with. A four-way ladder match is the perfect way to get to know the people close to you. Watch how they play. Do they take the offense, defense? Do they rush for the championship belt hanging from the ceiling, or wait to knock down the ladder when others are near victory? Someone famous once said, possibly in a movie, that you never really know a man until you fight him. The lady at my local GameStop does not know me. She rolled her eyes as I handed her the game, then nearly had an aneurysm when I picked up a copy of ‘09.

The point I’m trying to awkwardly make here is that people will look down on you for buying this game. It’s a fact. Professional wrestling will always remind me of the slick-haired douche bag in junior high that always asked me, in all seriousness, “Do you know what the Rock is cooking?” And, for the life of me, I had no idea. I couldn’t even tell him I liked wrestling games, because I’d only ever played WCW Nitro on the original PlayStation, which is like playing Wrestling: The Action Figure: The Game: Marionette Edition. Things have evolved since then. Now the movements are fluid. Now you can slam a man’s head against the ground and feel the impact through Dolby Digital Surround Sound. And when you try to put him in a choke hold, he will dodge to the left, kick your foot out from under you and bash your face against the ropes.

I will always be waiting for my hunting game. A fierce, unrelenting battle with an enemy who adapts to survive, and occasionally sneaks up behind me with a bowie knife. In the meantime, Smackdown vs. Raw 2009 is pretty fun.

I never even knew his name

I didn’t have to kill him. For all I knew, he would have just stayed there, frozen in place, his in-game code depleted. I couldn’t take the risk.

 I shot him in the face. 

Just once. With a 9mm semi-automatic, two feet from his head. He stared right at me as he went bloody, jerked backwards. I turned to leave. 

He was slumped on the floor, behind the desk. 

I fired two more shots at the radio, which ricocheted into the wall. Useless. He was the one guy in the place that didn’t try to kill me. And I shot him in the face. I had to make sure he wouldn’t call for backup. I gave him the flase coordinates to read, to redirect the convoy for the attack. Maybe, if I left him there, they would know I was coming. Waiting, ready to ambush me. I couldn’t take the risk. 

 I shot him in the face. 

Later that night, the game turned off, I would remember the way he stared at me. Hands above his head. Face stoically blank, only the slightest hint of fear. Then he was on the floor and I was out the door, the gunshot echoing in the dimly lit room. 

In my hunt for The Jackal, the notorious African arms dealer, I killed plenty of people. The UFLL and the APR were plenty willing to pay for my conscious. But the men I killed, slaughtered under the hot Savanna, they were like me. Guns for hire. Mercenaries in a war that would never seen an ending. We fought for the diamonds, for the weaponry. Some would say we did it for the thrill of battle, maybe even survival. But that was a cop-out. We murdered in cold blood because it was all we knew how to do. It was so simple. 

“Ok, I’ve done what you asked,” he said, hands above his head. 

Killing is so much easier than trust. 

I shot him in the face. 

Why did I do it? Has an endless assortment of videogames turned me into the callous killer depicted in the media? When I play Hitman and someone is lying on the floor, crying out in pain, I always put an extra bullet in them. Ease the pain, you know. 

But he’ll never stop watching me. His eyes cross the digital divide, keeping me awake with a question I never thought I’d ask. 

Did I kill him because I doubted his existence, or because I couldn’t think of an alternative?

All hail Joesirus

Lately, I’ve been playing a computer game called “Children of the Nile.” Days after buying a $150 graphics card for my PC, I’m sitting at home, at 11:30 at night, playing a videogame that was released in 2004 and would probably have no problem running on my mother’s iPhone. It’s pretty addicting, in a weird way. Rather than conquering great nations and taking over the world — stuff you typically do in strategy games — here you are tasked with building an Egyptian empire. 

The game takes place in a pseudo real-time where day turns to night, flood season becomes planting season, followed by a rich harvest, and the whole time your peasants are planting crops, trading for bread, weaving baskets, digging out clay for brickmaking. The little tiny, fictional people go about their little, tiny fictional day. Something about it just feels genuine. Even when the farmers walk to the river, then teleport closer to the papyrus so the stock “gathering papyrus” animation can play, they feel like real little people. 

You start to care about them. You need to build a pyramid, to maintain your prestige level — you are a god-king, after all — but the limestone quarry is many miles from your city. Well, build a worker settlement. Give them a hospital, a bakery, huts to live in, an overseer’s hut to, well, oversee things. Make some shops, too, because the workers have wives, and the ladies  love to shop. So detailed is this that you can actually track the family history of any, single digitized character, only to find that the Sanef family used to be farmers, then pottery sellers, then fine furniture retailers and now they entertain the noble elite class at great feasts. 

