All Good Things Of This Earth Flow Into The City.
So. The console I said I didn't want.
I'll admit it: I was wrong about a lot of things. When I was busy not being interested in modern gaming part of me wondered if the reason why I wasn't interested in modern gaming was because I didn't have a console capable of playing the big releases. Don't get me wrong - I loved my Wii for a while. I loved Wii Sports and Wii Play, I adored Twilight Princess and Super Mario Galaxy, I enjoyed Eledees and I really, really loved De Blob. I thought the Miis were utterly charming, the interface - with the Virtual Console, the web browser and the messages - felt like a genuine revolution in gaming. Then there were the controllers, the 'Wii-motes'. I loved how versatile they were, not just the way you could use them as a tennis racket, boxing gloves or whatever, but just the way of browsing through your options by pointing it at the TV screen. It didn't just feel like a huge advance over your typical control pad; it felt like it was better than a mouse.
But the Xbox 360 and Xbox Live . . . that's something different entirely.
Here's how games consoles progresse: Every generation includes faster and better graphics hardware that provides prettier graphics. That's it. Oh sure, they can do other things with their hardware, they somtimes include new controller functions like extra buttons or thumbsticks, or harddrives, but it's graphics that measure your console generations. Super NES games have more colours than NESes. N64 games have 3D graphics, and Gamecubes have better 3D graphics with higher poly-counts, more realistic lighting and suchlike. That's what I thought the 360 was going to do. When I saw the videos of Kameo and the like at launch it looked shinier, but that was pretty much it. After that I pretty much stopped paying attention.
Some of the games are shinier. For instance, the game I've spent the most time with since the console arrived is Lego Indiana Jones, a title I could have bought for my Wii. The Wii version wouldn't have been as shiny; it wouldn't have had the same depth of field and visual effects as the 360 version, but it would have been the exact same game.
Then there's Left 4 Dead.
Left 4 Dead was the game that swayed me to buy a 360. I've always been against the idea of buying a console just for one game, but even though there were a few games that piqued my interest, I bought a 360 because I badly wanted to play Left 4 Dead. Currently I'm counting down the minutes until the TV will be free, so I can play it again.
It's a zombie game. You're stuck in a city overrun with zombies and you have to escape it by shooting a path through them. Put it like that, it sounds like it could be pretty much any game.
It is categorically not pretty much any game. Or at least, it's not like any game I've ever played.
See, after a lifetime of single player titles I've become a social gamer. Social is, perhaps, a bit of a strong word to use, seeing as I'm me and all. I'll get to that in a bit.
I wasn't too impressed with my spanking new console for a good few hours. That's my own fault. After I unpacked it and set it up, I hooked it up with an Internet connection, set up a Gamertag (your ID on the Xbox Live network, basically. Your e-mail address with added bonuses) and had a look at what the console could do. There were some retro games to download, juse like on the Wii. There were also films. That was interesting. One of the first things I saw when I started looking through the dashboard's pages was a massive advert for Cloverfield. A couple presses of the control pad's buttons and I was watching the trailer for it, full screen, great quality, with absolutely no buffering. My PC can't do that. God only knows how the Xbox managed it.
Turns out you can rent Cloverfield - or any number of films - from Xbox Live's Movie Marketplace. You pay your money, you download the film, and then you watch it standard definition or high-def, depending on your TV and your bank balance. I thought that was a pretty cool feature. Apparently the US version has a vast library of films to rent, as you can register the console on your Netflix account. The UK's movie selection is much more meager. It'd be nice if you could tie your LoveFilm account to your 360, but I don't really rent films, so it's not a feature I'm going to use. There's some free material - game videos, converence videos, a couple of original TV series - so it's not so bad.
Then I looked at the Game Marketplace. Lots of retro games to buy, sure, but also original games, Xbox classics, and a fat load of demos for every game available on the service plus a good lot of fully released games.
The Wii's game service doesn't have any demos ever any of the games. It doesn't even have videos. When a new title's up, you're buying it blind and hoping for the best. With the 360 you can trial every available game and weed out the crap. It's a great service. For the first two days I owned it, I didn't play a single full game on the console. I spent all my time downloading and playing demos, and I've hardly made a dent in what's on the Marketplace. I could be playing this console for weeks without buying a single game.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I said I wasn't immediately impressed with the 360, and it's true. The first thing I played was Rez HD, the high-definition update of Sega's classic Dreamcast game Rez. Now I love Rez, it's one of my favourite games, but when all is said and done, Rez HD is just Rez, a game played, what, seven years ago? More? So I had fun with the demo, but it was a game I've played to death.
