Welcome to the 2011 Mento VGAs: "Because I wanted to do one too." You all know how these things work. Video games get awards. It's a thing people are doing. But don't take my word for it:

So I'll just move directly onto the categories then:

BEST 2010 GAME PLAYED IN 2011 BECAUSE I WAITED TO BUY IT LIKE A CHEAPSKATE:

Nominees: Just Cause 2, Alan Wake, Donkey Kong Country Returns, God of War 3, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.

Just Cause 2 was a game I'd picked up the Xmas of last year, so playing it through most of January (it's a big game) seemed like an ideal way to see off 2010's spectacular year of games. Of course, I ended up playing several more games from last year in an eternal and futile attempt at catch-up, but nothing that matched the elation of grapple-hooking around an island at a hundred miles an hour.

BEST GAME MADE LONG BEFORE 2010 WHICH I WAITED TO PLAY BECAUSE BACKLOGS ARE A THING, I GUESS:

Nominees: Scurge: Hive, The Temple of Elemental Evil: A Classic Greyhawk Adventure, Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos, The Orion Conspiracy, Deus Ex.

ToEE was made doubly fun not only by its idiosyncratic, overly-complex yet deeply engrossing CRPG combat system but also from the meta-game of getting myself embroiled in a high-stakes blog competition with a certain lunar monarch and a CRPG-obsessed skeletal general for nothing short of the very world itself. Definitely one of the more memorable gaming experiences in 2011, from a game that didn't come out anywhere close to this year.

"GAME, I AM DISAPPOINT" AWARD FOR MOST DISAPPOINTING GAME:

Nominees: Bulletstorm, Super Monkey Ball 3D, Dragon Age 2, Uncharted 3, Red Faction: Armageddon.

Bulletstorm wasn't ever going to be my type of game, Uncharted 3 isn't nearly as bad as I made it out to be and the Super Monkey Ball franchise lost its vitality and charm half a dozen games ago. So it comes down to the disappointment I received from Red Faction's regressive, generic shooter iteration and Dragon Age shooting itself in the foot with a steampunk crossbow. I have to hand it to Dragon Age 2, purely because it was a franchise I became very excited with after playing the first game. First games in a franchise, if not a home run with the initial swing, usually hold a bright spark of potential that future games can build and expand on. Dragon Age 2 steered itself away from that lighthouse beacon of a spark, choosing instead to veer into the sharp, jagged rocks of a stupidly over-simplified combat system with randomly spawning enemies, dungeons which were literally the same place over and over with certain doors bricked up like we wouldn't notice and a plot that peters out towards its foregone conclusion. But whatever, it wasn't a terrible game. Just a terrible waste of a spark.

BEST BABBY GAME FOR A BABBY CONSOLE:

Nominees: Xenoblade Chronicles, Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars, Super Monkey Ball 3D, Ocarina of Time 3D, Star Fox 64 3D.

Oh boy. I do this Nintendo category each year so I don't forget my roots. I'm no Nintendo fanboy, otherwise I'd be all green and shit, but I feel my tenuous grasp on my childhood love for video games slip whenever I play a brown military shooter or gritty character action game. Nintendo is still somehow able to tap into that giddy childish passion, and I played plenty of excellent games this year that felt like a Nintendo game (de Blob 2 and Rayman: Origins immediately come to mind). I give this award to Xenoblade, because I really didn't play much else on a Nintendo console this year. However, I have a feeling in a perfect world, Skyward Sword would be getting this award. I really ought to play that.

BEST DOWNLOADABLE GAME:

Nominees: Chantelise, The Binding of Isaac, Outland, Terraria, Stacking.

I didn't give much love to downloadable games in 2011. I should've, because lord knows I have dozens of them waiting for a playthrough on my Steam client after a whole year of the Humble Indie Bundles, the Indie Royale Bundles and the always magnanimous Steam sales. These were the only five Indie games of 2011 that I actually did play this year, and they were all pretty great. I'd say The Binding of Isaac just edges them all out with its addictive and perturbing dungeon crawling. Kind of wish it had a better auto-save feature though. Sorry Bastion, maybe next year.

WEIRDEST F-ING GAME:

Nominees: Shadows of the Damned, The Binding of Isaac, Alice: Madness Returns, Resonance of Fate, Saints Row: The Third.

I think I'm just drawn to weird games. I dunno if it's because I play a (frankly disturbing) amount of vidya and am always looking for something unique, or I just have an odd sense of humour that corresponds nicely to these curios. Isaac and Alice had some very strange psychological elements, Saints Row was as gleefully manic as ever and I really had no clue what was going on with Resonance of Fate in the short amount of time I spent with it. However, I feel like if I don't give this award to the Suda 51 game he'll probably go off and sulk in a corner for a few years, so.. here you go buddy. You are the weirdest. Forever.

