vs. Dragon Age

The recent trend in video games, or at least, those ones considered really good, tend to be to make epic cinematic adventures, and for some reason, try as I might, I haven't really been able to get into them. When I talk about these games, I mean games like Uncharted 2, that are meant to represent everything great about modern gaming, but it's only when I was playing (and finally completed) Dragon Age: Origins (that's the old one) that I realised why.

Dragon Age: Origins is one of those games that's all about your decisions. It's not a carefully scripted cinematic experience, because everything you do can make the game run off in a different direction. It's also ridiculously long. When a game is nearly fifty hours long, not every minute of it is going to be brilliantly written and directed. So there are some stupid, hammy moments in it. But you actually feel like what your character is saying matters, because you never know how it'll come back to haunt you. And it's not always obvious either, some decisions I made really screwed my character over later in the game, even though I had thought they were for the best.

But the reason I really liked it was because I seemed to end up filling in some of the blanks myself. And I think that's why I don't like these great cinematic games. There's nothing for my imagination to do. The game does it all for me. I think the moment I realised the type of game I liked was in Dragon Age when a pivitol moment from my character's past came back to be confronted by me. This felt more personal to me, because it's a game that lets you choose background stories for your character, and then you have to play through those background stories. So for the first six hours of the game, your experience is pretty unique to which gender, race, class and background you pick. This means you could play through the game multiple times, and find it different each time, but to do that, you'd have to have a heck of a lot of time on your hands...

...but what it does mean is that certain situations and settings have special meaning to you as a player and you become more attached to your character, provided you let yourself. I experimented with quite a few of the origin stories, and ended up settling for quite an unusual one. My character was a female slum dwelling elvish rogue. A bit of an odd choice for me, I admit, but I became attached to her after the introductory story placed me in a position I'd never really experienced in a video game. All the other characters start out with weapons, or spells, or abilities of some kind. Many are even nobles, feared and powerful, set up for a fall during their introduction. My elf girl had none of this. She didn't even have a weapon, or any combat techniques. She was, however, getting married, to somebody she'd never met. During the marriage, a human noble (humans are twats in the Dragon Age universe it seems) showed up, kidnapped all the women from the wedding, including my character, to rape them. I have to admit, I've never had my main character threatened with rape in a video game before...

And the real interesting part was when I realised I couldn't defend myself. I didn't at this point have any techniques or weapons, and I knew the game well enough from my other origin story experiments to know an unarmed rogue couldn't defeat the four armed guards that had captured my character, even though the dialogue options were leading towards a fight. I can't readily think of another video game experience like it, that turns your character, especially when it's a freeform RPG, and your character is supposed to be your ultimate hero, into a literal damsel in distress. Of course, my character did get rescued, rather than it be a very short game, and I got to kill the enemy responsible. Unfortunately, the heroic rescuer, the husband-to-be of my main character, got killed in the progress. I'm pretty certain you can avoid that happening, but I just went with it.

And then, way later on, after I'd ventured around the entire world, united four armies under me, and was ready to win over the rulers of the land to let me save the world from an evil army of deadly orc-things, my team met the father of the noble who had done all that at the start. No matter how you play it, he's a villainous character, but I realised, to me, he had more of an impact, because he was technically responsible for everything bad that happened to my character (after murdering a noble's son, my character got arrested and press-ganged into a secret order that started all this to avoid execution). And I found myself picking dialogue choices against him that I knew weren't beneficial for my quest. I knew it wouldn't help me get a reward, I knew it wouldn't help me complete the quest I was on, and I knew it'd actually probably make it harder for me to achieve my goals. It didn't even match up to my usual play style, which given the options I usually picked, my rogue was apparently the nicest, wussiest rogue ever. She always tried to avoid a fight and always tried to do the right thing. Except here, I picked all the dialogue options that tried to start a fight, making threats and trying to attack him in a big courtroom full of important people.

Why? Because I saw it as something my character would do. Despite her usually nice nature, I had a good idea in my head of the type of person my character was, the way she'd respond to this man, and the fact that she'd want to kill him. It even worked into a character arc for her, as if over the course of the story she'd grown from a bit of a coward, scared of a confrontation, into more of an altruistic hero, trying to avoid a fight if neccesary, and now into somebody finally letting her anger and developed fighting abilities get the better of her. And I imposed all that myself. It's not there, in the game, told to me. I filled in the blanks and made up my character's motivations and story to fit into the game. Basically, my imagination filled in the blanks. And that's what I think I like. When I can imagine more is going on than the game presents. When it's too slick, too cinematic, too much like a film, I loose interest because the character doesn't feel like my own.

