The Crosshair

This blog is discontinued. You can find all my reviews and posts now at www.thecrosshair.co.uk

Arkham Asylum

Last night I played through Batman: Arkham Asylum in one sitting. That is a feat I have never accomplished before, even with my most beloved games. The reasons why B:AA kept my attention so steadfast for 12 hours (!) are many. Very many.

I had looked forward to this game since I first heard of it's development a few months ago. The developers were making all the right noises about treating the license with respect and making the player actually feel like Batman. They spoke about how to be Batman you would have to feel powerful and fearsome from the outset, but that one well placed blow could do serious damage. They have achieved this goal with aplomb, and it's only a tiny part of the game.

The game opens with you escorting Joker to Arkham Island, only to find that he has been caught on purpose and that him and his gang have a dastardly plan. They soon take over the island and turn loose a fairly large section of Batman's rogues gallery against the Dark Knight. From this premise, a beautiful game unfolds. Initially, you are taken on a few objectives in a fairly linear fashion to show the player the different skills in Batman's locker that you can use to defeat enemies.

This brings me to the combat. The hand to hand combat is the most fluid and enjoyable combat I have ever encountered in a game, and despite being essentially comprised of two buttons, there is a great deal of skill involved in chaining hits to increase your experience points. Hand to Hand combat is largely used when approaching a gang of unarmed thugs. When entering a room full of the Joker's men with guns however, the action flips to a different style. Using Batman's Grapnel Gun, you can swing from gargoyle to ledge to gargoyle silently above the unsuspecting victims. You can trace their movements by switching Bats' Cowl to detective mode and wait until there is one isolated enemy, and swoop. The most joyous part about these parts is that once a body is found, the other guards heart rates start to increase and they start to mutter things to each other about their previous encounters with Batman. They start to sound genuinely scared and you start to feel genuinely hard.

So, combat is excellent. There is another major component of the game that is equally as excellent - detective mode. You can flip your cowl to detective mode at any time, which brings up a kind of wireframe interpretation of the environment around you, and it gives you stats and the whereabouts of any enemies in your vicinity. In addition to this, at certain points of the game you will need to set up a crime scene to look for clues as to how to proceed. This requires you to search the scene for a personal effect of the person you are looking for. I can't really say much more without giving away spoilers, but it's pretty cool.

The graphics are uniformly lush throughout the game, from grim hospital scenes to the flowery environs of the botanical gardens. The voice acting too, stands out as better than almost any game released this year. Most of the cast of the Animated Series reprise their role, including Mark Hammill's amazing Joker.

So there you have it. Arkham Asylum. PLAY IT!.

Bad Company

With the release of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 on the horizon, I thought I would give the original a spin, as I had somewhat neglected it on release. Having never played any of the Battlefield games before, I was unsure what to expect. This was, after all, the first in the series to include a singleplayer mode with a plot.

First off, the characters, although somewhat caricatured, are at least disctinctive, and the voice acting is above par for first-person-shooters. The premise of the game is that you and your three squadmates comprise the eponymous "Bad Company", a frontline division for the delinquents in the army. As such, you are sent further and further into enemy territory, on the most dangerous missions because you are deemed expendable. The twist however, comes two or three levels in, where you discover mercenaries who are paid in gold bullion. Thus a quest unfolds to abandon your orders and try and grab as much gold as possible.

In terms of gameplay, B:BC doesn't offer a great deal of new features to the genre. That being said, the vehicular combat is implemented pretty well, this having been Battlefield's staple since it's inception. The health system is also a twist on the Call of Duty style "run away a bit until your are better" in that you have an injector which will pull you back to full health but it takes 5 second to reload.

All in all, B:BC is an enjoyable romp through a few FPS conventions. The characters and the dialogue make it interesting enough to stick with it until the end.

inFAMOUS

So I've sadly been living in the stone age recently and have been without anything approaching a proper internet connection for about two months. But I'm back! And the game that has caught my attention most in this interim period has been a rare beast of a PS3 exclusive, inFAMOUS. At first, it seemed to be a fairly generic sandbox adventure game, with echoes of Crackdown etc.

Once I played on however, and the game drew me in, I started to realise that inFAMOUS is, despite it's silly capitalising, a bit of a masterpiece. It plays almost like a greatest hits set of the best games from recent years, with the acrobatics of Prince of Persia and Assassin's Creed, the open world mission based gameplay of GTA and the range of superpowers from The Force Unleashed. But it becomes more than the sum of it's parts. What it reveals to you is a broken city, destroyed by an apocalyptic explosion, which only you can help save. The feeling of taking back parts of the city and watching it regenerate, is genuinely satisfying.

There are a couple of problems, there probably isn't enough variety in the missions, and some of the powers are a little pointless, but none of that really matters when you are gliding along a power cable between two islands of the city, hurling bolts of electricity at baddies. This is a fun game.

A Shot In The Dark

So, after a few short hours headshotting my way through Resi 5, I think I have to say it's been one of my favourite gaming experiences that I can remember. The co-op mode just works so well, it leaves me wondering why 2 player was the domain of sports games and beat em ups exclusively for so long! I haven't played it single player yet, or co-op online, so I'm basing this opinion purely off the splitscreen mode. 

Initially, the splitscreen annoyed me a bit, because it's not a traditional bisecting line, rather two staggered rectangle boxes, leaving a lot of the screen unused. But after a (very) short while, it became my zone, and nothing else existed outside it. There have been some lovely uses of the co-op dynamic in the 30% or so I've played, the mines being a highlight.

While I hear the moans from a certain element of the resi fanbase with regards to the upping of the action and the lowering of frights, I don't really agree with it. Resident Evil has not been about horror and scares really since the first one, it's always been a more action oriented, goal driven game. Get the key/emblem/crest, headshot a few zombies with your shotgun and watch the ammo (and inventory space). That's the formula, and it works. And Resident Evil 5 is the most honed, refined version of that formula, and it's barry.