Then came Duke Nukem 3D. I've since bought the game, because I'd forgotten how much fun it was, but again, it's an old game (eleven years old, this time) I've played a lot. I could have played both Rez and Nukem 3D, it wouldn't have cost me a penny and I wouldn't have needed a next gen console to play them.
Things perked up when I played the Braid demo. Braid is a 2D platform game that, to the uninitiated, might look just as old - if not older - as the two games mentioned above. It's an original Xbox Live Arcade game, and when I started playing it I saw that I might have been wrong about 360 games being shinier version of last gen games. It looks gorgeous, it's true. Apart from the moving characters it looks like a piece of art, with beautiful watercolour painted backgrounds and deep parallax scrolling - that the Disney technique that overlays different painted backdrops against each other in such a way that they look like 3D backgrounds when they're moving. 2D games have used parallax scrolling for decades now, but none of them look as impressive as Braid.
So far, so shiny. It's the time manipulation mechanics Braid uses that mark it as a next-gen title. Time manipulation was used in titles like Max Payne to reproduce the Matrix's distinctive bullet-time effects, but it was Blinx on the first Xbox that brought the hard-drive into play. The game itself mightn't have been any good, but it introduced the idea of reversing time into games. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time refined the concept, but Braid doesn't use it as a gimmick. The world of Braid is all about learning the way each level's physics work, and exploring them. In the first world you can rewind time to bypass puzzles. Certain objects aren't effected by time manipulation, so if you were to open a door that isn't effected with a one-use key that is you could then go back in time to before you opened the door with the key. Usually the door would close back up again and you'd get the key back, but in this instance the door remains open and you get the key back. If the key wasn't effected by time manipulation, then you wouldn't be able to get the key back by reversing time.
It's quantum physics. You guys like quantum physics, right?
The early puzzles in the first world all toy with this conceit. When you move onto the next level, things change. In the next world, time travel and physical travel and inextricably linked. When you move forward, time moves forward. When you step back, time moves backward. And the puzzles stem from that.
Another world allows you to travel back in time and see your future actions enacted by a future shadow of yourself. There's a platform ahead of you. You jump over the platform. Then you rewind time and see the future shadow you jump over the platform, while this time you decide to walk under it.
It all gets very complicated, but it's ingenius with it. I don't think this kind of game could have been made using the last generation's technology. It might have been possible on the Xbox, seeing as it has a harddrive to record all your movements, but on the PS2 or Gamecube, no, it wouldn't have been possible.
So I liked that so much I bought the full game. Then it's onto Bioshock.
Bioshock was what proved the 360 to me. I've already said I thought it looked a little generic. I can be excused for that, seeing as it's the unofficial follow-up to System Shock 2, one of my all-time favourite games. But seeing it in action for the first time made me realise how wrong I was. I mean, sure, it's very shiny, but oh, the shininess!
The game starts with you being involved in a Lost-esque plane crash. In the intro movie you swim up from the wreckage to find yourself in the middle of the plane's burning fuel. It looks impressive - it looks almost as good as something from Finding Nemo, if Finding Nemo featured Hurley, Kate, and a massive lighthouse beaming out into the night sky. So I'm watching this and thinking it looks nice, but I wish it'd hurry up and get on with the game. I've been watching this CG movie of my character bobbing in burning waves for a minute. When's the movie going to end?
Then it hits me: This isn't a movie. This is the fricking gameplay.
For the first time since Shenmue and Code Veronica on the Dreamcast, I've been conned into thinking the game footage I'm watching is a movie. Because a game can't possibly look this good.
It does. It looks incredible. When I start swimming to the safety (ha!) of the lighthouse, droplets of water splash up on the screen. When I look behind me I see the flames, I see the moonlight sparkling off the rippling waves, I see motes of burning material floating against great billowing banks of black cloud. When I look in front I see the tail end of the plane slowly sinking beneath the waves.
I am gobsmacked.
Once inside the lighthouse I'm in complete darkness. Then a floodlight comes on, highlighting a statue in front of me. I follow stairs down to a bathysphere, pull a level and descend beneath the waves.
