That Which We Call a Rose

Just a quickie. I really need a new tag line: "Analogue Musings on the Digital" is pretty prententious.

The Holy Grail

Well, I've finally managed it, I've finally got my hands on a PS3, which makes me a multi-consolist or something.

I'll be honest, my 360 is going to remain my go-to system, but I'm enjoying the games on the PS3. What I'm not enjoying, is the PS3 itself. The XMB does have a certain minimalist charm, but it's all so po-faced that it takes a bit of the fun out of it.

Not only that, but the idea of installing demos still doesn't sit right with me. Take the Heavenly Sword demo. It's about a gig in size and is literally ten minutes long. What the hell am I installing? I could understand it if I was playing the game from a disc, but on a demo I've downloaded, and especially one that is so short? I am positively baffled.

It's all well and good Sony making a lot of noise about how you have to pay extra for a hard drive on the 360, but I would counter that argument with the idea that there are no games on the Xbox that you can't play without a hard drive. It's disingenuous to claim that it's a luxury when it's clearly a necessity.

Confused By Capcom

I can't figure Capcom out sometimes, and for once this has nothing to do with Resident Evil 5. What's baffling me is their demos, and the disparities between them. One of the hallmarks of Capcom's third-person adventure titles is an excellent demo. Even when the product itself turns out to unimpressive, the demo is almost always amazing. I bought Devil May Cry 4 on the strength of the demo, obviously unaware that the set piece battle with Berial would be repeated three times.

When it comes to fighting games though, Capcom seem to lose the plot. I downloaded the demo for Marvel Vs Capcom 2 from Xbox Live, only to discover that the only gameplay on offer was local multiplayer. Perhaps I'm just a friendless hermit, but it strikes me as presumptuous on Capcom's part that I even have a second controller, let alone someone to hand it to on a Sunday night.

It would seem to me that the point of a demo is to provide gamers with the opportunity to see if they would enjoy a game. Beating up a completely stationary Captain America is hardly a compelling gameplay experience.

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.

Further thoughts on Resident Evil 5

I wrote up my feelings about the RE5 demo in an earlier post (scroll down, it'll still be there). The weird feeling that the demo gave me was enough to put me off buying the final version and so it wasn't a topic that I really thought I'd be revisiting, at least not about RE5 anyway. But then this turns up on the internet and the whole thing erupts again; for me at least, which means I may need to take a look at myself after this as well.

To summarise the blog post, posted by an educated white, male gamer, which is a more significant point than you might think, responded to this article, which in turn was a response to this article, and outlined why RE5 is not racist in any way shape or form, oddly contradicting a much more rational post he made on the subject last year. He essentially accuses RE5's detractors of making something out of nothing, going so far as to say that N'Gai Croal's comments on the trailer, which opened my eyes when I read it, were 'over the top'.

I have to ask Mr. Peckham, for 'twas he who wrote the offending blog post, what the fuck are you doing?

As an white, male gamer myself, I find discrimination hard to spot sometimes, unless it's really overt. Just like Mr. Peckham, I stand in what is probably the ultimate position of privelege, no one discriminates against me, unless I bring it on myself. This means that I can't necessarily trust my initial instincts when it comes to discrimination, and I have to take a step back and think about the situation. Recently I made an complete ass of myself commenting on a blog post that talked about the progressive nature of Portal and Mirror's Edge. My first reaction to the reply my comment received was one of anger. I got defensive, which is a pretty common reaction for a person of privilege to have, but then I realised what I'd done and apologised. Basically, I didn't know what I was talking about and got called up on it, which is how it should be.

The point hidden in that very long diversion is that dismissing accusations of discrimination from a position of privilige is a dangerous thing at best, and to do it in such a cavalier manner as Mr Peckham does is down right lunacy. I'm not saying I'm perfect, hell I'm clearly patting myself on the back for being man enough to apologise, but at least I'm aware that as a white person, I might not be best qualified to judge whether something is racist or not.

For the record, I don't think that Capcom are being intentionally racist and I never have, but I think that they were unaware of the effect the imagery in RE5 might have. As I said in my earlier post on the subject, setting a Resident Evil game in Africa makes perfect sense, but it has to be handled with immense care. All the arguments against the accusations of racism are either incredibly hollow, ("It's only a game!" Oh really? I suppose this is just a picture?) or miss the point entirely. ("What about RE4? It was ok when it was Spaniards!" or "All the zombies in the previous games were white, why isn't that racist?") I don't want to address these arguments here, although I may assault a few threads where I've seen them and try and inject some sense into the proceedings, besides, Kieron Gillen summed it up better than I ever could when he said:

"Gamers want games to be taken seriously until they're taken seriously, and then they don't want them taken seriously".