Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen

When I reviewed BioShock this year, I gave it an A in spite of some problems I had with the story. And I gave it the A because the story was still pretty good … for a game. Later, when Portal blew me away with the sheer brilliance, subversiveness and most of all, flawless consistency of its writing, I swore: never again. Never again would I cut a game slack for a story that wouldn’t hold together in a book, or even a comic book.

I just filed a review of Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer, and I feel like I went back on my word a little. I didn’t give the game an A, but I cut its story more slack than I should’ve. MOTB deserves credit for being inventive, strange and original. It avoids the usual zero-to-hero, kill some stuff, fight the bad guys, elves and orcs cliches of fantasy role-playing games and goes to lengths to present a bizarre – and mostly cliche-free – story that starts strong, and just keeps getting better.

But it ain’t perfect. I had barely any time in my review to explain my problems with the story, but we’re in Blogspace here, so let’s list ‘em out:

Lore-orrhea. When Mask of the Betrayer opens, you find yourself lying in a cave. You have no idea where you are or how you got there, and on top of that, you’re afflicted with a strange curse. The point of the game is to understand what happened, and take care of it – and to do that, you have to read a lot of backstory.

As you finish the relatively short (for an RPG) campaign, you learn about different races, cultures, matriarchal political organizations, old religions, spirits, and a whole ton of backstory specifically about your curse – the one thing you’re most interested in dealing with. I’m not against a game including a lot of backstory. Planescape: Torment - which came from some of the same designers, and is still my #1 game of all time – took place in a whole new world that was totally unfamiliar to anyone who hadn’t played the Planescape D & D campaign. It rolled out the setting and fed you information at a good pace.

However, with interactive entertainment, it’s often tempting to take short-cuts on disseminating this information. How exactly do you measure the “pace” of something that a player can explore at his or her leisure? This is a problem for any game that tries to build an entire world, but often, the world just gets jammed into the margins. In Mass Effect, tons of information was just rammed into your codex, for you to read whenever you wanted. Except I never did read any of it: if it just went straight to my codex, how important could it be? But MOTB doesn’t even have the codex. It crams a lot of information in dialogues (which you can’t revisit), and even in the loading screens. Did you forget the names of all gods of the dead that someone mentioned to you? Too bad – we’re moving on, and hey, it probably wasn’t that important anyway, was it?

Where the hell were we? Part of MOTB’s appeal lies in its otherworldly locations. You’ve got dreamscapes, shadow portals, spirit-filled woods, an astral plane, and – well, maybe you start to see the problem. How many supernatural settings do you need in a game this short? And how can you explain how all of them work in any useful detail? Basically, it blurred together into a lot of cool-looking stuff that made the game seem creepier – but I never stepped back to question it or wonder how any of it worked.

The trees overwhelm the forest. Planescape: Torment opened with a simple, important mystery: you’ve woken up with amnesia, and you don’t know who you are or how you’ve gotten here. The whole game, no matter how strange, elaborate or nuanced it gets, follows that mystery – and when the story gets really twisty, it’s still playing off that core storyline: everything that happens is interesting because of how it relates to the plot.

In MOTB, you wake up in the cave and you don’t know how you got there or what’s wrong with you. But suddenly you’re learning about red wizards, and reading up on old gods, and some spirits are ticked off at you, and you deal with them, and then your curse really kicks in – but wait, I kind of forgot about the curse because I was so busy dealing with these wizards, and oh hey, we can wear masks in this game? That’s kinda neat … but anyway, you get my point: for about half the game, until things really get going, the main storyline gets lost in the unusual characters, scenarios, traditions and conflicts you encounter. All of those details create a fantastic atmosphere, but they distract from the plot. They don’t ruin it – it’s always basically clear what you’re doing and what you’re working toward – but they don’t help it, either.

Weird shifts in tone. During Act II, there’s a terrific sequence of scenes where you explore different “dreamscapes” – taking you from other people’s personal hells, to your own. It’s one of the most memorable parts of the game, but it also highlights one of the game’s problems: it jolts from clever to moody, from witty and sarcastic to ethereal and dreamy. In one of the game’s best-written sequences, you have to help someone who sold his soul to the devil, by helping him get out of the contract. It’s a funny, fast and deftly-written scene. But it sits right next to a very personal and disturbing scene involving one of the player’s old companions. I won’t say it killed the mood, but it was distractingly obvious that two totally different writers were at work here.

