Thoughts On Blur

There's a reason nobody had made a 'real world' kart racer before. Bizarre Creations, a studio I have infinite love for given that they made Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2, have made a valiant attempt, but they've missed what made the genre so fun in the first place. Flow.

In Mario Kart, and the sadly under-rated Crash Team Racing, you put the pedal to the metal and don't ease off it. The beauty of this is that it provides the game with unstoppable momentum. The karts have a finely tuned jump and drift move that maintains your speed while carving a satifying curve through any corner. This is a fantastic replacement for braking, which stymies the flow of the races and doesn't at all mesh with the weapon battling side of the game. With more realistic maneuvering comes more chance of game ending mistakes and adapting to sudden changes like a shunt or a danger in the road ahead requires far faster reactions and much more work.

Also in order to improve the flow, classic kart games feature weapons that, while often random and unbalanced, don't disrupt competing players' fun. Being hit by a weapon will have a penalty, but the player will always end up facing in the right direction. They will spin out or slow down, but they will drive out of it and carry on. In Blur however, they will spin out or slow down, be forced to make a painful three point turn, drive out of it and carry on in a significantly worse position than they were before. And then get hit by something else.

The point is, random punishment and complicated handling don't go hand in hand. Even wipeout, a game with far more emphasis on racing technique than a kart racer, made large concessions regarding control because it dealt with weapon combat and destruction. Blur is a polished game, but nevertheless its frustrating lack of flow stops it short of brilliance.

Doctor Who: The Adventure Games Episode One

The new series of Doctor Who, the fifth of the rebooted franchise, is arguably the best yet aired. Despite having a less handsome lead (Matt Smith following the delicious and charismatic David Tennant) the show has been vastly improved with a subtle change in direction instigated by new helmsman, Stephen Moffat. According to the official PR, this collection of episodic point and click adventures is to be considered as 'extra episodes', as much canon as the adventures screened each Saturday. This doesn't really hold up in practice however, with the stories' chronology dubious when juxtaposed with the television plot, and the two main actors phoning in strangely dessicated and bland performances.

The game is played in a 3rd person 3d perspective (perhaps a more elegant and 'kind to the average family computer' 2D style would have been advisable), and this is awkward for adventure gaming a la Monkey Island or Broken Sword, but is necessary for the badly implemented stealth scenarios which accompany every goddamn map traversal section. The game would be much better off were these sections played out entirely as cut scenes, it has nothing to gain through maintaining interaction here. The stealth gameplay is fiddly and frustrating, and there is no enjoyment to be gleaned from it. Filling time would have been much more successful from a fixed perspective, solving point and click puzzles in the classic manner, and leaving the action to the cut scenes. While the majority of the game has been tuned for children to play easily, the stealth sequences are anything but.

As awkward as the cursor controls are, it's thoughtful of Sumo Digital to include other control options, even going as far as to include WASD movement for seasoned PC gamers. The context sensitive clicking is smart too, making it easier for children to play. The intention is honourable, even if the execution is a little lacking.

The puzzles themselves are smart, short and fun, like sci-fi Professor Layton, and should feature more strongly. This kind of thing is what Doctor Who is about, and more so are the 'combine item a with item b' puzzles, which should form the spine of the experience by rights.

In the end, this is a free game, the first of several, and it is fairly decent if you're a Doctor Who fan. I had fun with it despite occasionally shouting at it for stuttering on my steam-powered macbook and for one particularly bloody minded stealth scene. Anyway, the next one has Cybermen, so it is going to be awesome no matter how like a potato Matt Smith's face looks in 3D.

Gameplay: 3/10
Wibbly Wobbly

Art and Narrative: 6/10
Timey Wimey

Red Dead Redemption

First things first, it's important to note that Red Dead is a spectacular game. Which is to say, it's certainly a spectacle, but the underlying gameplay is while varied, quite awkward. Ostensibly concerned with authenticity, it struggles to move beyond the tired old mechanics of Grand Theft Auto, and this ties up the game in messy elements that prevent it from truly shining as an experience. The world Rockstar have created here is beautiful, it feels real and it teems with life, solving the common sandbox problem of soullessness. Your actions have purpose, filling bars, acquiring items, gaining levels, and the locations you roam through change the opportunities that arise. It feels more like an environment and less like a map than any sandbox game preceding it.

Unfortunately this feeling doesn't spread to the game's other facets, with an intrusive HUD detracting from the lush setting and some bizarre and robotic physics and animation forming the framework. The reliance on a minimap isn't too much of a problem, I wouldn't have minded the real world skill required in occasionally pausing to refer to the proper map, but I can see it is useful. The constant clutter of button prompts and status updates I could have done without though, they definitely took away from what I wanted of the game, a realistic world to explore and inhabit. Majorly more detrimental to this is the fundamental style of play, a woeful cover system combining with a ridiculous lock on system which couldn't steal more gameplay from you without actually pulling the trigger itself. It can safely be considered from this perspective given how useless the free aiming is, the reticule is so invisible you're awarded a trophy just for getting a headshot using it. Red Dead's combat is made frustrating by it's button press intensive nature, unreliably switching in and out of cover (a problem exacerbated if, like me, you try to loot as many defeated enemies as possible) and requiring something in the region of seventy presses to run to cover and kill someone. The configuration in general could have been more economic, especially given Rockstar's experience with Euphoria physics, the game could have easily adapted to your playstyle, sprinting by holding the button, or, (gasp) on it's own (after all, who in the world just moseys through a gunfight?)None of this is to say that Red Dead is a bad game, it's just... Hmn. Okay well the main missions are a bad game. The meat of the game is in it's ambient challenges, consistent, powerful mood and living, exciting world. These more than make up for the poor shooting gameplay. I only wish they'd gone the whole distance with that absorbing world, they'd introduced sleep, hunger and thirst dynamics that changed the way you play, making your aim poorer or reducing your health and stamina, making the land less something you play in, and more something you inhabit. Imagine riding through the mountains, periodically needing to find a safe place to camp out where you can light a fire and rest, eating to get your energy back and riding out again. Perhaps you run out of food in your saddlebags and game to hunt, and your vision occasionally blurs as you ride, tired and ragged into Armadillo, for a welcome bed and drink at the saloon. That'd be a fantastic game no matter how terrible the shooting was.