I don't mean doesn't feel like me, I mean, unless I'm a female elf and nobody's told me (Boote, shut up). I just mean, I feel like I'm playing as somebody elses character. Nathan Drake doesn't feel like he belongs to me, I feel like his every thought and action has already been decided by somebody else. In contrast, say, Link from the Legend of Zelda, I do feel belongs to me, because I can impose my impression of what his thoughts are, because he's silent, even though he's a fully developed character in terms of design. It's even moreso when I created the character. I feel that the character is mine to define. By the end of the game, I had a fully developed personality in my head for that character, and it'd all developed just for me over the course of the game.

And that doesn't mean things worked out for her. My character survived the ending of Dragon Age, but not through choice. My choices had some pretty severe impacts on my adventuring party. One tried to kill my main character (I suppose that teaches me for not using him enough), another abandoned me after I turned down a sinister sounding deal with her, and a third died. These weren't outcomes I wanted, because I knew I was going to go on and play the sequel, where I wanted the characters from the old game to still be around, but they happened because of the character I'd made my little creation in to.

Of course, I could have cheated and gone back and revised those decisions, but again, that'd of defeated the point. Then, at the end of the game, I had my character turn down all the rewards she got offered, because I imagined she just wanted to run away (and the game gave me that choice too, to 'travel for a bit') given how much she'd lost. Which was again, not neccesarily what I wanted, as I thought it'd be funny to set my character up as some kind of ruler for Dragon Age 2, when my new characters would then have to be aware my old one ruled the land or something, but it fitted in character, so I did that instead.

And that's why I liked it. I like the kind of games where you can fill in the blanks. Maybe it's why I like DS games so much. They're not slick enough yet to make everything preset. I hope that as games develop, we'll still get experiences like that one, rather than they become increasingly cinematic. Sadly, Dragon Age 2 looks like it's gone that way already, with only one character for you to play as, with a full voice and personality, so I won't be able to invent my own character.

Which sucks.

vs. Predators

From the moment I first planned to watch this film, I knew that I'd have to do a review on my blog, just to get one step closer to having that long searched for 'vs. Predator' blog title. And that in itself made me curious. Would I like it or hate it? Would it be a review saying how things finally picked up for the Predator franchise, or how they crashed and burned like the AVP series? Interestingly, it's neither, mostly because it's saved by a strong start and it led me to realise something...

The original Predator movie is one my favourite films, which is unusual for me, since it's mostly seen as a big dumb action movie, and as someone who reads way too much into films, I'm not meant to like big dumb action movies. But I love it for a couple of reasons. I think the actual Predator creature is one of the best realised humanoid aliens in cinematic history. One of the key moments in watching films as a kid, and something that made me so obsessed with them, was seeing the Predator unmask in the original film for the first time. I remember thinking 'there's no way it'll look as alien as it should' (yes, I was jaded when it came to films even as a kid), and then was really impressed when there was this lizardy mandibled monster that actually looked convincingly alien. And then it impressed me again in Predator 2 where they, for once, managed to make a creature that was obviously the same species, but convincingly looked like a different person. Not just another gathering of aliens that all looked identical.

But I also loved the way the plot worked. It was clever. It almost works as a subversion of a big dumb action movie. It starts like one, with its own plot and characters (more on that later), but then they get interrupted by something else, and it all goes off the rails and gets very interesting. It also manages to be hilarious at the same time. 'I ain't got time to bleed' has to be one of the worse, and therefore best, macho one liners ever.

I also love Predator 2. But that's a film that has a terrible reputation, and might actually warrant a 'vs. Predator 2' blog one day. Which would at least be a pretty awesome title for a blog.

But unfortunately, both those films are pretty old, and anything that's attempted to capture the Predator as a film concept since has failed miserably. So I started off surprised when Predators started off strongly. Flung into the story in one of the best cold openings I can think of, we join our 'hero' (inverted commas needed for this guy, trust me) plummeting through the sky in free-fall. He's pretty freaked out, and seems to have no idea why he's there. He discovers an alien parachute strapped to him, manages to activate it, and lands, with no clue who 'threw him out of a fucking plane'. He's then joined by various others plummeting out of the sky in the same manner, all complete strangers, and they set about finding why they're there.