BEST QUICK LOOK MOMENT:

Nominees: Sabre-Tooth Satellite, Out of Bow-Wow-nds, Sky Train, Dropped In The Water, We Can Be Friends!, WTF Dragon?, Genital Triangle.

Plenty to choose from this year. Probably should've included TNT in this category for the amazing Truck Wars, but there's enough to go on with the seven above. Sky Train just about edges them out as a combination of the guys being funny and the game being funny, even if Ryan didn't quite grasp what was going on straight away. I'm a sucker for incredulous Rorie moments and Wipeout will never stop being a hilarious game to QL (and a terrible game to actually play), so this was a hard decision to make.

BEST PREMIUM CONTENT MOMENT:

Nominees: Don Rape, Tetris Battle Gaiden, Screaming Skeletons, Slice the Pie!, Creeper Cam, Shakira Makes a Video Game, Dong Dong Never Die.

Not going to dwell too much on these moments. Instead, a story: This year I purchased a month's subscription for the SNES Party (and was later gifted a year's membership by the very kind omghisam) and it has never stopped paying dividends. This is from someone who abjectly refused to pay Lowtax ten dollars for a secret torren hours of entertainment with the fine goons of that establishment and likewise hemmed and hawed a long time over the same decision for this site. Totally worth it, it turns out. Everyone should jump right into doing this as soon as possible, or during one of those large live streams where you can leave asinine messages to people watching in chat. That seemed kind of fun.

THE AWARD FOR THE DUMBEST, MOST POINTLESS & ACTUALLY SORTA REDUCTIVE VIDEO GAME AWARD CEREMONY:

Nominees: The Spike TV Video Game Awards, The Mento VGAs.

I didn't watch much of the VGAs. In fact, the clips I did watch were largely due to incredulity from the reports I was hearing. The whole thing seemed kind of insulting. I'm not one to live vicariously through my biggest hobby, as I have plenty of others of varying degrees of legitimacy (boy, that sounded shady), but I still think we deserve a lot better as a community of occasionally sensitive and discerning interactive media consumers. I realise that there are plenty of rational excuses to simply accept the VGAs as a necessary evil to help further a burgeoning legitimacy for video games, yet it's not going to happen if that legitimacy is consistently being undermined by teabagging jokes and the like. I just think back to poor old Sweep, getting verbal abuse and burger wedgies (presumably it's when the lettuce is pulled up and over the upper bun) by his hip graphic design workmates for his love of games and I can't help but believe the blame lies entirely at the feet of Spike TV and its annual idiocy. Boycott the Spike VGAs. For Sweep. He wants to be inside your heart this Christmas.

And that's going to do it for my awards this year. For a slightly more sober look at my actual top ten, I refer you to this list I made. I make a lot of lists...

See you next year! Or maybe later this year! There's still a few days to go!

I should preface this blog, all about how video games effectively use colour, by stating that I have absolutely no background in anything art-related (I thought Mario Paint was pretty sweet though). So instead of discussing colours as they pertain to graphical wizardry or aesthetic appeal - evidence that supports my lack of expertise with either will of course be appearing at the end of this blog as usual - I'll discuss how they can directly influence and be instrumental in the gameplay, which is really more in my wheelhouse.

Colour as Symbolism for Polarity

This is a fairly common use of colour in games, where it is used as a visual shorthand for a binary "on/off" gameplay facet. A good example of which would be Outland for PSN: The colour-switching between "light" and "dark" polarity ties in the story and is instrumental for most of the game's action, which involves switching on the fly to avoid damage from traps and attack creatures of the opposing element. Like Ikaruga, its inspiration in several ways, these two polarities are the colour-contrasts orange and blue - ostensibly to create a much more striking effect against the largely black and white backdrop.

A far more frequent example of this, using color-contrasts as a visual metaphor, are the reds and blues of Mass Effect and other Bioware games, where they represent a moral polarity of red for Evil (or Renegade) and blue for Good (or Paragon). It's an effective - if slightly over-simplifying - way of encapsulating a usually far more abstract split of ideologies. Outside of video games, it's a concept that's been with us since Star Wars and GI Joe, so it's fairly ingrained at this point.

Colour-Coding

Talking of ingrained, at some point in our collective gaming history we've had it drilled into us that specific colours mean specific things in our games. Like how we instinctively associate the colour red with the forces of evil, we could just as readily associate it with health potions and health meters thanks to the many games for which that colour choice is the case. Likewise, we could associate a red health bar with one that is in critical condition, rather than a healthy green or caution-advising yellow. Then again, green can also symbolise the poison status or our stamina meter. Blues are mana or magic related, purples can again suggest a toxic affliction and orange probably still sends tingles up the spine of any Valve fanboy. Okay, fine, I couldn't think of a good example for orange.

