It's just as I feared. I feel so rotten. I'm halfway through Bioshock now and the enthusiasm is waning. It's just not grabbing me in ways that this acclaimed darling of 2007 should be. I glance around apologetically as reviewers tut and call me a charlatan. I'm sorry!
I can admire its brilliance. The stylised art deco aesthetic decaying into madness. A history told in scenery not cutscenes. The clunk and sizzle of messy, brutal combat for survival.
I can't quite stomach the scavenger hunt for items. Every drawer and corpse rifled through for a round of bullets isn't quite my style. Nor is the transparent linearity of the story. Each new location you arrive in predictably locks the exit to the next then puts you on a quest equivalent of killing ten boars, or so it seems to me. I never experienced that artificiality in System Shock or Ultima Underworld, so I wonder why now.
Those design choices are forgivable in the context of the second paragraph, however. No, perhaps the fault lies with me. You see, this being a much talked about game, there are twists in the plot that have provoked much discussion. Me being me, I've tried to avoid them as much as possible, and while I've closed my eyes and covered my ears information has slipped through. I've never heard directly what happens in the end, but so much has been inferred that I can pretty much put the pieces together and know it. It was tragically inevitable, so it appears.
It shouldn't be like that, I should still be able to savour the journey, not the destination. Yet just knowing sullies the experience somewhat, like stumbling upon your Christmas presents and having to act surprised come the day. It's just not the same, is it?.
On the subject of spoilers, the gaming community as a whole has been pretty good in keeping things quiet for those who don't want to hear. Bioshock's an exception, really, probably because it's got a story that deserves being discussed - not something that happens often. As long as you're prepared to keep out of official discussion, you're pretty safe. I mean, can you believe I managed to get around to playing Metal Gear Solid 2 about three years after release without knowing what goes down in that game? That's crazy. I even tend to stop reading previews, sometimes the meat of reviews a few months before release to come into a game pleasantly surprised, just as I do movies. I always like to come into a game fresh. A risk seeing as I'm the type of guy who likes to wait six months for a game's price to come tumbling down. Considering I've heard the final part of Bioshock may be the worst,
I'll be interested to see what my reaction is come that time. More on
this later.
Warning: May contain a few spoilers, but I'll try to keep them vague.)
It's been a month or so since I finished Grand Theft Auto IV, so it's about time I wrote down some overall thoughts about the game. Biggest question, first. Does it deserve the hype? Does it deserve those perfect tens? It's easy to be cynical, yet there are times when GTAIV dazzles and amazes, when the world immerses you completely and your actions inside of it enthrall. Rockstar North have built a complimentary world that at times towers above its rivals.
Then again, it's easy to be lost in the hype, and there are times when the game fails to live up to expectations and you can see the flaws and you feel a little shameful for rating it so highly.
It's largely dependent on how you play it. I went through it twice consecutively, something I hardly ever do with games. Two reasons for that: one for the Achievement to complete the game in under thirty hours, and two, rather less ashamedly, to make different story choices than those I'd made. I was interested in going back and trying again, changing my mind over who I would kill or not kill as the game demands at certain points. As you quickly discover, however, there's no ultimate result to making those decisions in the game and no pointers on how you should play it. It's just a gut feeling. Saving someone doesn't necessarily mean any consequences beyond a bonus cut-scene or two later down the line. It's also marred by the fact that the effect is diluted by the surrounding missions where Niko Bellic has no qualms in killing dozens of people to fulfill a goal. You feel like the game's trying to placate you as was Ralph Fiennes' Nazi character in Schindler's List, implored by Oskar Schindler that forgiveness can be just as powerful as execution; an ultimately futile gesture in a sadistic world.
The two most significant assassination choices give you access to a little more power or events but they're never necessarily the 'right' answer. Nor are they of consequence story-wise. No sooner have you executed your decision than it takes any significance to the main story away. It means nothing to you as a person. All the way up to the ending, nothing of how you've acted informs the ultimate decision and nothing can foreshadow what happens either way. Playing through twice and you can see that it's damned if you do, damned if you don't. Emotionally, that's the intent, but as a whole it doesn't rely on the player's investment in morality, more's the pity.
Incidentally, there's something I like with how the game doesn't end after the credits roll. It literally picks up right where you stood and took your final revenge. Your phone rings and friends console you with kind words before leaving you alone to contemplate your now directionless life in a quiet park. Before you decide to steal a forklift and ride it into the river, but that's beside the point.
Anyway, I wanted to talk about I played the game, and playing once for fun, twice for speed, it's easy to see how the game falls apart a little under duress. Rockstar North clearly had a vision of how the player should progress. If you do all it wants - go on dates, follow the suggestions of your contacts as and when they come - the game world works. It feels like living a day to day existence as much as a GTA could in the midst of its many limitations. Ignore all that however, and the cracks really show. Besides the one or two mission-critical events, the social events don't have to be touched at all, again making no consequence to the plot and without those the game begins to feel empty as you grind away on missions.