Gameplay: 6/10
Varied and functional, but far from ideal.

Art and Narrative: 9/10
A better realised story and world than any western film I've ever seen.

Alan Wake

Alan Wake is an example of a widespread problem in game design: over-thinking. The game is fundamentally good, but plagued with badly applied frills and unnecessary extra elements.
Arguably this extends to the premise itself, a story of a writer, writing into existence the events of the game in a bizarre and complex attempt to save his wife from a mysterious dark force given power through language. The strange and potentially ridiculous nature of this story is redeemed through some fantastic execution though, and by drip-feeding curious enigmas between genuinely gripping action sequences Remedy have told a tale far more than the sum of it's parts. In the manner of Lost, tantalising loose ends drive the player onwards, while intense action and stirring atmosphere keep them gripped moment to moment.

Alan Wake owes an obvious debt to Lost specifically, a tale of the supernatural told from a realistic perspective with a divisive habit of raising more questions than it answers. This is a hard balance to maintain, mystery being the key ingredient of fear (revealing the secrets of the unknowable monstrous antagonist is always an anti-climax. Stephen King's IT, the black smoke monster, you name it) while fans thirst for explanations. Alan Wake achieves this much more successfully than Lost in my opinion, never becoming overwhelmed by it's own puzzles and plot threads and satisfactorily unraveling enough of it's major secrets that the player can grasp the big picture, while maintaining the fear and mystique of the unknown. This is a laudable quality it shares with Mass Effect, where the incredible, unstoppable reapers have motives beyond human understanding, and are acknowledged as so far superior to known life as to be entirely unfightable. Mass Effect does this better, where the Reapers keep their mystery while still being thoroughly explored and defined, but it's a hard thing to achieve and Alan Wake still does it better than most.

The storytelling is good almost in spite of the writing, which veers wildly from smart and understated to ridiculous and ill-judged, with Alan's voice-over often seeming strangely flippant when referring to the psychopaths hunting him down.

A somewhat less advisable feature to acquire from television is the episodic format, which would work fantastically were the game delivered in such a way, but as it stands is just absurd, repeating events you witnessed or indeed actively played out just minutes before to little merit. If 'Alan Wake 2' is delivered as multiple DLC episodes this approach could become relevant, but this is unlikely and the format as it stands is useless.

Also present on the list of useless features is the collection mechanics on display. Shining Thermoses are out of place in the dark haunted woods of Bright Falls, and aside from ruining the mood and bringing you out of the experience, destroy the carefully balanced direction of the game. Without the pointless collecting, and searching every inch of each area for hot chocolate or whatever, the game would really feel like a panicked chase through the woods, and the 'events' whenever you reach certain waypoints (flickering silhouettes in the mist further down the path etc) would never be in danger of being missed due to exploring behind a tree.

It has long been my opinion that the abstract collection challenges in videogames are due a large re-think. If designers must pad out their games with collection missions, or if they are looking for a way to get the player to explore their painstakingly crafted maps, have the player find unique items or equipment with a measurable in-game effect! Sure, exploration for the sake of exploration isn't a huge draw for most people, but even having no collection system is infinitely better than ruining the pace and fun of your game with abstract glowy orb or meta-game currency acquisition. Have unlocks and acheivements tied to core game mechanics, or one-off explorations. I for one find the prospect of attempting to search down every stupid piece of treasure in a game, no matter what the reward, sickeningly boring. It's neither good storytelling nor good entertainment. It's busywork.

This isn't to say I sometimes don't try anyway, because these dumb missions have instilled in me some kind of proto-obsessive-compulsive attitude for shiny trinkets. I don't even care about the damn thermoses, but if I see one and miss the chance to pick it up I'll be goddamn annoyed. Same thing happened to me with a Gorgon Eye in God of War 2 and I couldn't bring myself to pick the game up again.

Anyway, back to Alan Wake. The game looks really good, the enemies are genuinely unsettling and the environments are incredibly realistic, making the supernatural elements feel all the more creepy and out of place. The lighting effects in particular are beautiful, and while some people have had problems with the faces, which aren't the best, they certainly didn't detract from the experience for me. There is one, huge, glaring flaw with the game's looks though, one which is as hard to explain as it is weird that the artists at Remedy didn't pick up on it. Alan's jacket. It's awful to look at. There's nothing particularly wrong with it, but having to stare at his back for the entirety of the game was infuriating, the visual equivalent of nails down a chalkboard, or drawing with broken charcoal. I can't exactly pin down why I hate it so much, but I really really do.

Anyway, all in all, Alan Wake is a very good game, it feels good to play, and it's a step forward in bringing quality storytelling into the mainstream of the medium. It combines some of the worst features of both dramatic television and gaming, but overcomes these in being a memorable and entertaining game regardless.

Gameplay: 7/10
Unique and textured, it feels comfortable to play, until you have to run or use the dodge move. Likewise, combat is great until there are too many enemies charging or throwing things at you, at which point it becomes an absolute fuckfest.

Art and Narrative: 8/10
Some fantastic lore and visual storytelling, docked one point for being forced into an arbitrary episodic format, and another point for the jacket.