Colours are commonly, but not always, assigned to specific icons and concepts in games as, again, another visual shorthand that gamers can recognize and integrate into their understanding of a game as they learn its ropes. Having a head-start with recognized and established colour-coding alleviates much of what the game needs to explain to you - though it'll almost certainly do so anyway to avoid alienating newcomers. Often individual games and franchises will use a convenient standard of colour-coding as well: Final Fantasy fans are familiar with magical schools as dictated by their colours - white for curative, black for destruction, red for versatility and blue for special abilities learned from enemies.

Similarly, when gamepads were being designed during or after the 16-bit era (depending on region; American SNESes lacked the colour variation of their overseas cousins in lieu of a subdued set of purples), colours were assigned to different buttons to form yet another cognitive pathway for players - alongside letters, shapes and symbols - to visually associate an icon on-screen with a button on their controller.

Colour as Symbolism for Life

Vibrancy in games is often attributed to bright colours and backgrounds, the more colourful of which the better. A gritty realistic game will often mute these colours to convey to the player the seriousness of the explosion-and-sideburns-a-thon they're about to embark on, while games intended to be more fun, less depressing, more abstract and family-friendly enrich the colour palette to almost eye-searing levels to appeal to its wider audience.

More interesting though, is when games take this vitality metaphor and apply it directly to circumstances within the game. Okami, Twilight Princess, de Blob, The Saboteur and Mento favourite Wizball are all examples of games where the landscape begins monochrome and inert and fills with life and colour by way of the actions of your protagonist. As you return life to the world and expel whatever dark forces are in the process of ravaging it, the game brightens up as an instantly gratifying impact of your accomplishments.

A subtle but effective use of this monochrome/full colour contrast can be seen in The Wind Waker, which creates in the black & white Hyrule Castle a really striking metaphor of how frozen in time the once great bastion now is, especially when compared to the profusely-coloured world above.

This is the point where I open the floor to you guys: Do you recall any other effective uses of colour in not just the visual appeal of the game but also as it relates to its gameplay and/or narrative elements? Any art design major types want to talk about great examples of purely visual examples of colour? Anyone want to deride me for using the British English spelling? Because I'll warn you now that half the mods are British. Just sayin'. And don't worry, I'll be throwing in with everyone else on the GOTY blogs next week. Because I know that was a concern. And now...

BONUS COMICS!

Skyrim

Outland

Phantasmagoria

Hey there, Bombpeeps. After finishing the sublime Rayman: Origins, I was struck with how amazingly similar it was to a game that came out almost a year ago, Donkey Kong Country Returns. Not in any sort of accusatory sense, of course. Simply that there was a certain factor that both games seem to share, to the point of it almost being the focus: Their extreme difficulty. So this got me thinking about why these 2D platformers felt the need to challenge their presumably young target audience with such a restrictive level of difficulty. The product of some very focused ratiocination (translation: I thought about it while on the commode) lead to the following:

Super Meat Boy

Obviously I can't blame Team Meat's masocore surprise hit for every challenging platformer since. That a small Indie game should influence two of the biggest game developers in the world would be a little unusual. I mean, except for Portal. And DOTA. But that's Valve, and they love the little guys as much as Gabe Newell loves knives and leaving his firewalls turned off. Ubisoft is essentially Euro EA (UPlay points!) and Nintendo almost seems to pride themselves on ignoring all modern trends regardless of their practicality or convenience.

But even so, Super Meat Boy set a precedence that had been strong in the very Indie market - as in, flash games on Newgrounds and Kongregate or five dollar games that are advertised in blogs that few people ever hear about until they inevitably show up in a charity bundle of some kind - where people could enjoy being brutalized by their video game if the controls and everything else were pleasing enough. Like how you'd let a dominatrix get away with anything if their boots were shiny and they used only the highest quality leather in their whips. Goodness, what dark places has this analogy gone? Masochistic games, then, seemed to become an overnight sensation once SMB (not that SMB, though I see what they did there) started selling like tormented hot cakes (Hot Topic cakes?). You have to imagine how much of that ringing success reached the ears of the higher-ups in Ubisoft and Nintendo.

Donkey Kong Country Returns

So we come to DKCR, an eleventh hour entry to the 2010 GOTYs and ostensible reboot of the highly-regarded Rare SNES platformers, an affection that generally doesn't extend to the blurry GB games or hiphop-impaired N64 entry. While the Donkey Kong Country games were considered challenging, largely due to any stage involving brambles or minecarts, they were still on par in that regard with every other platformer around the time. 16-bit was really the last era before the emergence of Super Meat Boy and its ilk where you would be sorely challenged to simply reach the end of any stage. After that, platformers seemed to be reorganized so they could be played and beaten by anyone yet only the best players could find the 300 golden whoosits, adequately opening up the game to casuals and experts alike, provided the latter group liked to arbitrarily collect shiny things.

