I play it for the stories
Hi,
So recently I finished up a couple of games that were both pretty good. What made them good wasn't the gameplay itself so much but the story you were playing through and the chances that both games took.
The first was Spec Ops: The Line. This plays pretty much like any standard third-person shooter. You play as the leader of a three-man team of Delta Force operators. Your job is to go into Dubai (which had been buried in a massive sandstorm) to make contact with an American Army regiment that stayed behind to try and evacuate survivors and hasn't been heard from in months. Soon enough, you discover that soldiers and civilians are in a complex fight in the sand-choked city.
The game makes no excuses that it's cribbing from Heart of Darkness and so things get confused and very dark as you go along. By the end, the game is dragging the character over the coals of madness and despair in a pretty compelling way. It's not ham-handed, it's effective at putting a set of bad choices in front of you and then pitilessly making you regret/second-guess them. You know how many games have little game hints during the loading screen like "press A to sprint" or "flashbangs stun enemies"? The game starts off with those, but as the game progresses it slowly switches to plot points and then to accusatory statements about what's going on.
At the very end, you're confronted with some stark choices that seriously affect the ending you get. Luckily, the game makes it easy for you to go back and re-load the endgame so you can test them all out. All the choices seem to matter and a "right" choice is probably a matter of opinion.
The only thing that I might fault the game with is that there are a number of either/or choices in the game. You can choose to do A or B and that has minor impacts on the rest of the game. However, at the end, you are mercilessly flogged for one really big decision you made -- except there was no A/B choice at that point. In fact, at that point in the game, an NPC asks for options and your guy says "there's no other option here". You literally can't progress in the game unless you do what you're supposed to do. So to get yelled at about it later pushed me out of character. I feel like there was at least one other option that the game could've offered you at several points and had you accepted, the game would've been much different (and shorter) but richer.
Anyway, it's a tour de force in games as storytelling, but once you try out the various endings it has almost no replay value since why would you go through all that again?
The other thing I played through was Brothers: A Tale of Sons. This is a simple story about two brothers who go on a quest to find medicine for their sick father. You control each brother with one of the two joysticks on your controller and the associated trigger button causes a given brother to perform some context-sensitive action. So brother A goes to the base of a wall and sets up and brother B comes along and vaults off of A up onto a higher ledge.
There's been some criticism about how dual characters on dual sticks can be hard to control and it can be. I tried to keep each brother on the side of the screen associated with the stick that controls them and that helps a bit, but there were a couple of scenes that got very confused when the brothers ran all over the place. Still, the game has a lot of lush scenery and fun, if not terribly difficult, puzzles to work out.
The game does a very good job of getting you emotionally invested in these two characters and you don't really notice that too much until the end of the game where they face some challenges that put them in danger and separate them from one another. I don't want to say too much because it's worth your time to play through. I will say that this game does the whole "Hero's Journey" deal better than most major fantasy titles. The only real issue I had with the game is that the two major female characters either go into the fridge or put you there. Irksome. Still...that ending is powerful and goes to a very different place than most games of it's ilk.
Mercifully, Saints Row 4 drops next week and I can get back to what games are really for -- mindlessly slaughtering cartoon people and pimping out my action figure PC in the latest latex gear and high-tech firepower.
later
Tom
So recently I finished up a couple of games that were both pretty good. What made them good wasn't the gameplay itself so much but the story you were playing through and the chances that both games took.
The first was Spec Ops: The Line. This plays pretty much like any standard third-person shooter. You play as the leader of a three-man team of Delta Force operators. Your job is to go into Dubai (which had been buried in a massive sandstorm) to make contact with an American Army regiment that stayed behind to try and evacuate survivors and hasn't been heard from in months. Soon enough, you discover that soldiers and civilians are in a complex fight in the sand-choked city.
The game makes no excuses that it's cribbing from Heart of Darkness and so things get confused and very dark as you go along. By the end, the game is dragging the character over the coals of madness and despair in a pretty compelling way. It's not ham-handed, it's effective at putting a set of bad choices in front of you and then pitilessly making you regret/second-guess them. You know how many games have little game hints during the loading screen like "press A to sprint" or "flashbangs stun enemies"? The game starts off with those, but as the game progresses it slowly switches to plot points and then to accusatory statements about what's going on.
At the very end, you're confronted with some stark choices that seriously affect the ending you get. Luckily, the game makes it easy for you to go back and re-load the endgame so you can test them all out. All the choices seem to matter and a "right" choice is probably a matter of opinion.
The only thing that I might fault the game with is that there are a number of either/or choices in the game. You can choose to do A or B and that has minor impacts on the rest of the game. However, at the end, you are mercilessly flogged for one really big decision you made -- except there was no A/B choice at that point. In fact, at that point in the game, an NPC asks for options and your guy says "there's no other option here". You literally can't progress in the game unless you do what you're supposed to do. So to get yelled at about it later pushed me out of character. I feel like there was at least one other option that the game could've offered you at several points and had you accepted, the game would've been much different (and shorter) but richer.
Anyway, it's a tour de force in games as storytelling, but once you try out the various endings it has almost no replay value since why would you go through all that again?
The other thing I played through was Brothers: A Tale of Sons. This is a simple story about two brothers who go on a quest to find medicine for their sick father. You control each brother with one of the two joysticks on your controller and the associated trigger button causes a given brother to perform some context-sensitive action. So brother A goes to the base of a wall and sets up and brother B comes along and vaults off of A up onto a higher ledge.
There's been some criticism about how dual characters on dual sticks can be hard to control and it can be. I tried to keep each brother on the side of the screen associated with the stick that controls them and that helps a bit, but there were a couple of scenes that got very confused when the brothers ran all over the place. Still, the game has a lot of lush scenery and fun, if not terribly difficult, puzzles to work out.
The game does a very good job of getting you emotionally invested in these two characters and you don't really notice that too much until the end of the game where they face some challenges that put them in danger and separate them from one another. I don't want to say too much because it's worth your time to play through. I will say that this game does the whole "Hero's Journey" deal better than most major fantasy titles. The only real issue I had with the game is that the two major female characters either go into the fridge or put you there. Irksome. Still...that ending is powerful and goes to a very different place than most games of it's ilk.
Mercifully, Saints Row 4 drops next week and I can get back to what games are really for -- mindlessly slaughtering cartoon people and pimping out my action figure PC in the latest latex gear and high-tech firepower.
later
Tom