A jauunty jingle comes in through a crackling radio and an antique animated advert for cigarettes obscures the window that was previously counting the fathoms my vessel was sinking. The game takes place 1960, but the world I'm going is stuck in the forties.
A man's voice comes through the radio, asking me who deserves the sweat from my brow. Is it everyone, as dictated by Communism? Is it the Government? Is it God? Then he tells me he's eschewed this way of thinking instead of something better: Rapture.
The screen over the window disappears. For a second I see the rocky sea bed with a crab scuttling across it; then the music swells, a squid pulses past the window in a rush of bubbles and Rapture is revealed to me: an entire, neon-lit art deco city buried beneath the waves. As my bathysphere takes me between the glowing spires my disembodied narrator tells me about the city - his city, as it happens. I glimpse some kind of monster, a cross between a bear and an antique diving suit, working inside a glass tunnel connecting two of the wave-scrapers, and a whale - a bloody humpback whale - swims beneath me.
The bathysphere is delivered to the city through another tunnel, some kind of woman-monster peers at me through glass that reflects the dust and grime on it every time a strobing arc-light behind her flashes. She jumps on the bathysphere and tries to claw through the metal to get at me. Eventually she's chase up a wall by a gun attached to a miniature helicopter that was sent by an Irish guy who starts talking to me through the radio. Over the next half-hour I inject something into my arm that gives me the power to shoot electricity from my fingertips, I run through a glass tunnel as the tail-end from the plane crashes into it, causing it to flood, I see a man try to kill a little girl and get a very wide-bore drill through his guts for his troubles, and I spend far too long marvelling at the water effects, the drips and swirls and ripples that are everywhere.
I electrocute a group of Splicers (psychopathic but dapper genetic mutants) by shooting lightning at the pool of water they're standing in. I grin.
Bioshock changed my mind on the 360. It doesn't just look shiny - it looks like a massive leap forward in gaming graphics. Going from Duke Nukem 3D to Bioshock was like going from Morph to The Nightmare Before Christmas.
But it wasn't Bioshock that made me love the 360. That was Left 4 Dead, and that is going in another post.
I'll admit it: I was wrong about a lot of things. When I was busy not being interested in modern gaming part of me wondered if the reason why I wasn't interested in modern gaming was because I didn't have a console capable of playing the big releases. Don't get me wrong - I loved my Wii for a while. I loved Wii Sports and Wii Play, I adored Twilight Princess and Super Mario Galaxy, I enjoyed Eledees and I really, really loved De Blob. I thought the Miis were utterly charming, the interface - with the Virtual Console, the web browser and the messages - felt like a genuine revolution in gaming. Then there were the controllers, the 'Wii-motes'. I loved how versatile they were, not just the way you could use them as a tennis racket, boxing gloves or whatever, but just the way of browsing through your options by pointing it at the TV screen. It didn't just feel like a huge advance over your typical control pad; it felt like it was better than a mouse.
But the Xbox 360 and Xbox Live . . . that's something different entirely.
Here's how games consoles progresse: Every generation includes faster and better graphics hardware that provides prettier graphics. That's it. Oh sure, they can do other things with their hardware, they somtimes include new controller functions like extra buttons or thumbsticks, or harddrives, but it's graphics that measure your console generations. Super NES games have more colours than NESes. N64 games have 3D graphics, and Gamecubes have better 3D graphics with higher poly-counts, more realistic lighting and suchlike. That's what I thought the 360 was going to do. When I saw the videos of Kameo and the like at launch it looked shinier, but that was pretty much it. After that I pretty much stopped paying attention.
Some of the games are shinier. For instance, the game I've spent the most time with since the console arrived is Lego Indiana Jones, a title I could have bought for my Wii. The Wii version wouldn't have been as shiny; it wouldn't have had the same depth of field and visual effects as the 360 version, but it would have been the exact same game.
Then there's Left 4 Dead.
Left 4 Dead was the game that swayed me to buy a 360. I've always been against the idea of buying a console just for one game, but even though there were a few games that piqued my interest, I bought a 360 because I badly wanted to play Left 4 Dead. Currently I'm counting down the minutes until the TV will be free, so I can play it again.