DKCR, perhaps fallaciously, decided that the original games' difficulty is what made them so successful, rather than the incredible graphics and music (one has perhaps as aged better than the other) and likeable setting. The resulting reboot was this beautiful, cinematically dynamic (or dynamically cinematic? I'm getting less red under-lined words with that arrangement) "2D but with a bit of 3D but not at all 2.5D perish the thought" throwback that kids could enjoy until they got to the "big brother" point (adequately explained in that one Futurama episode I should really hunt down a clip for) far sooner than perhaps should be intended.

DKCR isn't the first reboot to return to the "Nintendo Hard" difficulty standard, obviously. We've had a couple of Bionic Commando XBLA games, the New Super Mario Bros Wii (though to be fair, that was made more difficult by the assholes you chose to play alongside with) and probably plenty of others that I'm not immediately recalling, but DKCR seemed like the first to really press the issue that our nostalgia for these retro games were linked to how frustrated we'd get at becoming intimately familiar with the Game Over screen, not putting two and two together that games were only overly difficult in those times because developers were still in the Arcade machine mindset which dictates that killing the player over and over was the best guarantee of earning oodles of quarters.

Rayman: Origins

I'm not really a fan of the term "sandbox". As a general metaphor of "big, non-linear game world with plenty to do", it works well enough, being evocative of a child with nothing but piles of silica and their own imagination to turn it into whatever they wish. However, I feel the term is largely reductive when it comes to describing these games: Sand has no craft to it, no art, no design - in sand's case, that all has to come from the user alone (and with it, the entertainment).

These games on the other hand, have created the many diversions you're likely to come across with care, often with specifically diverse methods to entertain the player. As such, I'm more inclined to call these games toy-boxes: Like the side activities in any non-linear game, toys are built to entertain a child but in wildly varying ways, often stimulating different parts of the mind. Some require skill, some require an imagination, others require more than one person and are intended to be shared experiences, while others still are just there to make you laugh.

So with that in mind I'm going to be looking at Saints Row 2 & 3, the activities that make up so much of their total playtime (SR3's only real major failing is that it doesn't include enough of these diversions, so I'm including the much busier (for better or worse) second game) and how they compare and contrast to toys we played with as little 'uns. It's possible that the appeal of these games, concealed behind the more adult (well, sophomore, so almost) themes of gangsta turf wars and giant dildo bats, is how reminiscent they are of being back in the single digits and having a bunch of brightly colored plastic junk to play with.

The Character Editor - Barbie

A bit of an easy comparison, I suppose. While you can't really edit Barbie's physical appearance without power tools or a microwave, she does tend to have a racially diverse cast of associates of either gender that kids can choose from in much the same way Saints Row 3rd will set you off with templates to horribly mangle in the pursuit of amusing physical abnormalities.

Often regarded as a high point of any Saints Row game, the options for clothing tend to get very silly very quick. As well as having an in-game clothing store entirely owned by the Saints, there's also a "leather and lace" risqué dominatrix store, a costume shop, a Hot Topic ersatz with the very subtle name of "Nobody Loves Me" with equally subtle razorblade decor and that's not to mention the many insane suits you unlock in the main game. A not-inconsiderable amount of the game's comedy comes from how you choose to present yourself (via the sociopathic blank slate of "the Boss") in cutscenes and the like. Ostensibly, this wardrobe-raiding is the entire appeal of Barbie as well - the adventures and careers she embarks on are hinged on being dressed for the part. Two sentences is more than I've ever wanted to type about Barbie though, so moving on.

The Turf Takeovers - Monopoly

While not quite as central to its overall experience as Monopoly's journey of slum lords and financial ruin is to that game, owning property in Saints Row is still its main source of revenue and a lot of buildings serve no purpose other than to be bought by the player for long-term gain. They can also purchase stores (and rob them, either before or after buying them) and cribs, and everywhere else needs to be conquered by eliminating groups of rival gangs that are standing around doing something vaguely felonious. The non-purposeful buildings though, colored brown, tend to range from obvious Monopoly targets (such as "the power plant" or some sort of hotel) to slightly more crime-themed venues (more than a few meth labs and crackhouses).

Unfortunately, rival gangs will not attempt to reclaim their territory. Actually, I spelt "fortunately" wrong there. This is entirely a good thing, if the alternative is to suffer ACR's arbitrarily difficult Tower Defense mini-game or Godfather II's rather persistent "stop having fun and deal with this" retaliations. It's a feature of modern sandb.. uh, toybox games that designers haven't quite perfected yet: It's either a dull, unchallenged climb to the top, or an intrusive constant aggravation.