It's a shame where dates are concerned, actually, because while the minigame activities are almost all terrible, simplistic or repetitious, the actual act is worth going through to hear what the characters say. Every few times you meet up, a dialogue will spring up discussing their thoughts and feelings, fleshing out the characters a bit more. That's what made it worth while, not wasting time on an easy game of darts when I could be somewhere else.
Taking all that away, all the diversions and side quests and fooling around, the second play through wasn't as interesting as the first. GTAIV only works as a coherent whole. It's not hard to see that a lot of its constituent parts are underdeveloped or uninteresting, yet they're set in a world that just begs to be explored and exploited. Sadly, it's not always rewarding. There are some glimpses: one of my favourite goals off the beaten path was finding vehicles by consulting pictures and location clues sent to you on your phone. I found that a far better treasure hunt than the lengthy search for pigeons. You feel like you're doing your own work rather than allowing for the handholding that the game insists on too much. A lot more of that could have gone a long way towards setting the game on the pedestal it doesn't quite deserve.
I've said quite a lot, so I'll save other comments for around the time of the downloadable content. I should mention the combat briefly, though. A much needed improvement, but still prone to sticking you against cover when you don't want it to. It felt brilliantly tactical on the first play through. A shame it lost some of it charm when you realise that most battles can be won by cutting straight through the middle with an automatic weapon and auto targeting.
Grand Theft Auto IV's world is a stunning visual and aesthetic achievement, though at times perhaps too awesome to accommodate the interactivity you'd truly desire. The GTA series comes with a lot of baggage and the 'fourth' game has to bear this weight on top of its own innovations. It can only really improve and iterate it seems. So while we get all the best parts of a much respected series, it also comes with some of the more archaic, needless bits (only saving at safehouses, no replaying completed missions, etc.). The improvements are all well and good, but the series is already becoming too set in its ways. Perhaps next time we need a true shake-up of the foundations as well. I don't think that'll happen, though. Do you?
Crackdown spoiled it for me. A vast open area with the same size and scope of Liberty City begging to be explored and the power to go where you want. I don't think I've experienced quite the giddy exhilaration of agility and movement your super-powered hero offers as he leaps and bounds from tall building to tall building with gravity-defying speed and grace as I have when playing Crackdown. It's a great feeling.
In comparison, Niko Bellic's more traditional perambulatory nature is too slow, too frustrating. It's not like Crackdown. Not at all.
Of course, you could excuse his nature by saying that the vehicle empowers the player - as opposed to Crackdown, which made the vehicles the least appealing mode of transport - were it not for the fact that going on foot is an essential requirement to fully explore the nook and crannies, parks, alleys, piers rooftops and subways of this magnificent city.
Now, I'm aware of falling victim to hyperbole now we're on the post-release critical backlash part of the GTAIV experience ride, but I can say in my heart that I think this is the best representation of a city I've ever played in. The attention to detail is astonishing, the diversity of character in the different districts overwhelming. There's an overload of information in every block and a distinct lack of repetition. Stand at any junction and you're rewarded with a unique viewpoint encompassing all that a city should be. Naturally, it's a condensed experience; once you get in the air you realise the city doesn't quite match the scale of its real world inspiration of New York, but when you're back down, immersed in the busy streets staring at the hustle and bustle of city life, there's not much else that matches what it accomplishes.
A place like that, where every location has its own identity just begs to be explored. I turned off the waypoint feature pretty early on. I wanted to find my way through the city on my own terms and to navigate by landmarks rather than led by the nose by a guiding line on a radar (impressive as it is, and I still rely on the radar way too much; there's really no way around it). I want to learn this city, to make it my own. I want to know all the shortcuts and what's round that corner and on top of that building. I've always been a fan of exploring for exploring's sake and the best game worlds, from Oblivion to Thief encourage that desire in me. Here in Liberty City it's no different: each alley seems pregnant with possibility that there's something down there I've never seen before, a little special something that made the trip there worthwhile. Nothing amazing, just a mural on a wall, an interesting piece of architecture or a throwaway gag is enough. Something that makes me think the designers cared that somebody would make the effort to come down this way.
There doesn't really need to be a gaming reason to see what lies there, although I'll admit it does help. Where Crackdown had its orbs, and previous GTAs had their packages (not to mention the dreaded underwater shells in San Andreas), GTAIV has its pigeons. Two hundred of the buggers to seek out and eliminate and only a little red glow and a quiet coo-ing to indicate their presence. Then again, I've only found ten in the thirty or so hours I've played the game. And the reason for that? Crackdown spoiled it for me.
