Today on Political Drama Hour, Variety reports that a new video game related bill is making the rounds. The proposition? ID boys and girls who want to buy M and AO rated games.
The “Video Games Endorsement Act” was suggested by Representative Lee Terry. Not only would ID checks be mandatory for kids with mere shadows on their chins and upper lips, but stores caught selling to minors could receive a fine.
I’m actually pretty supportive of the idea, minus one issue…
Douglas Wilson from Gamasutra wrote an interesting editorial about the methods of story delivery used in most games. The piece features Super Mario Galaxy as its base, but I think the topic is highly relevant to games across all consoles.
Gaming is a hobby populated by a hard-to-please crowd of mumblers, half of whom cry foul over the fact Super Mario has been rescuing princesses since they were a gleam in their daddy’s eye (”Why can’t he do something new?“) and half of whom froth over Nintendo’s audacity when it includes a story in a Super Mario game (”Buncha high-falootin’ jerks don’t know their place, which is making games for my kid sister.”).
The story for Super Mario Galaxy is told through, of all things, a storybook. Princess Rosalina, the seemingly vapid caretaker of a magical space station and dozens of star-creatures, will occasionally allow Mario to sit in on “Story Time.” Rosalina’s storybook tells a tale of adventure and deeper-seeking that’s not completely unlike The Little Prince. Everything is presented in pastel colours that are deceptively childish. It’s also a surprisingly emotional story with simple themes like family, homesickness and even death.
And guess what: You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to.
You can read Rosalina’s story, discover her motives and even develop a fondness for her. Or you can give it a miss and go on thinking she just ain’t right. It’s up to you.
Speaking for myself, this is the kind of choice I love to see in video games. Games are capable of telling complex backstories, but a developer who includes one runs a risk of offending people who just want to get on and play. If you were to queue up the number of gamers who play games for the stories, you’d have a mighty short line compared to the individuals who are all about skipping cut scenes.
True, Mario is still Mario. There’s a huge risk involved in incorporating narrative, and I think Super Mario Galaxy handled it well. It told the story. It kept my interest. I was not beaten over the head. I did not have to wait for hours to get back to playing.
Writers hear “Show, Don’t Tell” often enough to make a novice puke. Still, it’s a very valuable piece of advice that applies in a same-but-different way to movies and games. Do we know what rendered the human race infertile in Children of Men? If we did, it would suck a great deal of intrigue out of the film. Do we know what caused the downfall of Rapture in Bioshock? We get a vague idea if we piece together the narratives that we are responsible for finding.
Do we know about blah blah Sephiroth blah blah Cloud in Final Fantasy VII? Yes, because the game wouldn’t give us a bloody rest about yelling the story in our ears. And ten years later the highly-ridiculed story still doesn’t make sense, and I’ll warn you right now not to laud it as a work of genius that holds up to The Grapes of Wrath, because the end result of that act will have you slinking out of the Punishment Room with your backside stinging.
Ah, but even Final Fantasy VII should be credited for one almost-fascinating piece of storytelling: Vincent’s backstory, which is accessible only if you can find the hiding spot of Sephiroth’s mother, Lucrecia (or the spirit thereof…it’s kind of a muddy encounter). Given, it’s a heavy-handed bit of narrative, but compared to the rest of what the game offers, it’s worth sitting through. Or maybe I just felt good while reading it because it was a reward I received for being a thorough explorer.
I know games are capable of telling great stories. I have no trouble admitting that I was an avid writer of fanfiction, and I still indulge. I’d just like to see developers fine-tune their presentation. Yoshiaki Koizumi, the director of Super Mario Galaxy, has a background in film. I think it served him well for the game’s development.
Grand Theft Auto 4 has received great praise from fans and critics for its realism (just feel that femur give way before my bat, mmm what a crisp sound for a fine mornin’), but all is not well in Liberty City. VideoGamer.com has published a rant about Rockstar’s latest, which perhaps borders on being too realistic. Nico’s nicked cars are no longer ignorant to the demands of physics, for example, and cops will bust you for firing warning shots at slow pedestrians. But these touches are not necessarily welcome for every fan:
“It’s a sandbox game which is no longer a sandbox. It’s more like a very small steel box. You can’t break any rules. People playing GTA 4 without wanting to break the rules can probably have a good time, but for me this isn’t GTA any more.”
I’m sort of glad that I just rely on the likes of Mario and Cloud for my fantasy gaming.
It’s probably not a big surprise to learn that Valve isn’t hip with the Playstation 3. Anyone who played EA’s port of The Orange Box can deduce as much. But speculation is best fortified with, like, quotes and stuff, so here’s Kombo’s story on the matter.
In an interview with CVG, Doug Lombardi noteth:
“We’re not PS3 developers - we’re doing PC and 360 like with Orange Box. EA came to us and said ‘Wow, Orange box was an incredible project, can we do a PS3 version?’”
And now you know the rest of the story.
I still haven’t played the Orange Box, actually. My brother and I are engaged in a silent game of Chicken. First person to buy it has to give it up to the other party when they inevitably ask if they can bum the copy.
Iron Man is burning up the movie theatres with one of the most successful releases in movie historee, but his pathetic video game adaptation ain’t making any friends. What’s wrong with it? What’s always wrong with these movie-oriented cash-ins? Bad controls, repetitive environments and missions, rampant boredom in general.