From the Age Gap

So I have been thinking recently about the emerging age gap that can be seen in videogames at the moment. An age gap is not really something has ever been present in gaming, because it has always been seen as a very "youth" medium. But now those "youths" who started gaming 20, 30 years ago, are grown adults, and are still gaming. This brings up the issue of how people who have been gaming for years digest the games they play when compared to younger, less experienced gamers. 

It's a common sight to see a teenager (or older) flicking around TV channels, see a black and white movie, and instantly move on, disregarding the movie as unwatchable because it is in black and white, from a different era. So what reaction might we see if a young gamer is presented with a classic point and click adventure perhaps, a gameplay device that is now all but redundant. Would there be the same reaction as the teenage movie watcher, unable to watch the black and white film? The thing is, while people can go back and listen to old records, or go back and dig out old films, games are different. Because you can go back and listen to music from a different era, and people do, the whole consumption and production of music has a somewhat cyclical nature, where there are waves and movements, often based on things that have happened in the past, and a similar thing happens with movies. But a game can't just be reissued on a new format, like a CD or a DVD. So much of gaming history is so time specific because of the way the industry works, with consoles and machines that are redundant every 5 years or so. I understand the emulation argument and I am aware of the rise of "reissues" on Playstation Network and so on, but in general, much of gaming's mythology and history is unavailable to younger gamers, and as such, they have a much narrower frame of reference of where their games come from, as opposed to their music or films.

So is there space for games to even become "classics"? Games that are referred to as classics, like Final Fantasy 7, Monkey Island, System Shock 2 etc, must seem like myths or legends to younger gamers with a proper interest. If they can't play them, can't find them in shops...how can anyone play through a history of games? How can games have a proper lineage?

Midnight Club

I've always stayed away from games like Need for Speed and the like because I never thought they would have anything to offer me. Not being a driver, and certainly not being the type of person who spends all their expendable income buying widebody kits for their punto, I just gave them a wide berth. The closest I came was a few lusty months with Gran Turismo all those years ago, but the passion quickly waned as I got bored thinking about carbon flyshafts or whatever they are called. And that was that. Until I had a shot of Midnight Club: Los Angeles, which absolutely floored me. Despite buggy gameplay, a paper thin plot and repetitive missions, I cannot stop playing this game. The sheer speed, thrill and exhilaration of steaming through LA at 180mph is a sensory delight I have not felt for some time.

The pace of the races and the added calamity of the traffic makes for seriously eyes-glued-to-the-tv gameplay. Then there is the "kevving up" of your motor. Now, I am the furthest from interested in cars, but the joy I have felt by taking a VW Scirocco up against Nissan Skylines and winning is unmatched. I found it strangely emotional when I had to sell up t buy something superior too. And then....racing for - and losing - cars is easily one of the most heartbreaking things any game can do to you. Hours of work, tens of thousands of dollars....gone. I nearly cried.

So what is it about this game that has got me so, given I have no interest for any of the subject matter? Perhaps it's like crossover albums in music, when albums of sufficient quality break out of their genre into the mainstream, like say... Nevermind breaking out of the grunge scene, to use an obvious one. Is this the case? Or have I just gone mental?

Flash in the pan?

I have, in attempting to distract myself from the actual work I need to do, fallen in love with flash games. I've played flash games for a number of years, but they were always fairly limited in their scope and imagination, more often than not rip-offs of more famous puzzle games. But over the past year or two, flash gaming has exploded into a worthwhile platform of it's own. The fantastic flash gaming site Kongregate even has it's own achievement and reward system, and a feature where you can tip game developers if you think their game deserves it. 

In an interview I read recently with the creator of of kongregate, Kim Greer, (can't remember where I read it, so sorry, no link!) he said that a few developers were now making their living solely on the tips and advertising revenue they received from Kongregate, and that the were looking for more non-intrusive ways for developers to get paid (as everyone else is). Now, this got me thinking about the tradition of the one-man game. In the days of the bedroom coder, it was more common than not for games to be made by one person. And some fairly legendary games were made this way. But as game companies grew bigger, and budgets grew higher, the one-coder game pretty much died. But now, thanks to flash, PSN, Xbox Live and Wiicade (or whatever it's called) smaller games are enjoying a pretty serious boon, and this might have more of a positive effect on games than may initially seem obvious.

The big problem that the  film scholars of the french new wave had when trying to establish the discipline of film studies was that it was considered a collaborative medium, and one for entertainment, not art. Because, went the argument, if there are so many people involved in the process of making a film, how can it be said that a film reflects one person's artistic vision? The french new wavers,like Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Andre Bazin set about proving this theory incorrect. By studying sets of films by the same director, they found stylistic imprints, or hallmarks that marked each film as being by that particular director. Directors that worked in this way, exercising total control, were labelled auteurs.

Now, could today's small game developers be the auteurs of the videogame world? Some people consider the likes of Kojima, Miyamoto, Meier and Molyneux already to have auteur status, but the same collaborative, entertainment-based argument goes against them. Games like Braid (sorry to keep going on about it) and, to a lesser extent Inquisitive Dave both inspired more thought and reflection than the last film by so called auteur Quentin Tarantino, so who is to say which is the more worthy? Surprisingly, the concept of the videogame auteur is understudied in the academic world, which I find strange, because for me, it could be the key issue in the future of videogame studies.

Sorry, I didn't really want to get into the "can videogames be art" question because I think much of it is a question about semantics. The definition of art itself is very hazy, so I'm not sure what the whole point of the debate is. The argument about videogames being dumb is funny though, because as we all know nothing can be considered art until has been "dumbed down"!