They're even a nicely diverse bunch, from all over the planet, so for once they aren't all Americans. That's nice, even if them all speaking English is a stretch. (I suppose you could assume the Predators picked prey that they knew could communicate with each other to make for a better challenge, so I can accept that). And actually, although this section of the film has some oddities (a doctor recognises a plant....on the alien planet) and it commits one of my cardinal action movie sins, for the most part, it's fairly efficient.

For those of you interested, if you're still managing to read this, that cardinal sin is introducing a female character we're told is very strong, independent and dangerous, and then repeatedly making her the incompetent one. In this case, we're introduced to an Israeli sniper who actually seems to be the real hero of the piece (Adrian Brody's character, although written as the hero, is far too self centred and selfish to be considered the hero). The only one with any morales, she's also meant to be one of the 'deadly predators' that were picked for the actual Predators' sport, but in the first part of the movie needs rescuing twice before any Predators even show up. While all the other male characters, even the unarmed ones, obviously handle these threats with no problem. I hate that kind of 'fake feminism' (as I call it). So it loses a point for that.

Other than that, and a few very sketchy infodumps ('this planet is a game preserve, and we're the game' says the main character... having deduced this because an alien dog attacked him... and then the aforementioned Israeli sniper tells everybody about the events of the original Predator, because a top secret US Government mission gone wrong is the type of thing they tell Israel), the opening is strong. There's some nice moments of mystery, the characters are hunted and stalked, and there's a real sense of a story happening.

And then the film begins to fall apart. The characters decide to set up various traps and wait for the Predators to come (they're all very accepting of being hunted by aliens, by the way), and apparently the only reason they have for doing this is because it was a scene from the first movie. Here, it makes no sense. They've already found the corpse of somebody who tried differently, and got a lot closer to the group of Predators (for there's more than one) than most people ever do in these films, but still think they're primitive traps might work. Of course, they don't. And that's where things go really wrong.

Laurence Fishburne turns up as a survivor of this world for what's implied to be years, driven insane and living off scrounged technology. He takes the heroes to his home, on a giant crashed spaceship. Apparently, the Predators never thought to look there for him. In fact, if the Predators parachute their prey in, why is there a crashed spaceship there? Anyway, regardless, things really begin to fall apart plot wise here, and it's not just because we question things like random spaceships. At least Laurence Fishburne is an acceptable source of info dump, as he tells us the Predators pick these people not only for good sport, but to advance their hunting techniques. They return each 'season' with newer, deadlier weapons and techniques. This is the first stumbling block for this movie, since it follows the set pieces of Predator so closely that it means there are no new weapons or techniques for the Predators, completely destroying this plot piece. They don't even use any of the interesting or cool gadgets introduced in Predator 2, since this film seems to ignore that, making them seem dull in comparison.

We're also told there's some sort of feud going down between the new redesigned Predators, and 'smaller' ones, which are the originals (the earlier mentioned mystery is why one of these is imprisoned in the Predators' camp). Not only does this disregard the original movies and the power of the enemies by telling us these new ones are bigger and more powerful (despite technically being shorter; they come in at about 6"7 whereas the original Predator was over seven foot), but it's another case of the film telling not showing. If these are meant to be 'Super Predators' or whatever, they fail to perform spectacularly. Not only do their reduced height and bigger helmets make them vaguely reminiscent of the old 'big head mode' on a video game, they fail to perform as deadly hunters. One is blown up when it stupidly grabs a man armed with explosives, and another is killed in a sword fight (itself ripping off a scene almost shot for shot from the original Predator, before rather than cutting away as the original did, actually showing us the sword fight; it looks about as silly as I always thought it would). But whereas the original films (both include a scene where somebody challenges the Predator to a sword fight and is then killed off screen) were sensible enough to show the Predator winning these confrontations (and both times making the badass swordsmen scream in horror off screen) in this case, the Predator actually loses. And the whole scene, again, only seems to have been put there to 'quote' the moment from the original film.