It's a zombie game. You're stuck in a city overrun with zombies and you have to escape it by shooting a path through them. Put it like that, it sounds like it could be pretty much any game.
It is categorically not pretty much any game. Or at least, it's not like any game I've ever played.
See, after a lifetime of single player titles I've become a social gamer. Social is, perhaps, a bit of a strong word to use, seeing as I'm me and all. I'll get to that in a bit.
I wasn't too impressed with my spanking new console for a good few hours. That's my own fault. After I unpacked it and set it up, I hooked it up with an Internet connection, set up a Gamertag (your ID on the Xbox Live network, basically. Your e-mail address with added bonuses) and had a look at what the console could do. There were some retro games to download, juse like on the Wii. There were also films. That was interesting. One of the first things I saw when I started looking through the dashboard's pages was a massive advert for Cloverfield. A couple presses of the control pad's buttons and I was watching the trailer for it, full screen, great quality, with absolutely no buffering. My PC can't do that. God only knows how the Xbox managed it.
Turns out you can rent Cloverfield - or any number of films - from Xbox Live's Movie Marketplace. You pay your money, you download the film, and then you watch it standard definition or high-def, depending on your TV and your bank balance. I thought that was a pretty cool feature. Apparently the US version has a vast library of films to rent, as you can register the console on your Netflix account. The UK's movie selection is much more meager. It'd be nice if you could tie your LoveFilm account to your 360, but I don't really rent films, so it's not a feature I'm going to use. There's some free material - game videos, converence videos, a couple of original TV series - so it's not so bad.
Then I looked at the Game Marketplace. Lots of retro games to buy, sure, but also original games, Xbox classics, and a fat load of demos for every game available on the service plus a good lot of fully released games.
The Wii's game service doesn't have any demos ever any of the games. It doesn't even have videos. When a new title's up, you're buying it blind and hoping for the best. With the 360 you can trial every available game and weed out the crap. It's a great service. For the first two days I owned it, I didn't play a single full game on the console. I spent all my time downloading and playing demos, and I've hardly made a dent in what's on the Marketplace. I could be playing this console for weeks without buying a single game.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I said I wasn't immediately impressed with the 360, and it's true. The first thing I played was Rez HD, the high-definition update of Sega's classic Dreamcast game Rez. Now I love Rez, it's one of my favourite games, but when all is said and done, Rez HD is just Rez, a game played, what, seven years ago? More? So I had fun with the demo, but it was a game I've played to death.
Then came Duke Nukem 3D. I've since bought the game, because I'd forgotten how much fun it was, but again, it's an old game (eleven years old, this time) I've played a lot. I could have played both Rez and Nukem 3D, it wouldn't have cost me a penny and I wouldn't have needed a next gen console to play them.
Things perked up when I played the Braid demo. Braid is a 2D platform game that, to the uninitiated, might look just as old - if not older - as the two games mentioned above. It's an original Xbox Live Arcade game, and when I started playing it I saw that I might have been wrong about 360 games being shinier version of last gen games. It looks gorgeous, it's true. Apart from the moving characters it looks like a piece of art, with beautiful watercolour painted backgrounds and deep parallax scrolling - that the Disney technique that overlays different painted backdrops against each other in such a way that they look like 3D backgrounds when they're moving. 2D games have used parallax scrolling for decades now, but none of them look as impressive as Braid.
So far, so shiny. It's the time manipulation mechanics Braid uses that mark it as a next-gen title. Time manipulation was used in titles like Max Payne to reproduce the Matrix's distinctive bullet-time effects, but it was Blinx on the first Xbox that brought the hard-drive into play. The game itself mightn't have been any good, but it introduced the idea of reversing time into games. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time refined the concept, but Braid doesn't use it as a gimmick. The world of Braid is all about learning the way each level's physics work, and exploring them. In the first world you can rewind time to bypass puzzles. Certain objects aren't effected by time manipulation, so if you were to open a door that isn't effected with a one-use key that is you could then go back in time to before you opened the door with the key. Usually the door would close back up again and you'd get the key back, but in this instance the door remains open and you get the key back. If the key wasn't effected by time manipulation, then you wouldn't be able to get the key back by reversing time.
It's quantum physics. You guys like quantum physics, right?
