Video Games! Battlefield: Bad Company and Condemned: Criminal Origins - the colons, they abound
I've just got done playing Battlefield Bad Company, which is a shooter game about Company B aka Bad Company (though, really, it's more “Bad Fire Team”) and their quest to steal mercenary gold. It's got a nice sense of humor, heavily inspired by Kelly's Heroes - which is, of course, the greatest “war” movie, ever - and is a very playable game for a shooter in the sense that when you die, you respawn but all the damage you've done to the enemies is still done. With a little persistence, any level is doable, which is nice. It's like they want you to finish the game or something, hehe.
But, of course, it's a shooter. Which means that you go around mowing down just about everyone in the world in hails of bullets. You start mowing down people in fictional former Soviet Republic in Central Asia, then you move on to actual Russians and then on to another fictional country in a desert where the people speak Arabic. Your final, and therefore toughest, enemies are Arabs.
Which, really, I don't much care about. A game has to be wildly overtly racist before I give it up and it's hard to peg this one as being more than very mildly racist. It would be akin to saying that WWII FPS games are anti-German though every person who plays shooters has, in the words of Cracked.com, killed more Germans than the Russian Army. It isn't personal, Germany. And the real bad guys are mercenaries, who are the worst people in the world, after all. Considering the characters are deserters from the US Army and this is all about stealing gold, it's fair to say that the game doesn't much care about your sense of morality, hehe. What I find interesting, now, is that the toughest, hardest soldiers we can imagine are guys with turbans living in the desert.
The game play is nice, too. In particular, a lot of the environment can be destroyed. You know what's fun? Blowing shit up. Not in the real world, where it's expensive and hurts people, but on TV? I'm all about blowing shit up. I liked it in Red Faction Guerrilla and I like it in Battlefield Bad Company. You can't blow up as much shit in Bad Company as in Red Faction, but I've heard for the next Bad Company game you're going to be able to blow up even MORE shit than Red Faction. I think a war has started. People who make shooters have learned that we really love blowing shit up. Well, okay, they already knew this, but this generation of console has the power to do it.
But the game also has a fairly diverse array of vehicles that you've got to drive - armored cars, APCs, tanks, dune buggies with grenade launchers, helicopters, patrol boats, all good stuff. I personally like it when a game diverts you from all the shooting with a little driving. One of the end level “bosses” is driving a dune buggy down a mountain and across a couple of rivers - a nice change and probably the hardest part of the game, oddly enough. It appears running a gauntlet through APCs with automatic grenade launchers and main battle tanks with an attack helicopter overhead while in a dune buggy is reasonably hard. Y'know, in a video game. In real life, I suggest avoiding those kinds of situations altogether.
With the current generation of video game consoles, it's also like all that screaming into the wilderness that I did wasn't in vain. About issues of playability. Oh, I know they didn't hear me personally, but the high level of playability - in particular, in this game, their realization that killing the same enemies over and over again is the complete opposite of fun and their elimination of any “death penalty” (something I first saw in Bioshock and enjoyed the hell of over there, though I didn't mind the new Prince of Persia's “you can't die” thing, too) - makes me feel good. You get killed in Bad Company you've got to . . . run a minute to get back into the fight. The horror. It also means that when you get through just about anything it's just “barely” because the difficult corrects itself. “Oh, that fight was too hard for you, well, you killed a couple of guys before you died and now it's just right.”
(I hear that some games still have a variety of death penalties, which has always struck me as silly. The way you help a person enjoy the game is to make . . . it harder when they die? But they died. They had trouble with that part of the game. Oh, well, I suppose there are people out there who like such things, those magical “hard core gamers” who define their lives by how hard a video game they can finish. I get the impression that they've mostly moved to PvP with the online portions of these kinds of games - the hardest challenge a video design team can come up with is letting the caffeine wired twitch monkeys battle it out amongst themselves. For these guys, the single player story is the briefest of warm-ups and many of these issues I talk about are irrelevant to them because, if the game can be finished by people in the top third of game play ability, these mutants will take it apart pixel by pixel. So why not make it playable, too, by those of us with low middling ability?)
Nevertheless, I enjoyed the game more than I expected. It's cool stuff.
**
I do have sensitivity, on some level, of the “moral” dimension of the game. Not as actual morality, but aesthetics. As I like to remind people, violent video games aren't violent. No one is hurt. There is no one to be hurt, after all. People who refer to violent games, almost always referring to shooters, as “murder simulators” or the like have obviously never either shot a gun and played one of these games. If you've done both, the idea that these games train a person to kill is preposterous. I assure you, you can't hit anything while running, except maybe your foot, and health packs do not, in fact, restore lost hit points.