Now if only one of the starting pieces of Monopoly was a toilet, then we'd have an even stronger comparison to make.

Driving & Vehicles - Matchbox

While driving is ostensibly for getting from point A to point B in a slightly faster fashion than holding the sprint button, the game shows its creativity in the vehicles it includes for the player to use. You have an assortment of cars, bikes and trucks with all manner of in-jokes - there's a Kaneda bike, an Estrada bike and a Nordberg station wagon for starters - then start using choppers and boats and moving up to the slightly insane sci-fi gear of S.T.A.G. There's also Professor Genki's people-launcher car (which I never spotted - perhaps it's a preorder/DLC thing?), an in-game achievement for destroying 50 SmartCars (in case you thought Forza 4 was the only game this year that appeared to have Jeremy Clarkson's involvement) and some Teen Wolf craziness with a completely optional car surfing mini-game.

Matchbox, for anyone unfamiliar with the brand, were an affordable series of miniature toy cars and other vehicles (though not as miniature as Micro Machines, very much their successor) that came in tiny cases that resembled matchboxes. Of course, in Saints Row's case, the matchbox part refers to the intrinsic flammability of almost every vehicle in that world.

S.T.A.G. - GI Joe

S.T.A.G. are very much the greatest American heroes. As much a joke on how current peacekeeping forces handle international and domestic concerns (just check out the many morally okay and completely sane things such organizations are doing to Occupy Wall Street protesters) as they are about the suspiciously well-funded team of GI Joe, these white-armor-wearing military forces show up in Steelport around the halfway mark and start making things difficult for the Saints and Syndicate both with their laser rifles and hover-bikes. Opening with a wonderful "what if this was your daughter" fallacy-slash-parody speech from the Race Bannon lookalike STAG commander that neatly references one of the more questionable actions taken by the Saints' boss in SR2, STAG's sudden invasion is what picks up the game for many Saints Row die-hards who weren't too pleased to have to play through a series of semi-compulsory introductions to already familiar mainstays like Escort, Mayhem and Heli Assault.

Honestly, if Volition Inc. doesn't release scale models of the Daedalus (which really should've been called the Damocles, by the way it kind of menacingly hangs over the heads of everyone in the city. I mean, c'mon. Get your Greek mythology right, guys) and the Thermopylae for sale to easily impressed but oblivious children this Xmas, it has failed to fully capitalize on some very funny satire.

Snatch - Hungry Hungry Hippos

Now this might be a stretch, granted, but the frantic goings-on in both these games kind of neatly parallel, so as long as I avoid easy jokes about corpulent prostitutes I think this comparison can stand up. Snatch is perhaps one of the most famous, if not necessarily well-liked, "Activities" or cash/terrain/respect boosting side-missions of Saints Row. The goal is to collect hookers from a rival gang's grasp and deliver them back to a central brothel base. Complications include an arbitrary time limit (where are the hos going to go?), occasional kidnappings before you reach their hooking areas and the fact that they are incredibly slow in getting in and out of vehicles, which strikes me as a necessary skill you'd pick up after a few years of streetwalking.

Hungry Hungry Hippos, on the other hand, requires that you quickly collect all the pellet-like resources before others can. The time limit is still there, as is interference from others claiming what is rightfully yours, and the annoying way prostitutes sometimes get stuck getting into the vehicle is sort of like the annoying way that you can give your hippo lockjaw if a pellet locks itself underneath it. Plus, some of those prostitutes can be awfully corpule.. oh, dammit.

Insurance Fraud - Operation

Both these games are about hurting yourself. Well, not the explicit purpose of Operation, but the psychological conditioning from that fucking buzzer sticks with you for years. So okay, both games are really about fake medical emergencies and raising money through doing risky things with one's body. While there aren't many childrens' games that are analogous to throwing oneself in front of cars that I was able to find, for some reason, Operation at least shares the same kind of morbid sense of humor and the trepidation involved in preparing to once again throw yourself into a punishing ordeal for fat stacks of cash.

Professor Genki's Super Ethical Reality Climax - Hello Kitty

Okay, I'm running out of steam, so one last Activity. Genki is a cat-human hybrid who enjoys putting regular humans into deadly scenarios with flamethrowers, high voltage currents and armed dudes in bear, dog, bunny, can and hotdog costumes. You gain points by shooting tigers, but lose points by shooting pandas (because it's unethical, you see). It's essentially a distillation of Japan's national twin obsession with Sanrio characters and potentially lethal endurance/self-harm game shows. No reason why they can't be combined to a satisfactory degree.