This would almost work if when later on in the film, the original style Predator escapes, and challenges the surviving new Predator to a scrap. As a 'return of the original badass' moment, this could have really worked, as the old school monster everybody watching this is a fan of kills the new one, and then becomes the real threat. Sadly, their fight is reduced to grabbing each other in man hugs, and, as Carl put it, Swilly head butts, and the classic Predator actually dies making the entire thing pointless. We do get to see the new Predator unmasked however. It looks terrible. As someone who loves the original, as I said before, something I found to be a believable yet horrific alien, this new one is just a case of overdoing everything to make it 'scary'. It even has red eyes!

It kinda looks like a rubbish Cthuthlu, but not a Predator...

After that, there's a fairly well executed plot twist for one of the characters, the girl needs rescuing again, and the hero defeats the last surviving Predator with an axe he got from nowhere. Then they're stranded on the planet with nowhere to go, so the movie ends. Yet despite all these flaws, they're not the biggest problem with the movie. It took me a while to realise what was wrong with it, despite Kerry's constant complaints of 'nothing happened', before I realised this actually was the problem.

By that, I don't mean that nothing happened in a movie cram full of set pieces, but moreover, the characters had no plot or motivation beyond what the Predators were doing. One of the great things about both the older Predator films was that they're both actually set up like different types of movies that the Predator is attracted in to. Predator is a cheesy Arnie movie like Commando or something, with characters on a mission that's not quite what it seems, a 'it's a conspiracy' plot twist, a government official you can't trust, and so on into which something new and fearsome is drawn. Predator 2 is a hardboiled cop movie with a 'too old for this shit' cop tackling gang warfare and his interfering bosses into which, again, something new comes. Both movies are like movies on their own that the Predator turns up in. The characters have plot lines, motivations and things to do outside of the attacks of the Predator, and slowly, the Predator takes over the storyline. Both films would make average action movies without the Predator (especially the original, with the awesome 'attack on the enemy camp' scene, complete with moments like pinning somebody to a wall with a machete, and delivering the line 'stick around'). In comparison, Predators is just the 'Predator' part of these films, with none of the set up to pull us into the world, or to make the appearance of the Predator interesting. And that's why it runs out of steam and the film feels like nothing really happened.

In fact, maybe that's the way to go with the franchise. To make films that work as films on their own, then throw a Predator in there. The possibilities are endless! What about a classic teen slasher flick, but the violence attracts something new and even more powerful? And suddenly, the hunted and hunter are hunted by something even worse. Or what about a powerful mob drama set in the 1930s, when suddenly something completely inexplicable and unstoppable shows up? In fact, why stop there? Why not any type of movie? Zombie apocalypse? The dead walk, man kind if pushed to the brink of extinction, every day is a battle as the planet boils... and then there's something else that can't resist that environment...

That's how you do a Predator movie! Quite literally, tagging 'vs. Predator' on to the end of random movies will net you a better Predator film than attempting to make it 'stand alone'. After all, the original Predator is little more than 'Commando vs. Predator', and really, Predator 2 is pretty much 'Lethal Weapon vs. Predator' with the comedy removed. Compared to that, 'Predator vs. More Predator' was always going to be a bit shit.

vs. Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light

So, here I go again with another one of my attempted 'review' blogs. Even though this time it's less of a review, and more me thinking about the games series I'm apparently a fan of, Final Fantasy. I say apparently because, despite the fact my entire blog is made out like the menus from that game, and even my spiffing new logo is based on it, I haven't actually liked a mainstream entry in the series since Final Fantasy IX, which a quick wikipedia check tells me is now nine years old at least.

So, I found Final Fantasy X's setting poor, the story rubbish, and the main character irritating, the only fun from Final Fantasy XI came from playing with Marc, Boote and Pete and some...questionable...character choices on my part that led to a lot of funny moments, Final Fantasy XII suffered from similar problems as X, except added to the mix a main character who had no relation to the actual story whatsoever, making it boring too, and XIII was the prettiest, most epic running in a straight line I think I've ever done in a video game, but that's all it was.

A lot of my Final Fantasy love then came from being able to revisit the old games. So, especially given the nostalgic gaming mood I've been in lately, when I found out a new Final Fantasy spin off had been released for my favourite console, the DS (I'll do a 'vs. the DS' blog some time to explain why), and that it was specifically designed to be an old school style Final Fantasy game, I thought I'd better check it out. Even if it has a rubbish title.