I find the whole discussion tedious. You want Americans to be less attached to violence, don't look to the video game industry but the government. They're the ones who use violence to “solve” “problems”. You want to reduce violence in America, let's start by outlawing pistols and all semi-automatic weapons and shotguns that carry more than two bullets - and put serious restricts on the rest. You want to hunt? You don't need an AR-15 and you definitely don't need a Desert Eagle.
My point being that violent video games don't teach anything because people are, in fact, aware that the games aren't real. Despite my hundreds of hours of shooting the shit out of all kinds of people, when I hit a dog last night - ugh, please, keep your dogs on leashes and don't let them run around on rainy nights - I was pretty messed up. I, like all humans, was aware when I “shot” “someone” in a video game that there was no gun, no bullet and no person. I knew that dog was alive and in pain because of what I'd done and that sucked, hardcore, even though there had been no way to avoid it.
But I do have such sensibilities. When I play Splinter Cell games, I sometimes roll my eyes or even grind my teeth at the way the character can kill whomever he wants in countries with brown people in them but if something happens in the US? Suddenly life is precious. I know this reflects the attitude of the US government, which is why it's annoying, really. But I've played and enjoyed every last Splinter Cell game. Sam Fisher could be knifing nuns and kids and I'd probably cackle as he did it. Though it would be pretty hard to beat that thing where he's under thin ice and he taps it so some guard wanders over and then he punches through the ice and grabs the guy to pull him into the frosty water and knifes the fool there. Let's face it, that's pretty cool.
There are, however, limits. In Condemned Criminal Origins, the trash mobs you kill are the homeless. You're playing a cop that's been framed by some bad guy so you're hunting the guy down, and along the way you've got explore a city of Gary, Indiana, levels of devastation. It's a gray apocalypse out there. Filled, apparently, with homeless people with a taste of blood.
So, you wander around and get attacked by homeless people, then you taser them and why they're doing the taser disco you smash them in the head with a fire ax. No, really, this is most of the game play. Sometimes it's a lead pipe and sometimes it's a sledgehammer, but the basics are - homeless guy, taser, crushed skull. I suspect there's some sort of supernatural component and we'll learn that the homeless guys are being controlled by the evil mastermind, but that makes it worse. They're actually innocent homeless guys whose skulls you've bashed in.
I understand the decisions that got them to the idea that hobocide was a good idea. They're, like, “Hey, let's make this game where a cop tracks down a psychic killer through an apocalyptic urban wasteland. Yeah.” “So, what will the enemies be?” “Well . . . what's in apocalyptic urban wastelands? Let's go to Gary and see!” Maybe it was Detroit, but you get the idea. And what they saw were the homeless. The homeless occupy apocalyptic urban wastelands. If you've got a real home, it's probably not in an urban wasteland, almost by definition, unless you live in Kibera.
But there I was bashing in the skulls of the homeless before they could recover from being tasered and I was, like, “Huh. This is pretty depraved. This cop has killed thirty or forty” - yeah, it took me that long, hehe - “homeless people because he doesn't want to, possibly, be convicted of a killing done by someone else. Did it occur to anyone that if you're willing to slaughter dozens of people maybe you're the bad guy?” Which is why so many of these games have zombies. It's hard to get riled about putting down the mindless undead in a video game. I stopped playing that game, even though the other elements of the game I liked quite a bit. I just couldn't get over the hobocide.
(Tho', to be fair, the word hobocide I stole from Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness where one of the story quests was to kill thirty hobos so you could get the distilled essence of urine . . . but it was Penny Arcade Adventures. And later on, you'd slaughter a bunch of rich people. And mimes. And clowns. And robots that fuck fruit. I mean, c'mon, it's Penny Arcade. It was different when I killed hobos there. With my rake.)
There are, of course, also a bunch of games I couldn't imagine myself getting, though they're few and far between. So, in Army of Two, there's this repressed homoerotic bromance between the two mercenaries in the game and they handle their wanton slaughter with the quiet dignity of frat boys surrounding a ruffied cheerleader at a freshmen kegger. And I've heard horror stories about the Left Behind video game, where your devout Christian survivor of the Rapture shows the love of Christ by charitably murdering Jews. I'm sure love was in his heart. Which, while traditional, reminds me of why I'm glad to be an atheist. And there's a bunch of games that are targeted at young girls that I view with distaste, too, because they reinforce a bunch of negative stereotypes about women. So it does happen, just not very often.
