Black, White, Or A Whole Load Of Grey (Some Spoilers)

A common complaint amongst games that offer so-called 'moral choices', is that the choices are not only too black and white, but often mawkishly so. It's often a binary decision, do you want to be the good guy or the bad guy?

Take Bioshock, possibly the most egregious example. I love the game, but the choice it offers exemplifies the polarised morals you find in modern gaming. Are you the type of person who kills little girls, or are you the type of person that spares them? Even more infuriating is that ultimately the choice is irrelevant, as you reap the same benefits either way, negating any idea of 'doing what is easy, or what is right'.

Obviously, there are some games that avoid this trap. The Witcher, for all it's flaws, has a system of moral choices that are about as grey as it gets. Do you sell arms the elves, knowing that those arms will be used against your (nominally) fellow humans, or do you send them away empty handed, knowing that you've just extended their oppression?

Fallout 3 largely falls into the Bioshock camp. Do you denotate the bomb, thus destroying Megaton, or do you disarm it, saving the town. Are you Megatron, or Optimus Prime? He-Man or Skeletor? Which is why the most recent DLC - The Pitt - came as something of a surprise. On the surface, it's another easy choice, steal the cure for a degenerative disease that infects the people of the Pitt from their cruel slavemasters.

It's not until you've infiltrated the slavers organisation that the easy choice starts to get a little muddy. The head of the slavers seems to have a vision of a a free zone and regrets the necessity of slaves, and the cure is a living child, a baby in fact, that you must steal from it's parents, probably killing them as you fight your way out.

Do you leave the child where she is, abandoning the slaves to their bondage but potentially allowing something greater to emerge or do you kidnap the child and give her to the slaves, continuing the instability for years to come? We're way past light side and dark side points here, and Fallout 3's karma system has nothing to say on the matter regardless of the choice you make.

This is the sort of thing I'd love to see in games in the future, not black and white, but something much more subtle and nuanced, where the 'right' choice isn't immediately obvious.

Pilgrimage Update

Just a quick update on this Pilgrimage thing that I mentioned a few months ago. I'm still going to do it, but it's taking a long time to generate enough enthusiasm to play any significant amount of Pong.

I hate Pong, so very, very much.

Demo Fever!

I was feeling in an experimental mood tonight and so I grabbed the demo for Volition's Red Faction: Guerilla and Ubisoft's HAWX.

I've not really been following the new Red Faction, so I assumed it was another first person shooter. Imagine my surprise when I discovered it was Saint's Row 2 on Mars.

My experience with Saint's Row 2 was not a good one. I found it shallow and packed to the gills with unlikeable sociopathic characters. I played it loing enough to take down one of the gangs - the heavily tattooed one lead by Lieutenant Worf (the Brotherhood?) - and knew it wasn't for me.

The Red Faction demo is much too short to reveal anything about the characters in the game, although the ever-so-slightly overwrought action movie trailer thing before the demo proper doesn't bode well.

All I can talk about is the gameplay, and I think this is a game that I'm just predisposed not to like. I don't like 'rampage games' and Red Faction: Guerilla seems like it's going to be a rampage game in a big way. The Geo-Mod 2 thing means that the building collapse in realistic ways, and if that doesn't start ringing alarm bells, I don't know what will. In the ten minute demo, there's shooting, gunplay, whacking people with sledgehammers, stealing cars, a battlemech section, and a turret on the back of a truck. It ticks all the boxes sure, but I want something more.

The only rampage games that I've ever liked is the Mercenaries games, and to be honest, they do everything that Red Faction seems to do, and does it better and funnier.

HAWX didn't really appeal to me either, but for a very different reason. It's a great looking game, but the controls are really, really fiddly. I bet there's a great game in there, but I'm not interested enough to struggle with weird camera angles to get some dog fighting done.