Tuesday, February 14, 2012 at 3:00 pm
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| Valentine's Day is all about love, but it's also about other feelings. |
To those with a sweetheart, a happy marriage, a lover or a crush, Valentine's Day is, at best, a time to affirm the mutual love and respect you feel for each other, and at worst it is a day when you exchange mediocre gifts for mediocre sexual favors. But for those who are committed or smitten, it is an undeniably exciting time.
Sure, it may be stressful to nail down the dinner reservations and try to come up with ideas to spice things up (hint: puns always make things sexier!), but unless you fuck up and get your partner a diet book or something, the aura of Valentine's Day is designed to make you feel validated. Everywhere you look, America is both paying homage to and milking money out of your relationship. Though it can be a little disheartening to sense the vigorous corporate hard-on that the greeting card industry achieves on this holiday each year, even that can't dampen the spirit if you're really, truly in love.
But what if you're single? Well, my unattached brethren, we can survive this most syrupy of days. Video games can help. I'm going to tell you how.
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Tags: Battletoads, Parappa the Rapper, Rapala Bass Fishing, Shadow of the Colossus, Superman 64, Valentine's Day
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| Deus Ex: Human Revolution is an exploration of whether someone is still human when they have sunglasses built into their face |
As we continue the trend of expanding the "Five Things We Learned" series into this-generation territory, we now come to a game that asks important questions like, "Will Detroit still be a cesspool in 2027?" and "If you could shoot metal planks out of your elbows, would you use this power for good or evil?"
Deus Ex: Human Revolution (shortened to DX:HR because honestly, with an acronym that badass, why not use it) is the prequel to Deus Ex, which presented a vision of the future that tapped into the eerie atmosphere of those early days of the new millennium and is heralded to this day as one of the best video games ever made. I've expressed my love many times for the classic original, but did the prequel live up its roots? Can Adam Jensen adequately fill out the big coat of JC Denton?
Having just played through this game, I learned the answers to the above questions -- and much more. And even though I never asked for this, I ended up learning... a little bit about life.
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| In Dragon Age: Origins, you do regular stuff like kill arch-demons and sleep with witches. |
I've been severely behind the times on this-gen games for what seems like an eternity. For a long while I had no console to call my own, only a laptop with a graphics card that kept me permanently stuck in about 2005. Using the computer equivalent of dark sorcery (I think I put a file called "eyeofnewt.ini" in some directory), I managed to trick the machine into running some more recent games like Oblivion or Mass Effect, but the dismal frame-rates made the games more like interactive slideshows, and I usually had to decrease the draw distance so much that my character was wandering through a permanent haze.
Every so often I would remember wistfully the good old days when I was at the cutting edge of gaming, when my father had bought a Dreamcast for us and we marveled at its then-unbelievable capabilities. I have clear memories of shouting at the microphone we attached to the controller to play Seaman, trying to tell my tadpole son that he was a fuck-up and that he'd never amount to anything, all the while amazed that games were so advanced.
For a time it seemed that those days were gone forever, that the price of New York life on low wages would preclude me from experiencing current games.
But recently a good friend purchased a newer model Xbox 360 and, in an act of gamer benevolence matched by few others, passed his still-perfectly-working previous 360 along to me. And so suddenly I find myself with all the possibilities of modern gaming at my fingertips. Mad with power, I now chip away at a seven-year backlog, devouring the games I once thought I would only be able to play come 2020 or so.
And with new games, come new life lessons. So let's get right to it, and talk about the lessons of one of the first games I popped into that sweet vertical 360 CD tray -- Dragon Age: Origins.
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Tags: Dragon Age Origins, Xbox 360
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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim -- putting the "fan" back in "fantasy." |
Oedipus has survived for millenia as a dramatic figure, because the story of his life is so compelling. In Oedipus's search for a cure to the plague of Thebes, we see our own compulsion to uproot the evil and misery in life. In Oedipus's discovery of the horrible truth that he killed his own father (ANCIENT GREEK THEATRE SPOILER ALERT), we recall every time we've accidentally brought ruin upon ourselves. And when Oedipus leaves town, once a beloved king, now a blind exile, we recognize that even the mighty may fall.
As a gamer, the Nintendo 64 Kid holds a similar place in my psyche -- he is an archetype, a figure who reflects my own thoughts, emotions and dreams. When I see N64 Kid's complete rapturous meltdown because he's received a gaming system, I understand the yardstick by which my excitement about future video game releases can be measured.
I was pretty stoked about LA Noire, maybe 0.4 N64Ks (if one N64K denotes a level of excitement equal to that of Nintendo 64 Kid). And I clocked in at about 0.65 N64Ks in the days leading up to the release of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. But I think now I may be approaching 0.8, 0.9 N64Ks of exhiliration... I may even pull a full-on 1.0.
Guys, I'm really excited for Skyrim. And I'm not alone -- fans and reviewers not lucky enough to have snagged an advance look at Bethesda's newest Action-RPG smorgasbord are wildly speculating about what the game will be like. And so, here's my own speculation -- five things that, Nine Divines willing, we will learn from Skyrim.
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| The internet thinks these guys are comedic gold; though we can probably agree this was not Bethesda's original intent. |
One point that has been raised in the past concerning video games is that they generally err on the side of being humorless. Luckily, there are notable exceptions -- classic games like the ridiculous Space Quest series come to mind, and recent offerings like the Portal games prove that it's quite possible to produce a gaming experience that is both emotionally satisfying and deliberately funny.