Because this is super long and I'm getting too tired to come up with proper comparatives (research? second drafts? pfft, maybe if I were getting paid for these), I'll open the floor to you guys:

• What childhood pastimes were you reminded of while playing through the insanity-sprinkled features of the Saints Row games?
• Is calling this sort of game a "toy-box" any more or less insulting to one's adult sensibilities than calling them "sandboxes"?
• Was anyone else disappointed (probably should stop invoking that word if past events are any indication) that neither FUZZ nor Septic Avenger came back in SR3?

Thanks for reading! Wait, that's Gamer_152's trademark, and he has the power to ban people now.

Thanks for looking at some words I wrote! Also, comics!

BONUS COMICS!

Skyrim

Wizorb

Saints Row: The Third

For the longest time I was racking my brain for this week's blog subject, with my ongoing battle with Skyrim addiction not exactly helping. After watching the recently subbed Game Center CX episode on DeceasedCrab-bait Legacy of the Wizard, it occurs to me that both it and the game I've been playing this week (Assassin's Creed Revelations) use multiple protagonists in completely different ways. Then I got to thinking about the way different games have utilized the separate talents and attitudes of a roster of playable characters, rather than having a constant, singular main character.

For the most part, players are given multiple characters to choose from as a way of personalizing their experience, choosing a character that benefits their playstyle or for some lesser cosmetic preference depending on the complexity of the game and its cast. Replacing - or sometimes including in tandem with - the usual character creators, players can choose from a selection of pre-made characters with their own backstories and personalities at the expense of a more in-depth customization process. In the Fighter genre, the playthrough is strongly defined by that initial choice of character - there's a huge difference between playing as Zangief and playing as Chun-Li, for example, and the assortment of opponents you face can be dependent on character choice as well.

Protagonists as narrative jigsaw pieces

So the first really interesting use of having more than one main character is one I observed through playing Assassin's Creed: Revelations. Like usual, present-day Desmond Miles is reliving the memories of a familiar-looking ancestor to piece together a mystery that crosses a large expanse of time. Revelations' explicit purpose is to finish reviewing the lives of former ancestors Altair Ibn La-Ahad and Ezio Auditore da Firenze both, paving the way for new characters in games to come. While locating a library under what used to be the Assassin Order's stronghold Masyaf, Ezio comes across several discs made with the same ancient technology as the Apple of Eden that allows him to relive Altair's memories in much the same way Desmond can with the Animus. As the events of the game unfold, both those characters are able to provide absolutely every piece of info they're ever going to about the overarching Assassin's Creed storyline about an extinct ancient civilization and the recurring (and now imminent) global disaster that finished them off, and can thus be detached from Desmond's mind before he croaks from some Animus-related condition that's been at the forefront of Desmond's journey and that of Animus predecessor Subject 16. It's established early on in the game's story that Desmond's near-death ailment can be fixed by seeking closure on the lives of his previous hosts, in much the same way the continued life of the franchise is dependent on finally wrapping up any loose threads with those two and moving on already.

While the Assassin's Creed series has always been about piecing together the truth about the world and the hidden Templar vs. Assassin conflict from the perspectives of multiple protagonists, it's all the more emphasized here, with all three protagonists getting some heavy backstory. There are plenty of other games that allow the player to piece together a fuller story by playing each character involved too: The Forbidden Siren games follow a group of survivors each with their own agendas for being there, their own plans of escaping the catastrophe going on around them and their own eventual demises more commonly than not. Folklore requires that the player complete both main characters' interlinking story paths before they converge at a later chapter. Odin Sphere, Eternal Darkness and Heavy Rain are more examples of this sort of narrative feature, while I'm still brainstorming.

Protagonists as cogs working together

A considerable number of puzzle games require the disparate talents of more than one character to solve environmental obstacles in order to proceed. This is most pronounced in co-op games specifically configured for two or more people, such as Portal 2's robotic buds, Four Swords' four Links or Army of Two's bro-ish pair of mercs. This is more in line with the mechanical nature of video games, in conjunction with the narrative nature above.The single player variants tend to come in two types, however: The first being the team-based games where the player can constantly switch between characters on the fly and use their abilities in tandem to solve puzzles. This is the case with the older point-and-click series Gobliiins, cartoonish platformer The Lost Vikings, dystopian action-puzzle game Project Eden, the excellent Trine and its upcoming sequel, and many others.

The other instance is that of switching characters at hubs and entering worlds that are subtly changed by the character you choose. Rather than switching on the fly and using their skills co-operatively, each character has their own objectives to fulfil on their own. Though very much a series of solo efforts, there is usually a unifying purpose at the end of all this, where all the major characters you've spent time with banding together to defeat a greater evil. Games with this format include Rare platformer Donkey Kong 64 and Falcom's Legacy of the Wizard (otherwise known as Dragon Slayer IV).