This is actually a continuation … of the first Neverwinter Nights 2. That first game ended with an abrupt, “wtf” ending that ticked off some of the fans. In MOTB, you get to pick up the story and find out what happened next.

The thing is, there’s really no connection between the two games. In tone, themes, and style, they’re totally different. Every reference to the first game feels shoehorned in – you’re walking around, dealing with a new story, new companions and new challenges, and all of a sudden you get to ask someone, “Hey, whatever happened to that dwarf I used to hang out with? Can you patch his story in here for me?”

MOTB is a smaller, more intimate story; it doesn’t really need any connection to the last game, and the last game’s problems aren’t solved by sticking some wrap-up in this game.

/ / /

Okay – to be clear, MOTB was written well. I loved the game. I gave it a really good grade. But these are the kind of concerns that we don’t always voice about games. “Really cool” is often good enough – plus, how do you really judge a story unless you experience all of its branches? (The evil plotlines vary significantly from the good ones – or so I’ve read.) But in this case, they’re so damn close that I don’t mind demanding a little more.

I’m technically in the middle of three games this holiday week, but one of them dominates my attention: Super Mario Galaxy. It’s taking me longer than it should to beat the damn thing but I can’t stop playing it.

Earlier I said I’m not a fan of Mario. And here’s the thing: I’m still not. I enjoy Super Mario because it’s a near-flawless example of “flow” – it teaches you a new trick, makes you prove you’ve learned it, gives you a jolt of satisfaction, and moves on to teach you something else. The most difficult, “fuck fuck FUCK” moments may frustrate, but they never feel cheap. The most frantic boss battles easily break into their component parts, giving you enough time to study what’s going on, understand the problem, and work your way through it.

At the same time, the OMG rainbow-colored cartoonishness of it is not to my liking. After two years I think I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that Japanese gaming leaves me cold. Not all of it, of course, but as a rule, drab, dull Western entertainment jibes better with me than the cute, colorful, spectacular and fantastical stuff that’s characterized by anime, manga, and most of Nintendo’s games. (I do like Zelda – though not the cutesy kiddy version.)

In the case of Super Mario Galaxy, there’s nothing wrong with the style per se, but it definitely doesn’t win me over. It’s a childish, cutesy world with a grating, mentally defective plumber and a bunch of dopey monsters. Each level throws newer, more colorful crap at me and I sit here, uncharmed. I enjoy the challenge, but Mario’s world is not one where I feel like hanging out. In other words, my experience of playing Super Mario Galaxy is not that far from, say, doing a sudoku puzzle.

In his Best of ‘07 for the NYT, Seth Schiesel gave the game a left-handed compliment, along the same lines – it’s a great example of a classic Mario game, but not much more:

Galaxy is finely tuned and a worthy member of the Mario pantheon. Almost anyone can have fun playing it. But as with Halo, Galaxy is at some level mostly a reinvention of classic play modes. In Halo that means battling killer aliens. In Mario that means jumping and dodging and collecting stars to free the princess who, as she has been for more than 20 years, is locked away in a cartoon-style castle. That’s fun as far as it goes. But now that the Nintendo developer Shigeru Miyamoto has gotten the Wii incarnations of his Mario and Zelda series out of the way, perhaps he will turn to creating something genuinely new. (Wii Fit, the fitness system coming to North America next year, could just be it.)

Of course, Schiesel’s #1 game of the year comes out to be Mass Effect : he clearly wants better storytelling and emotional complexity, but I’d argue that Portal, which accomplishes that goal seamlessly in the gameplay, beats Mass Effect, where the story’s world is strapped onto the action with duct tape. Portal is the opposite of Super Mario. It takes place in a grim, grey, claustrophobic world. But when the desparation breaks, it does it with style and humor. I’m much happier there.

I switch on the radio and catch the news: Bhutto’s been assassinated. Pakistan, possibly the most dangerous nation on Earth right now, is in chaos, and the current President has been eating the line they’ve fed him since September 12, 2001, when he decided to look the other way so long as they promised to dick around in the mountains and pretend to be on our side. But no, no time to bash him – he’s old news. I’m the one who can set a better course. I’m the one with the responsibility to fix this mess.

Who am I? A New Hampshire primary voter.