Anyway, give Condemned Criminal Origins a miss unless you have a huge grudge against the homeless.
But, of course, it's a shooter. Which means that you go around mowing down just about everyone in the world in hails of bullets. You start mowing down people in fictional former Soviet Republic in Central Asia, then you move on to actual Russians and then on to another fictional country in a desert where the people speak Arabic. Your final, and therefore toughest, enemies are Arabs.
Which, really, I don't much care about. A game has to be wildly overtly racist before I give it up and it's hard to peg this one as being more than very mildly racist. It would be akin to saying that WWII FPS games are anti-German though every person who plays shooters has, in the words of Cracked.com, killed more Germans than the Russian Army. It isn't personal, Germany. And the real bad guys are mercenaries, who are the worst people in the world, after all. Considering the characters are deserters from the US Army and this is all about stealing gold, it's fair to say that the game doesn't much care about your sense of morality, hehe. What I find interesting, now, is that the toughest, hardest soldiers we can imagine are guys with turbans living in the desert.
The game play is nice, too. In particular, a lot of the environment can be destroyed. You know what's fun? Blowing shit up. Not in the real world, where it's expensive and hurts people, but on TV? I'm all about blowing shit up. I liked it in Red Faction Guerrilla and I like it in Battlefield Bad Company. You can't blow up as much shit in Bad Company as in Red Faction, but I've heard for the next Bad Company game you're going to be able to blow up even MORE shit than Red Faction. I think a war has started. People who make shooters have learned that we really love blowing shit up. Well, okay, they already knew this, but this generation of console has the power to do it.
But the game also has a fairly diverse array of vehicles that you've got to drive - armored cars, APCs, tanks, dune buggies with grenade launchers, helicopters, patrol boats, all good stuff. I personally like it when a game diverts you from all the shooting with a little driving. One of the end level “bosses” is driving a dune buggy down a mountain and across a couple of rivers - a nice change and probably the hardest part of the game, oddly enough. It appears running a gauntlet through APCs with automatic grenade launchers and main battle tanks with an attack helicopter overhead while in a dune buggy is reasonably hard. Y'know, in a video game. In real life, I suggest avoiding those kinds of situations altogether.
With the current generation of video game consoles, it's also like all that screaming into the wilderness that I did wasn't in vain. About issues of playability. Oh, I know they didn't hear me personally, but the high level of playability - in particular, in this game, their realization that killing the same enemies over and over again is the complete opposite of fun and their elimination of any “death penalty” (something I first saw in Bioshock and enjoyed the hell of over there, though I didn't mind the new Prince of Persia's “you can't die” thing, too) - makes me feel good. You get killed in Bad Company you've got to . . . run a minute to get back into the fight. The horror. It also means that when you get through just about anything it's just “barely” because the difficult corrects itself. “Oh, that fight was too hard for you, well, you killed a couple of guys before you died and now it's just right.”
(I hear that some games still have a variety of death penalties, which has always struck me as silly. The way you help a person enjoy the game is to make . . . it harder when they die? But they died. They had trouble with that part of the game. Oh, well, I suppose there are people out there who like such things, those magical “hard core gamers” who define their lives by how hard a video game they can finish. I get the impression that they've mostly moved to PvP with the online portions of these kinds of games - the hardest challenge a video design team can come up with is letting the caffeine wired twitch monkeys battle it out amongst themselves. For these guys, the single player story is the briefest of warm-ups and many of these issues I talk about are irrelevant to them because, if the game can be finished by people in the top third of game play ability, these mutants will take it apart pixel by pixel. So why not make it playable, too, by those of us with low middling ability?)
Nevertheless, I enjoyed the game more than I expected. It's cool stuff.
**
I do have sensitivity, on some level, of the “moral” dimension of the game. Not as actual morality, but aesthetics. As I like to remind people, violent video games aren't violent. No one is hurt. There is no one to be hurt, after all. People who refer to violent games, almost always referring to shooters, as “murder simulators” or the like have obviously never either shot a gun and played one of these games. If you've done both, the idea that these games train a person to kill is preposterous. I assure you, you can't hit anything while running, except maybe your foot, and health packs do not, in fact, restore lost hit points.