Protagonists as a device to be played around with

Of course, video games aren't the only form of fiction to play around with the concept of the protagonist, or more specifically the character with which the consumer shares a viewpoint, and what that necessarily means for the big picture. Protagonist-switching novels like the A Song of Ice & Fire will often kill off whomever the viewpoint character happens to be for any given chapter. However, once you factor in how important the participation of the player is for any interactive fiction, the protagonist becomes a much more vital element, and thus becomes something that's more fun to co-opt or subvert in some way.Metal Gear Solid 2, infamously, gave players the new character of Raiden to play as, in a plot that didn't seem to connect to the first game or any others in the series. While Solid Snake would eventually show up, the switch to Raiden and the way Hideo Kojima played around with that "main character" trope is indicative of his overall obsession with subverting traditional story elements of both fiction in general and that of video games specifically.

Other games will allow you to believe you're playing the game's main character before switching to a completely new main, either killing the previous or severely downgrading their relevance to the plot. It can be grating when done poorly, though, or in games where there's a significant amount of levelling such as the SaGa RPGs. At least from my experience anyway. It's also a major spoiler for the many games it occurs in, so I'd better stop talking about it. So instead, here's some comics?

BONUS COMICS!

Assassin's Creed: Revelations

Skyrim

Hey folks. I'm going to be just as contentious this week, though hopefully way less negative, by talking about a trio of games I've become hopelessly addicted to despite my best efforts to avoid such a situation in a month packed with highly coveted new releases.

These three games stand out as particularly similar with their intimidatingly dense open-world RPG gaming, if very little else tonally or structurally. Because I still have several shorter games on my to-do list for 2011, and that by their very nature these open world RPGs tend to be very time-consuming to an OCD nutcase completist like myself, I'm doing a direct comparison of the three to see which is most deserving of what little spare gaming time of 2011 I have left.

So I guess I should do a thing where I talk about each game, right? Maybe in a cliché boxing match sort of way, since this is a showdown. I'm all about the clichés over here. We'll have separate rounds too, because I've never found a blog device I couldn't wear out.

IN THE RED CORNER: Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Our most recent release and major heavyweight is Skyrim, a game about dragons and the Nords who love them. Love killing them and stealing their souls so they can shout at bad guys to make them fall down, that is. This probably needs very little introduction beyond that, since everyone and their grandmother is currently stomping across Tamriel's northern territories watching giants launch wildlife into the mesosphere.

IN THE BLUE CORNER: FromSoftware's Dark Souls

Dark Souls, the last big thing to take up everyone's time, is FromSoftware's opus and monument to abject, arbitrary cruelty. A much more methodical game than anything else in this contest, players are expected to enjoy themselves by finding wonder in their surroundings, learning from their mistakes and participating in a very patient combat system of parries, evades and ripsotes. Actually, they're expected to die a lot. Any pleasure derived from the experience is largely incidental.

IN THE... YELLOW CORNER?: Monolith Soft's Xenoblade Chronicles

Xenoblade is sort of a dark horse, in that a considerable number of Giant Bomb users have yet to play it. And, in fact, are finding it hard to get a copy and would probably be sort of sore about someone calling attention to it like the tactless fool I am. Sorry for rubbing salt in the wound, guys. It's your usual JRPG, with a bit more of PSO's/Final Fantasy XII's fake-MMO gameplay rather than the usual linear turn-based adventure. Importantly, it's a hell of a lot of fun for a game so idiosyncratic with its many gameplay features. Almost to the same insane, sublime zenith that Dark Cloud 2 reaches. Almost.

ROUND 1: The World

Ding! For the first round, we explore perhaps the most important aspect of any open world RPG - the world in which the RPGs are open.. in.

Skyrim's got a very detailed frozen realm full of Nordic and Gaelic architecture and mythology, with the usual plethora of ruins, caves and the like to explore at one's leisure. Unless they have trolls or something equally big and scary, in which case you make a mental note to avoid it, go outside and get attacked by a dragon instead. The towns too, are impressive with their conceptual variation, with the mountain-forged Markarth a highlight. I haven't had the opportunity to see all the towns yet, but I've liked the ones I've stumbled into while half-dead so far.

Dark Souls' world is interesting if only because of how dark its apparently gotten since its glory days. Enormous terrors live in every dark corner (good god, I need to buy a thesaurus), and there's plenty of ugliness and beauty in turn to be found in many of the game's varied settings.

Xenoblade's most impressive feature is its world. From the eyeline of your tiny human protagonists, it's a place of verdant fields, networks of caves and impressive vistas. Pan out, as the game enjoys doing occasionally in dramatic story cutscenes, and you find that the entire "world" is the corpse of a million-foot tall colossus that died in an epic struggle with a similar colossus some distance away. The game starts with this battle, but it's a few in-game hours later when players are able to truly appreciate the actual size of these leviathans. It takes a while to get used to the idea, especially when every location is referred to as a body part of the giant God corpse you're all living on.