Despite the cute graphics and silly description on the box, it really is clearly inspired by the NES Final Fantasy games, not even going as far as to incorporate many of the Super Nintendo's FF elements. In fact, it's (probably) the first Final Fantasy game since Final Fantasy VII to dispose of the 'classic' logo they've used ever since and reverts back to the old retro font style used on the NES boxes.

And one thing that means is that it's hard. But not in the typical way games are hard these days, in that old school RPG way where half the time your only hint on where the hell to go is the fact every villager seems to be talking about a 'haunted cave to the North' or whatever. That, and battles are over very quickly, either with you winning or losing. Relaxing even against ordinary foes can get you killed.

Sadly, the game's not properly turn based like the old games, and the battle system more feels like, well, like the NES game developers had suddenly been given DS technology, I guess. It's still turn based, but there's no targeting (which is odd), and you use 'action points' to do stuff instead of the usual MP and such.

All of this was made up for though by the unfortunate story plot twist that had me stuck playing as the spoilt princess I'm-not-a-white-mage-by-default-because-this-game-has-a-job-system-but-I'm-obviously-meant-to-be who, on top of that wussyness, had been turned into a kitten. Usually, this may have caused a problem, but I got very lost, levelled up ridiculously trying to find out where to go, and became a fireball casting, tsunami causing slaughtering murderous kitten of death and destruction that wreaked havoc on everything I came across, and that was pretty damn funny.

Actually, the characterisation in general is fun. You have four characters who, despite the title, are incredibly dysfunctional and spend more time splitting up with each other and adventuring solo than they do together. The job system means you can select any class (seriously, the job system is one of the best innovations in these games, and really needs to be re-used in a proper Final Fantasy title), but they still have personalities. The aforementioned princess is, at least, probably an RPG's first accurate depiction of a princess. She's not the soft, cute and sweet person you normally get. She's the greedy self centred one who literally goes hunting for treasure purely because the room she's staying in isn't up to her palace standards. And then there's the great 'asshole' character, who manages to defy the usual RPG trope of being the badass with a heart of gold, and instead is actually just a regular ass, dumping his companions constantly because they do stupid things like, well, as I mentioned, hunt for treasure to make their rooms look better. That really has nothing to do with the nostalgic theme though, and more just stems from writers probably not being forced to take their job so seriously.

It's weird to play a game that's nostalgically designed but not nostalgic in appearance though. An easy way out for this might have been to make the graphics 16, or even 8-bit. They didn't. It just has the same sensibilities as an old game. No tutorials for example. Read the instruction book or work it out, just like you used to have to. To be honest, in today's Wii-inspired world of sitting through tutorials to bloody walk, this is quite a nice relief. Although it makes the game harder at times, it also introduces an element of 'am I meant to be doing this yet?' which I've always thought is the great feeling of freedom old games (Final Fantasy and Legend of Zelda especially) used to offer you that you don't get any more. Today, freedom in games always feel manufactured. You feel like you're doing what the programmers wanted you to do, and where's the fun in that?

So I like nostalgic games, and hey, I guess I am a Final Fantasy fan, because revisiting this reminds me that I've enjoyed almost all the spin offs (DS ones especially) that I've played. I guess it's just the main series I don't like anymore. Which given most FF fans these days complain about the market being saturated with shitty spin offs is kind of ironic.

And because I'm still keeping track of my life as a video game, today I had a fight with a sealed door. I got to kick it down and send wood splintering everywhere. This is probably the closest to being in a cop show I'll ever get, so I'm giving myself +20 experience points! Especially thematic for Marc, given he may remember my track record with Final Fantasy bosses shaped like doors...

Vs. An Explanation

So, this is my new blog. And it's been a little surreal so far. Jon, a friend of mine, came up with the idea to do a blog tracking his life as a video game, and it seemed like a fun idea, so I thought I'd join in. But, in retrospect, I had quite a few other things to use a blog for, so video gameyness is just a general 'theme' for this blog. Plus a desperate attempt to capture my younger spirit, since I don't really play many games any more!

So while I plan to use this with a few video game jokes thrown in to fit the theme, it'll also be used for a few other things as well. Or so I hope. A big part will be helping to design the storyline for a game for Marc (who I am now oblidged to add is 'a friend of mine', since I have friends who don't know other friends who may end up reading this, when did that happen?).

There you go.

Leigh summons an explanation!

Leigh actually explained something!

Leigh still didn't gain any experience points though, because he should have done that in the first place!