But while it's true that humor is certainly a part of some great games, it's also worth admitting that many games do seem rather devoid of any considerable levity. You, as the player characters of these games, trudge along and accumulate headshots or gather magic crystals or make arrests with nothing in the way of lightheartedness except perhaps the occasional smug joke at a fallen enemy's expense. So does the prevalence of these types of games mean that gamers are uninterested in humor? That we would rather take ourselves too seriously than have a laugh?
Not necessarily. There's a compelling case to be made that even the most dramatic games have the potential for uproarious comedy -- that's one of the massive perks of the medium. Heavy Rain can be a chilling meditation on love, control and evil, or, if played in a certain way, it can be a gut-bustingly funny series of skits on people miserably failing to do simple tasks (or doing them comically slowly). A dark tone set by a game requires the gamer's cooperation, because a gamer can turn any game into a farce by finding humorous glitches, awkward gameplay, or simply by playing the game extremely poorly.
YouTube offers ample proof that video games contain some of the weirdest, most unexpected comedy of our generation. And here are five prime examples.
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| Splinter Cell -- it's about to get subtle up in here. |
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell is about a dude who is so fucking subtle that he makes the highly-trained, low-profile operatives of Rainbow Six look like drunk cowboys with six-shooters. His name is Sam Fisher, and he is stealthy from the moment he wakes up to the moment he goes to sleep. And we're not sure if he ever sleeps.
Splinter Cell is about an international crisis sparked by a coup in the Russian border state of Georgia, and the new head of state's nefarious plans. Figuring out what this shady figure wants and defusing the plot before something awful happens is going to take an operative who is so subtle that when he makes a joke, you don't laugh at it until days later. So sneaky that he makes the best cat burglar in the world look like a loud trombonist in a shitty high school marching band. So awesome that he's voiced by Michael Ironside.
Sam Fisher is the perfect man for the job, and sneaking a mile in his shoes teaches us many things about life, love and silent takedowns.
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Tags: Splinter Cell
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Secret of Evermore -- not just a cheap attempt to ride the coattails of success. |
Secret of Evermore was not that follow-up. It incorporates the same general gameplay style and was titled similarly to cash in off of Mana's success -- but that's all. It doesn't deal with the Mana Tree at all. None of the characters are back. The tone is seven to eight times more whimsical. And the sword you get in Secret of Mana is a sacred weapon to be used against the grandest form of tyranny; the game is called Seiken Densetsu 2 in Japan, which means "Holy Sword Legend 2." Secret of Evermore could hardly be called a "Holy Sword Legend," and as such, many fans who bought it expecting a direct sequel were disappointed.
But if you can get past the longing and nostalgia-ridden fury that the sight of those beautiful Mana-like ring menus fills you with, Secret of Evermore is a good game in its own right. Maybe even a great game. And it taught us entirely distinct things from its distant cousin Mana.
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| Handheld LCD Games -- where the artful rendering of the game's title on the front of the machine is more entertaining than the actual game. |
This article, however, is not about that sharing of a beautiful communal memory. This article is about my personal reactions to goofy LCD handheld games that I found images of on Google.
To be clear -- I have not played these games. I believe that from cursorily looking at these games I have learned much of what they can impart. And there are certainly things to be learned (and, indeed, fondly remembered) concerning this oft-overlooked form of video game.
Will you follow me down this road, oh reader?
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Mario is Missing! -- Note: the cover art here is 200 to 500 percent more exciting than anything that occurs in-game. |
There are several self-consciously educational entries in the long list of Mario games. Mario desperately tries to get your WPM count up so you can land some kind of halfway respectable job in Mario Teaches Typing. In Mario's Time Machine, instead of going back in the titular machine and killing Hitler (or at least Mussolini) like anybody with a soul and a time machine would do, Mario just goes on a painfully informative scavenger hunt.
Perhaps there will be a time when we discuss more in depth those two attempts to educate gamers using Mario lore as a cover. But right now, we're going to focus on the SNES version of Mario is Missing!
Mario is Missing! is essentially an hours-long lecture about geography and world history given by Luigi. If you completed this game as a child, you either had an immense yearning to become an anthropologist at an early age or you had a gun to your head. You do have to hand it to Mario is Missing!, though -- it did teach us a lot. Sometimes it taught us things it wasn't even trying to teach us.
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Shadowrun is, at least in part, about the future of sunglasses fashion. |
But if science fiction authors and futurists are to be believed, the nice, happy future is sort of a long shot. Judging just from the ratio of dystopias to utopias in pop culture depictions of the future, odds are about five thousand to one that instead of robot butlers we'll have robot masters, and instead of steak pills we'll have pills that violently awaken us from our drugged slumber to make us aware that we are living in a big goo-egg with cords coming out of our spinal column, our life force used as an energy source for those robot masters we mentioned. And don't even get us started on the floating cars. Do you have any idea how much it takes to insure a god damned flying car?
Shadowrun, a dark cyberpunk thrill-ride for the SNES, was derived from the popular role-playing game of the same name. The setting is Seattle in the year 2050. You are essentially a weird-looking future version of Jason Bourne: you wake up near-dead with no memory of how you got there and no idea why people are trying to kill you. It's up to you to put the pieces together and fight the dragon.
Oh yeah. You fight a fucking dragon.
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