I want to explore, to see everything I can't see by car, but it justs feels so slow and awkward. I want to see it all and yet I'm restricted in my speed. Of all the little disappointments with GTAIV the one I put to the forefront is the baffling decision to make walking the default speed. It's not even a brisk walk, it's a saunter, maybe even a stroll designed to make Niko look good rather than designed to help the gamer move about. Holding the run button speeds things up, but it's not enough. The fastest you can get is sprinting by constantly tapping the run button instead. That's a little more like it but hardly practical for the fingers. And that's not to mention veritcality and how, while the climbing animation is great, Niko's mired in a world where Prince of Persia acrobatics have no place and thus no way to make scaling tall buildings a fun reality beyond a convenient set of stairs or a helicopter.
It's a shame that pigeon hunting, even exploring in general is more of a chore than it should be, then. It's not the central focus of the game, it's just a relatively small thing in a title that still mightily impresses me despite exposing its flaws very quickly, yet how much better it could have been had we been given agility on par with Realtime World's noble effort to take the open world city in a new direction. My one hope from now is that someone knocks up a mod that unlocks this ability in the forthcoming PC release. Do so and I'll praise you to high heaven.
Hello again. Writing about videogames for a hundred days, which is what this blog was once used for, can take a lot out of you, let me tell you. No wonder I haven't come back here for so long. I've dipped my toe into the blogging waters since then, with a short tenure on WiiWii.tv, a Nintendo blog, but I've been a bit quiet on that front.
Still, right now I've got a hankering to write again. Partly because I've got things to talk about, partly because the best advice people can give you to improve your writing skills is to, y'know, write. So I want to talk about the recent games I've played, and sometimes other stuff. What I don't want to do, though, is go off and write long, befuddling review texts. That's what put me off in the first place. Instead, I want to focus on short pieces about certain aspects of games I've been playing, or general overviews. They might not be about up-front new releases or anything groundbreaking, but this blog's as much about me shaping my opinions as it is people reading it.
Anyway, without further ado, a quick word on Grand Theft Auto IV, my game du jour:
Yes, I pay the toll. Sometimes. As the cars of Liberty City queue to deposit their coins at the bridges' toll booths, I'll nudge my way to the front and toss $5 away in order to open the barrier and drive through safely. It's not because I don't desire the police attention, that's nothing to worry about - the one star wanted level is a very minor irritation that passes almost as soon as you're off the other end of the bridge. It's less do to with the greater good, either. It's just sometimes it feels good to follow the rules, even if life's normal rules don't necessarily apply in this game.
Morality's a funny thing in Liberty City. It's twisted round in a way you wouldn't recognise and in a world of extremes, the line you draw can be very far out. I don't really like pulling my gun out and shooting innocent bystanders but I've got no qualms in running a few of them over in my car. I'm not deliberately doing so, mind you. I'm just saying that if I'm driving through the park and there's one between me and an immovable wall sometimes it's easier to let them tumble over my bonnet than stop and let them past. Hey, I'll sometimes beep my horn.
Of course, there's no real consequence to your actions, so why not? Your morals are only in your mind and if you're playing an embittered sociopath, why not? Would Niko Bellic do the same, controlling his own character out in the wider world if he knew he wouldn't get caught?
In terms of story, Niko has his morals. As rare as they are, those moments where you choose to let a character live or die show some form of right and wrong, as corrupt as the whole thing is. For the most part, though, he's a loyal puppet ready to roll over for whoever pays him. Early on, his story appears to be about revenge, then gets lost somewhere along the way. More than twenty-four hours in, so tell me, is Niko's distraction in working for drug dealers and assorted criminals for nothing but cash a satire on how money corrupts the American dream and the best intentions or just filler material?
So it's up to the game to provide the moral code. As far as it appears, Niko only kills bad people. There's no mission to slaughter innocents that I remember. Of course, everybody's corrupt in Liberty City in some way, but some more than others.
That said, there's one particular moment in which I felt slightly uneasy. Early on, there's a random mission you encounter in which you have to drive a rich kid to buy drugs. It didn't feel right. The game makes a point of making Niko refuse any substance offered to him to give him the moral high ground. So to actively take someone along to do this felt a little hypocritical. Here's an 'innocent' who asks you to do him a favour - help him score crack - and you just do it. No choice in the matter.
So why does that make me feel worse than running someone over and zooming away from the scene of the crime? He was an addict. He would have done it anyway. No, it's the fact that you're the one helping him on the downward spiral for cash that feels uncomfortable. You're closer to the consequences and you feel more responsible when the choice to refuse is taken away.
Later on, you'll meet the same guy, and he's all cleaned up, so it all ends up fine (as far as his character could be, I guess). Really, though, GTA IV makes a point in showing that morality doesn't always lie in the players hands, as you cruise through the streets, sometimes you don't get to make a decision. Not if you want to get a hundred percent, of course.