The early puzzles in the first world all toy with this conceit. When you move onto the next level, things change. In the next world, time travel and physical travel and inextricably linked. When you move forward, time moves forward. When you step back, time moves backward. And the puzzles stem from that.
Another world allows you to travel back in time and see your future actions enacted by a future shadow of yourself. There's a platform ahead of you. You jump over the platform. Then you rewind time and see the future shadow you jump over the platform, while this time you decide to walk under it.
It all gets very complicated, but it's ingenius with it. I don't think this kind of game could have been made using the last generation's technology. It might have been possible on the Xbox, seeing as it has a harddrive to record all your movements, but on the PS2 or Gamecube, no, it wouldn't have been possible.
So I liked that so much I bought the full game. Then it's onto Bioshock.
Bioshock was what proved the 360 to me. I've already said I thought it looked a little generic. I can be excused for that, seeing as it's the unofficial follow-up to System Shock 2, one of my all-time favourite games. But seeing it in action for the first time made me realise how wrong I was. I mean, sure, it's very shiny, but oh, the shininess!
The game starts with you being involved in a Lost-esque plane crash. In the intro movie you swim up from the wreckage to find yourself in the middle of the plane's burning fuel. It looks impressive - it looks almost as good as something from Finding Nemo, if Finding Nemo featured Hurley, Kate, and a massive lighthouse beaming out into the night sky. So I'm watching this and thinking it looks nice, but I wish it'd hurry up and get on with the game. I've been watching this CG movie of my character bobbing in burning waves for a minute. When's the movie going to end?
Then it hits me: This isn't a movie. This is the fricking gameplay.
For the first time since Shenmue and Code Veronica on the Dreamcast, I've been conned into thinking the game footage I'm watching is a movie. Because a game can't possibly look this good.
It does. It looks incredible. When I start swimming to the safety (ha!) of the lighthouse, droplets of water splash up on the screen. When I look behind me I see the flames, I see the moonlight sparkling off the rippling waves, I see motes of burning material floating against great billowing banks of black cloud. When I look in front I see the tail end of the plane slowly sinking beneath the waves.
I am gobsmacked.
Once inside the lighthouse I'm in complete darkness. Then a floodlight comes on, highlighting a statue in front of me. I follow stairs down to a bathysphere, pull a level and descend beneath the waves.
A jauunty jingle comes in through a crackling radio and an antique animated advert for cigarettes obscures the window that was previously counting the fathoms my vessel was sinking. The game takes place 1960, but the world I'm going is stuck in the forties.
A man's voice comes through the radio, asking me who deserves the sweat from my brow. Is it everyone, as dictated by Communism? Is it the Government? Is it God? Then he tells me he's eschewed this way of thinking instead of something better: Rapture.
The screen over the window disappears. For a second I see the rocky sea bed with a crab scuttling across it; then the music swells, a squid pulses past the window in a rush of bubbles and Rapture is revealed to me: an entire, neon-lit art deco city buried beneath the waves. As my bathysphere takes me between the glowing spires my disembodied narrator tells me about the city - his city, as it happens. I glimpse some kind of monster, a cross between a bear and an antique diving suit, working inside a glass tunnel connecting two of the wave-scrapers, and a whale - a bloody humpback whale - swims beneath me.
The bathysphere is delivered to the city through another tunnel, some kind of woman-monster peers at me through glass that reflects the dust and grime on it every time a strobing arc-light behind her flashes. She jumps on the bathysphere and tries to claw through the metal to get at me. Eventually she's chase up a wall by a gun attached to a miniature helicopter that was sent by an Irish guy who starts talking to me through the radio. Over the next half-hour I inject something into my arm that gives me the power to shoot electricity from my fingertips, I run through a glass tunnel as the tail-end from the plane crashes into it, causing it to flood, I see a man try to kill a little girl and get a very wide-bore drill through his guts for his troubles, and I spend far too long marvelling at the water effects, the drips and swirls and ripples that are everywhere.
I electrocute a group of Splicers (psychopathic but dapper genetic mutants) by shooting lightning at the pool of water they're standing in. I grin.
Bioshock changed my mind on the 360. It doesn't just look shiny - it looks like a massive leap forward in gaming graphics. Going from Duke Nukem 3D to Bioshock was like going from Morph to The Nightmare Before Christmas.
But it wasn't Bioshock that made me love the 360. That was Left 4 Dead, and that is going in another post.