Just under two weeks from now, we vote for a Republican or Democratic candidate to lead his or her party, hopefully to victory. I thought that this time, this year, we would be a state under siege. Put both sides together and you should have nearly twenty political hacks stomping the ground here. I mean, 2003 was intense enough with just a handful of Democrats that nobody liked. You couldn’t cross the street without running into one of them – whether it was Dick Gephardt speaking at a church down the street, or John Kerry, standing formidably in his overcoat on a cold December night, shaking hands with everyone who came out of the grocery store. On one occasion I saw five candidates in one day – driving up and down icy I-93, from John and Elizabeth Edwards at the Tilton Diner to Howard Dean packing ‘em in at a union hall in Concord, to Kerry ice-skating with his supporters, who still believed.

This year? It’s all about Iowa. And yes, I’m ticked. I’m a politics junkie. I read ABCNews.com’s The Note every day at lunch, just to relax. The highs, the lows, the frontrunners, the whackos – it’s all endlessly fascinating. But I don’t feel as much a part of it this time around. Last year, I also had front-row access: I covered several campaign appearances for the local alt-weekly, The Wire. My coverage was more like concert reviews: Wes Clark speaks at Exeter, here are the laugh lines. I did a repeat this winter with Bill Richardson’s appearance at the River Run bookstore. He was a total doof – plenty to work with.

At the same time, no matter how closely I follow the race, I have to admit that I’m making up my own mind almost on the fly – and almost entirely on the same stupid things anyone would use: character. Some inkling of positions on the few issues I really pay attention to. Occasionally, fear of what’ll happen if we get to inauguration day, 2009, and someone sets off a nuke. Obama has the vision, but McCain – well, gravity’s a good thing. I can’t think of many issues on which we agree, but I still believe if he’d won in 2000 and been in office on 9/11? He’d be on Mt. Rushmore by now.

Last time, I voted in the Democratic Primary. And I voted for Dean. This was after the infamous Dean scream and his momentum-killing loss in Iowa. I know he’s liberal, and I know he couldn’t have survived in the general. But I liked him. I heard him speak several times, and I got to hear the way his mind works and the way he tackles a problem. He was direct, thoughtful, and on his record, more moderate than the press made him out to be. I don’t mean to sound like a Ron Paul supporter, but he came off as loonier on-screen than he did in person. And I never would have known it if I weren’t in New Hampshire, attending his campaign appearances.

This year was different from the get-go – I caught Obama’s first New Hampshire appearance, last December, and his first time out of the gate he was a rock star. Last time around, I got to meet John Edward in somebody’s living room; Obama drew 1,500 people and you had to wait in line for an hour just to get an autograph (he was ostensibly on a book tour). I’ve seen Richardson, Obama, Edwards again, and Dodd. I want to catch McCain before it’s over. I never got to see Hillary, even though she and Bill held court right here in Market Square.

I won’t waste copy defending New Hampshire’s special status, because it should go without saying that any time these chuckleheads have to work diners and living rooms, and come face-to-face with real live human beings who can ask any questions they want, it’s a good thing. New Hampshire stepped up first; we get the first primary. I like to think that we’ll knock Romney out of the race, on the basis of being a total phony and lacking in any character. I’m hoping for a McCain comeback – I may vote in the GOP primary to help make that happen. Or maybe I’ll vote Dem. But believe me, as indecisive as I sound now, I take this seriously. The fate of the world is in my hands.

Whether you celebrate it or you just get a day off work, have a Merry Christmas and expect more (and more frequent) blogging later this week!

I just filed my “Best of 2007″ game blurbs for the Onion. I split a list of six games with the inimitable Gus Mastrapa (who just started blogging heavily again – check it). That means I’m not publishing a full Best Of list anywhere.

I could post one here. But to make things interesting, let’s do something different: let’s post the major games that did NOT make my Best Of list, and the reasons why. This could get ugly.

Super Mario Galaxy: So I’m torn on this one. I understand it’s practically the greatest game ever made ever. I understand people love Mario. Know what? I hate Mario. I’m enjoying this game – as it gets harder, I find myself paying more attention to each level instead of just buzzing past all the goofy fountains and climbing vines and all the other crap they crammed in here. But I dunno. Mario. Should I appreciate and rank this game highly because I have objective super-observant senses of perception? Sorry. I just don’t like Mario that much. Let someone else crank this to the top of their lists.

Crackdown and Assassin’s Creed: Both the same problem – both great big cities with plenty to do, but not so much that you want to move in. As sandbox city games go, Grand Theft Auto hit a certain pinnacle because it just surprises you with how much it has to offer – I keep thinking of the time that I beat someone up, and then an ambulance showed up to help out. Moments like that make you realize you’re in a working, self-reliant society, and not just a city-themed playground. ‘Course, to be honest, I haven’t played GTA all that much, so maybe I’m too romantic about this. Still: both games felt like a B; I gave ‘em both a B; they didn’t hit the home run.