If you’re interested, GameTrailers has a video comparison of the Playstation 3 version versus the Xbox 360 version. The PS3 version looks a little richer and crisper. Too bad it still sucks the bag gameplay-wise. Go home and nurse the bottle, Tony Stark.
Square-Enix has been torturing us slowly in celebration of Final Fantasy VII’s decade of existence. First there were gems like Dirge of Cerberus and Advent Children, though we did receive a dose of painkillers through the Zack-oriented Last Order and Crisis Core.
Now it’s over. Time to change the linen and scrub the blood off the cell walls and wonder what we’ll get as a reward for our endurance.
Yoshinori Kitase, the director of Final Fantasy VII and the dungeon master in charge of the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, doesn’t foresee a remake happening in the near future:
“My feelings are that if a remake were to work well then all the core members of the original team must be reassembled, all the artists and designers.”
Because the game is just that holy, uh, I guess.
Let us squeeze our bitter disappointment into a tiny little ball and get on with our lives. If you need help in the disappointment department, here’s that Final Fantasy VII PS3 tech demo that made the world take a collective hyper spaz over what may be (or what might have been, as the case may be):
Kombo.com has published a great feature about gaming’s complete disregard for players with disabilities, particularly hearing. The article’s author, Jonathan Law, is hard of hearing and he observes how few games bother with subtitles:
“Titles like Uncharted, Gears of War, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy XII and countless others all offer the option for the end user to turn the subtitles on or off as per their desire. Some games like Half-Life 2 take this a step further and actually include closed-captioning for the dialogue and the sound effects. But it sometimes feels that for every game that does include subtitles, there’s a Resident Evil 4 or a Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter that does not include subtitles to go along with their voice acting. It’s frustrating to realize that despite the fact that developers have come so far in their ability to express their stories and experiences, they often forget that not everyone will be able to enjoy them because of something so minor being overlooked.”
I actually wrote a feature for 1UP some time ago about inaccessible games. I contacted Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo and asked each company if it had plans to make gaming a comfortable experience for everyone. None of the companies were forthcoming with answers, which was pretty sporting of them.
It’s understandable that companies aren’t going to go as far as Nintendo did when they developed a special NES for a wheelchair-bound quadriplegic boy. But the consistent availability of subtitles isn’t asking for the moon. There’s no DVD on the shelf, no movie theatre in North America that doesn’t offer the option of subtitles to deaf and hard of hearing patrons. Why is getting the same from game companies a total crapshoot? Even gamers with normal hearing can benefit from subtitles. I hate not being able to follow a story at my own pace. Listening to voice actors drone on can be infuriating, regardless of whether or not said actors have a molecule of talent (survey says: Not usually).
What’s even more distressing is the latest fad among game studios, which is to include subtitles that poor-ass gamers with standard def televisions have no hope in hell of reading. Text the size of a pinhead isn’t a good idea in any sense. My ears might be fine, but my eyes sure ain’t.
When I was all young and spry and stuff, I used to spend a lot of time on message boards. These days though, I exclusively hang out on the forums of Mr Jeremy Parish whenever I need to procrastinate.
The “Talking Time” forums are home to a number of interesting game-related conversations. A recent one: Why are movie /television directors so gosh darn lazy about their depictions of video game enjoyment? All too often someone will be playing a Playstation with an Atari controller, or mashing furiously at buttons for a game that doesn’t require button mashing (one poster recalled a commercial wherein Santa Claus was pounding buttons furiously while summoning Titan in Final Fantasy VII).
The answer’s pretty obvious: Nobody wants to dance the Copyright Tango, because it is a deadly dance. The other option, which pimps games and systems gratuitously, doesn’t seem much better.
At the very least, it makes for some fun memories, even if many of those memories are disgraceful. We all ate up “The Wizard,” even for atrocious lines like “You scored 50,000 on (the first screen of) Double Dragon (which is bloody impossible)?”
Do you recall any instances wherein an actor was playing a recognisable game, but doing it completely wrong just for the sake of some background movement? It’s kind of thrilling and irritating at the same time, isn’t it?
One forum member posted an episode of Doug, which is kind of based around Generic System Syndrome (Super Pretendo!):
The prodigal rumble function has returned to the Playstation 3, and everyone is delighted about it. Except maybe Sony, which has tonnes of extra SixAxis controllers that are destined to rot in warehouses. But the Big S has a plan: It’ll be slipping a SixAxis into a new Japanese-exclusive bundle pack.
The bundle, which is called the “PlayStation 3 Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots Welcome Box with Dual Shock 3″ (Wow) will include a 40GB Playstation 3, the standard version of Metal Gear Solid 4, a Dual Shock 3 controller and a SixAxis controller.
Japanese gamers will even have their choice of three delicious colours: “Clear Black, Ceramic White, and Satin Silver”.
So maybe newcomers like Abel and El Wrestler Fancypants aren’t getting you excited about Street Fighter IV. Still, here’s a good reason to cheer up: lots of new Street Fighter IV screenshots, including M Bison and his original lieutenants from Shadaloo! It’ll be interesting to see what role they fill (hint: meat-stuffed punching bags).
Vega in particular looks pretty sweet. He was one of my first video game crushes. It was all downhill from there.
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