I find the whole discussion tedious. You want Americans to be less attached to violence, don't look to the video game industry but the government. They're the ones who use violence to “solve” “problems”. You want to reduce violence in America, let's start by outlawing pistols and all semi-automatic weapons and shotguns that carry more than two bullets - and put serious restricts on the rest. You want to hunt? You don't need an AR-15 and you definitely don't need a Desert Eagle.
My point being that violent video games don't teach anything because people are, in fact, aware that the games aren't real. Despite my hundreds of hours of shooting the shit out of all kinds of people, when I hit a dog last night - ugh, please, keep your dogs on leashes and don't let them run around on rainy nights - I was pretty messed up. I, like all humans, was aware when I “shot” “someone” in a video game that there was no gun, no bullet and no person. I knew that dog was alive and in pain because of what I'd done and that sucked, hardcore, even though there had been no way to avoid it.
But I do have such sensibilities. When I play Splinter Cell games, I sometimes roll my eyes or even grind my teeth at the way the character can kill whomever he wants in countries with brown people in them but if something happens in the US? Suddenly life is precious. I know this reflects the attitude of the US government, which is why it's annoying, really. But I've played and enjoyed every last Splinter Cell game. Sam Fisher could be knifing nuns and kids and I'd probably cackle as he did it. Though it would be pretty hard to beat that thing where he's under thin ice and he taps it so some guard wanders over and then he punches through the ice and grabs the guy to pull him into the frosty water and knifes the fool there. Let's face it, that's pretty cool.
There are, however, limits. In Condemned Criminal Origins, the trash mobs you kill are the homeless. You're playing a cop that's been framed by some bad guy so you're hunting the guy down, and along the way you've got explore a city of Gary, Indiana, levels of devastation. It's a gray apocalypse out there. Filled, apparently, with homeless people with a taste of blood.
So, you wander around and get attacked by homeless people, then you taser them and why they're doing the taser disco you smash them in the head with a fire ax. No, really, this is most of the game play. Sometimes it's a lead pipe and sometimes it's a sledgehammer, but the basics are - homeless guy, taser, crushed skull. I suspect there's some sort of supernatural component and we'll learn that the homeless guys are being controlled by the evil mastermind, but that makes it worse. They're actually innocent homeless guys whose skulls you've bashed in.
I understand the decisions that got them to the idea that hobocide was a good idea. They're, like, “Hey, let's make this game where a cop tracks down a psychic killer through an apocalyptic urban wasteland. Yeah.” “So, what will the enemies be?” “Well . . . what's in apocalyptic urban wastelands? Let's go to Gary and see!” Maybe it was Detroit, but you get the idea. And what they saw were the homeless. The homeless occupy apocalyptic urban wastelands. If you've got a real home, it's probably not in an urban wasteland, almost by definition, unless you live in Kibera.
But there I was bashing in the skulls of the homeless before they could recover from being tasered and I was, like, “Huh. This is pretty depraved. This cop has killed thirty or forty” - yeah, it took me that long, hehe - “homeless people because he doesn't want to, possibly, be convicted of a killing done by someone else. Did it occur to anyone that if you're willing to slaughter dozens of people maybe you're the bad guy?” Which is why so many of these games have zombies. It's hard to get riled about putting down the mindless undead in a video game. I stopped playing that game, even though the other elements of the game I liked quite a bit. I just couldn't get over the hobocide.
(Tho', to be fair, the word hobocide I stole from Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness where one of the story quests was to kill thirty hobos so you could get the distilled essence of urine . . . but it was Penny Arcade Adventures. And later on, you'd slaughter a bunch of rich people. And mimes. And clowns. And robots that fuck fruit. I mean, c'mon, it's Penny Arcade. It was different when I killed hobos there. With my rake.)
There are, of course, also a bunch of games I couldn't imagine myself getting, though they're few and far between. So, in Army of Two, there's this repressed homoerotic bromance between the two mercenaries in the game and they handle their wanton slaughter with the quiet dignity of frat boys surrounding a ruffied cheerleader at a freshmen kegger. And I've heard horror stories about the Left Behind video game, where your devout Christian survivor of the Rapture shows the love of Christ by charitably murdering Jews. I'm sure love was in his heart. Which, while traditional, reminds me of why I'm glad to be an atheist. And there's a bunch of games that are targeted at young girls that I view with distaste, too, because they reinforce a bunch of negative stereotypes about women. So it does happen, just not very often.
Anyway, give Condemned Criminal Origins a miss unless you have a huge grudge against the homeless.