Rock Band: Haven’t played it yet. Been invited to two Rock Band parties – had to skip ‘em both because of deadlines. Sorry.

Guitar Hero III: Too crass. Getting sick of metal.

Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass: Got hooked on this a couple weekends ago when I was making a lot of plane trips and sitting around a lot of airports, and I’m still determined to see it through – but the cutesy dialogue is grating on me, and the adventure’s not sucking me in. I loved Twilight Princess, which believe it or not was my first Zelda game – what can I say, I grew up with an Apple //c and a Colecovisino. But this is a snack compared to that.

Metroid Prime: Corruption: The Wii pointer controls are great, but chalk me up as someone who would rather kill stuff on the XBox. Boy – I’m really not a Nintendo fanboy.

Puzzle Quest: Gave it a shot while I had my kidney stone. I’m no good at Bejeweled. Sorry.

Any real-time strategy titles: Terrible at ‘em. I make no headway. Sorry guys – you don’t want my opinion anyway. Off the list.

Mass Effect: If Assassin’s Creed was a big dumb black lab of a game, Mass Effect was an in-bred, schizophrenic little yapper with eczema – yet I couldn’t bring myself to put it to sleep (i.e., stop playing it). Strong in many ways, weak in many others. Plus, performance problems that reminded me uncomfortably of playing Second Life. I was hooked while it lasted, but ultimately? Didn’t make the cut.

Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer: I likes me the computer role-playing games, and this one has promise. But I’m still in the first act, and not far enough to consider it for my list – and anyway – as much as it’s beating Mass Effect on consistency and execution, it hasn’t really sucked me in yet. I’ll give it more time, and then I’ll come back and grovel.

Knytt and Knytt Stories: I gave them some love at The AV Club, but they’re slight little things, aren’t they? Of the two, Knytt is my favorite – and jeez, look at this gameworld - I dunno. Not top 5, but likely top 10.

Any MMORPGs: World of Warcraft Burning Crusade impressed me, and would probably make it into the Top 10, though I didn’t play it much – I explored the Blood Elf starting area, and that was about it. Of the other MMOGs I played this year, none really blew my mind. Sorry.

Half-Life Episode Two: I fall prey to the problem of thinking that it’s not that much better than the last installment, plus my top spot was Portal by a mile, so do I really want to make room? But to tell the truth, it would probably creep into my top 10. It’s worse than the last game in that being invited to smoosh all 300 ant lion larvae, and crawling around trying to find the damn things (which I did not do, but I was constantly tempted), really breaks the realism. But it’s stronger in the dialogue, and the way you really had to decide who to watch closely during a tense conversation. And oh yeah, it’s one of the best-made games of the year. Definitely top 10. Not top 5, though.

So that’s it. Is it biased? Oh hell yes. But guess what? Most top-whatever lists are. They’re a battleground between feelings of obligation and shame, and the chance to give a boost to the stuff you actually gave a damn about and aren’t too embarrassed to rep for. And anyway, I picked all of three games for the list, so if you find this and you’re incensed by what you take to be an unprofessional demeanor? Don’t worry – the world won’t stop turning just because I didn’t like/play/vote for your game. I promise.

UPDATE: No point in linking to all of the “Best Of” lists, but I enjoyed Mitch Krpata’s take on the worst games of the year.

Also don’t miss Leigh Alexander’s Best Characters and Most Poignant Moments of the Year.

UPDATE 2: Here’s the full list on The Onion. Commenters seem most upset by the omission of Call of Duty 4 and Super Mario Galaxy. Honestly, Super Mario Galaxy would probably creep into my Top 5 at this point, my Mario trash-talk aside. Someone also pointed out God of War 2, which I forgot to mention in this post. I played it, I enjoyed it, and a couple of the puzzles and several of the fights were fantastic – but it was also the kind of game that one chews up and spits out. Nothing in the game lived up to the first sequence, even the final fight with Zeus (or maybe the fact that I had to try that five times sucked away some of the awesomeness). It’s in the top 10, but the bottom half.

One note on the numbering, though: we didn’t coordinate that; my contributions go BioShock > Halo 3 > Jets ‘N Guns GOLD. And Portal >>>>>> all three, for all the reasons Gus gave in his excellent blurb.

New column up at GameSetWatch today. It’s a little messy, kind of a “get to know you” thing since the first column was already its own depraved little story and I never had time to say, “Hi!” And it sets up some of the arguments we’ll be pacing through every other Monday – about games as pop culture, games wishing they were pop culture, and sometimes, games trumping pop culture. See what you think.