After a while, I just like to watch them work. Tiny, tiny lives. Marvel as the seasons change and the workers harvest the crops, depositing them at the granary, then returning periodically to gather supplies. These pixelated, imaginary Egyptians don’t need you. They have an entire ecosystem hacked out into algorithims which controls the rise and fall of the Nile. If you sit there and do nothing, just, I don’t know, let the game idle while you go to work or have a cigarette outside, then the people will continue to go about their business, because even though you aren’t doing anything, they still have to bring home dinner. 

Something about that truly entrances me. A videogame that doesn’t need you, the player, to sustain itself.

Face punch from the future

I have to say that when it comes to blatant sexism, nobody does it quite like the videogame industry. 

Checking my email this morning, I discovered an advertisement from my once-favorite retailer, GameCrazy. Inside was an image of three girls lying on a bed, under a sparkling banner: “Girls love games!”

To illustrate this point, the background is pink (girls love that color). Whimsical little icons of femininity dance around the bed, like stars and hearts and cell phones and, like, you know, girly things. Totally! 

“Yesterday was Candyland…today they still love playing games!” It says.

And what games they play! “Petz Rescue Wildlife Vet,” “Ener-G Dance Squad,” “Imagine: Fashion Party” and “My SAT Coach,” just to name a few. 

As if! 

Seriously, I don’t understand what kind of “gamer girl” would see this, whip out her bubblegum pink Nintendo DS — covered in Hello Kitty stickers — and make a run for the store. 

But then, I suppose this isn’t much better than the cover of “Tomb Raider: Underworld,” which shows Lara Croft’s chest to her hips without bothering to show her face. And what is she covered with? Mud, of course. Because there is nothing the 18 to 25 male age demographic loves more than a mud-caked bundle of polygons.

Raindrops keep falling on the dead

I’ve probably played “Gears of War” at least a dozen times, always starting from the beginning and never reaching the conclusion. This is a game I have bought, played and sold more times than I care to admit. There’s something about the cover system that appeals to me. It wasn’t until recently that I realized you can roadie run straight up to a barricade and instantly take cover behind it, without pressing an extra button. Marcus Fenix, a hardened space marine with a chainsaw on his gun, knows enough about combat not to run into a wall. He reaches cover, he takes it. Automatic and instinctive. Hit the right trigger, pop out, lay down some suppressing fire. There’s no need for a “Brothers in Arms” style indicator, a glowing red dot piercing through the game world to show you when the enemy is suppressed. You know the enemy is suppressed when you see bullets tearing chunks out of the concrete and the enemy stops popping his damn fool head up because his helmet just got blown the fuck off. 

The only time I ever played the game co-op was when I was visiting my ex-girlfriend in St. Louis. Her brother, Corey, loaded up the game for us to play while she was in the next room talking about the childhood friend everyone felt she should be dating. We played through the entire first chapter of the game, sprinting away from the berserker while screaming in panic. The back-and-fourth orders, diving for cover, drawing attention away from the beast just long enough to make our way to victory thrilled me like few games have. It’s amazing what human contact can add to a videogame. 

That is, of course, what Nintendo has realized with the Wii. Or not realized, depending on your point of view. The Nintendo Wii is a communal experience, one to be shared through small parties with four people at a time gripping their remotes and whacking off furiously. There’s something comical about watching your friends flail about in games simple enough for Mom and Dad to enjoy. But when the party is over,  you’re left to whack off in the dark, which is never that satisfying.

Meanwhile, I was so sure that Ron Perlman did the voice of Marcus Fenix that I went on Internet Movie Database to check. Imagine my surprise when I discovered the actor is actually John Di Maggio, the guy who plays Bender in “Futurama.” But what surprised me even more  is that “Gears of War” has a tagline, and it says: “The gears of war are lubricated by the blood of soldiers.” This is kind of an interesting phrase. Lubrication, which is a word for squirting some WD-40 in a door hinge, also has a very a sexual connotation. This is especially relevant in a game like “Gears,” where muscular men in futuristic armor, drowning in testosterone, wield weapons called “lancers,” that they use to spray their enemies at long range before grinding into them at close quarters. 

So we are back to the masturbation metaphor, which is never more evident than when a group of four hardened 14-year-olds band together to shoot some shit online. These are kids that will shoot a man in the face, then kneel over the corpse while laughing into their headsets about “tea-bagging” a guy. “Gears of War” embraces the communal locker room to full effect, with gushing ejaculations of blood and gore spewed fourth in-between scenes of gladiatorial combat re-imagined for the digital age. Some say that watching burly men kill things before stopping just short of slapping each other on the ass is homoerotic, but we here at 8-bit Adrenaline are not above a little male bonding, provided it is painted in hues of crimson fire. 

Gears of War may be the poster-child for “Boring grays and browns of war, more like,” according to a writer at Eurogamer, but it is hard to deny the thrill of flanking an enemy, slapping a live grenade to his back and watching the chunks fly.