Other recent stuff:

Pitchfork: Review of Radiohead In Rainbows - CD 2 (the bonus cuts)
The Onion AV Club: Review of Assassin’s Creed

When I need a break from my avalanche of year-end filings, lately I’ve been playing Assassin’s Creed. I’m reviewing it for next week, and no game has given me more difficulty with its grade. On the one hand, I’ve read the negative press – specifically, essays like Chris Kohler’s on exactly what’s wrong with everything about the game. On the other? It’s a hell of a lot of fun, even the repetitious parts. The cities look gorgeous and they’re fun to run through. With so few individual things you can do, you’d think it would get dull, but I just love spending time in here and killing the shit out of people.

So sue me.

I often write about using games as a way to learn more about yourself – RPGs and their “should I do the right thing or to hell with it” alignment systems being the most robust example – but one thing I’ve learned this year is that sometimes, I like slow, satisfying games with concrete tasks and obvious rewards. I liked Touch the Dead and yes, even Vampire Rain more than I should’ve. And in its unrealized ambition, it also reminds me of Mercenaries on the XBox – a game I enjoyed so much that I actually killed every single person in the deck of cards, even the optional ones. So if I had to hazard a guess why Creed is so ridiculously popular, it’s that playing it is a lot of fun and much of it looks awesome, and beyond that, people don’t really care. Or at least, I don’t.

UPDATE: Another theory on why I liked Creed so much. One of my favorite comic book characters is this guy –

- and he and the vigilante protagonist of this game are maybe one degree apart from each other, and then only because Moon Knight is based a couple countries away in Egyptian mythology.

Still no time to post, but in case you missed Radiohead’s webcast, here they are doing great stuff with “Bodysnatchers”:

I didn’t draft a “Top 25 Albums of the Year” list this year – as usual, I had a hard time coming up with more than five new records that I’m passionate about, so in the end, I punted. But every year I make a mix CD of my favorite songs.

UPDATE: You can listen to it on my page on iMeem – WordPress won’t let me embed it, but it’s just a click away.

1. Twilight Sad, “That Summer At Home I Had Become the Invisible Boy”
2. Dirty Projectors, “Depression”
3. Charlotte Hatherley, “I Want You To Know”
4. Gruff Rhys, “Cycle of Violence”
5. M.I.A., “Bird Flu”
6. Carol Bui, “Modern Dance”
7. Fiery Furnaces, “Navy Nurse”
8. Of Montreal, “Faberge Falls For Shuggie”
9. Supersilent, “8.5″
10. Shapes and Sizes, “The Horse’s Mouthy Mouth”
11. Deerhunter, “Spring Hall Convert”
12. Panda Bear, “Bros”
13. Deerhoof, “Matchbook Seeks Maniac”

Hidden Bonus Track: Jonathan Coulton, “Still Alive [The Portal Credits Song]“

So today was a good day to be me and to publish articles.

- Mass Effect review in The Onion – and that’s the last we’ll say about it (well, except see below)

- Supersilent 8 review in Pitchforkmedia.com

And also, as of tonight I have a new gaming column, over at GameSetWatch. Titled Save the Robot, ’cause I had no better ideas, it’s a pretty big diversion from my recent column at Paste, in that I can talk filthy and run on at length. I may do some pieces for Paste later, as it was a real privilege to run a column there and to get my own caricature and everything. I hope I reached a few people with it. But I think this’ll be a little easier and a lot more fun.

Here is the debut column. This brings me to another point: the difference between my blog and my freelance work. The last month, a lot of my posts have pointed to stuff that I published somewhere else. And a lot of the stuff I’ve published steals from my blog – including this first column. Sure, I buffed it up a bit and consolidated it, but it’s basically a reprint. For the next few columns that I’ve planned out, I’m expecting to run all-new material. I’m a leeeetle uncomfortable repurposing old stuff for new markets. At the same time, and just to be honest, not too many people read this blog. And trying stuff out here gives me a lot of freedom to let loose and act natural and then, at the end of the day, come up with better-sounding, better-reading pieces.

I like writing original content for this blog. I seem to do it maybe once or twice a week. But I also see this as a work blog – a place where, if you’re curious about what I cover, you can have a one-stop shop to keep up with it, no matter where it runs. Now and again, I may focus on other markets. I may steal from myself now and again. But when all’s said and done, I like to think we’re all the winners.