Winner: Xenoblade Chronicles. Dude, giant God corpses!

ROUND 2: Character Development

Ding! Ding! Join the Nintendo fanclub! I'm going to scrap the boxing analogy from now on. It's.. it's making me feel like a bad person. If you're planning to spend a lot of time in an RPG world, you'll want to have an engaging system in place for developing your playable character(s). One that ideally starts off as a blank slate of unlimited potential, with which to sculpt into a very specialized build that works for your preferred playstyle.

Skyrim's is exactly that, with a system that allows you to focus and enhance the skills you use most often. Sticking with one small group of skills allows you to quickly master them, but branching out to practice other beneficial talents will also allow you to gain skill points quicker, growing stronger at the expense of taking a while longer to utilize some of those super-useful high-level perks. It's a balancing act that's been a core component of the Elder Scrolls games since the beginning.

Dark Souls will ask you to choose a "class", giving you a smattering of stat points and the starting weapon/armor based on your choice. Beyond that, players are free to develop their character however they want, using their class choice as a loose guide of where to focus points into than a permanent statement of what that character is. Levelling happens at a rate dictated by the player, depending on how difficult they want the game to be, how effective they are at holding onto their souls and their tolerance for grinding. There's no doubt a few crazy people out there who are running around in their skivvies at zero level who have managed to beat difficult opponents through sheer skill alone. It's that sort of game, ultimately.

Xenoblade's development is far more arbitrary and specialized, in the way most JRPGs are. As far as player choice goes, you can choose to focus in skill trees that depend on personality aspects of the character. So the heavy bruiser might have "Determination" and "Recklessness", with defensive and offensive skills respectively. Players can choose to switch at will though, so with enough grinding it's possible to have everything. Where the character focus comes in is with the skills the player chooses to enter battles with: There are a limited number of spots on your "palette", so after a while you have to decide which mix of offense, support and technical skills work best. When you factor in the complex system of needing to break/topple/daze certain enemies to attack them effectively, it gets complicated fast.

Winner: Skyrim, by a hair. The new perks, one of many features cribbed from Bethesda's Fallout 3 project, is what makes the overall system shine brighter than it ever has.

ROUND 3: Combat

With round 3 we finally look at the game's combat. Again, it's a dealbreaker feature - a game with a lacklustre combat system will get dull fast, regardless of how much work has gone into every nook and cranny of that game's universe. Unless your open world sandbox game is Animal Crossing, it pays to have a combat system that's sufficiently fun and dynamic enough to never bore someone into a coma by their 1000th unavoidable battle.

Skyrim has managed to improve the usual Elder Scrolls system of waving a sword in someone's face as they barely acknowledge it until their semi-circle of health finally vanishes and they ragdoll into a pile on the floor. Instead, the new combat errs on the side of giving the players at least some feedback for their heavy hits, with Fallout 3's cinematic kills making an appearance sans that enigmatic dapper gunslinger in a fedora. It's got a way to go, but at least I can arrow a dude in the head and have it be considered more than a mild annoyance.

Dark Souls, inversely, has a brutal combat system that requires constant vigilance for telltale signs a fatal attack is coming so they can dodge out the way and find an ideal time to strike. Each opponent has their own methods of attack, and while holding one's shield up will negate most of the danger, it's never guaranteed and will quickly wear you out. Each fight, even against those you can take down in a single swipe, will prove to be your (temporary) undoing if you don't adequately prepare for the blows to come.

Xenoblade's is a massive clusterfuck of real-time combat with cooldown-based skills. On top of utilizing attacks which drop enemies into stunned states for set-ups, you also need to be aware of character tension (morale, in other words) which lead to devastating chain attacks, enemy statuses, enemy types and their immunities, attacks which cause more damage depending on your position relative to the enemy, keeping your allies healed and status-free and eventually being able to predict the enemy's next move and take steps to counteract it or at least deflect some of the damage. It gets fairly insane when you factor in the large number of enemies that could join melee at any given moment.

Winner: Dark Souls. It's the one combat system that isn't too simple to get bored of, but doesn't get too crazy complex to get hopelessly lost with. The little bear's porridge of combat systems, in this particular case.

ROUND 4: Sidequestin'

Any good open-world game gives the players a story thread to follow, and a yarn store's worth of threads to optionally chase after like some adorable, easily distracted kitten.

Skyrim has the customary longship full of sidequests which players can find by talking to almost anyone with a name. Turns out everyone has problems, delivered to you by guilds more often than not, plenty of which are conveniently located in several dungeons just outside of the city walls. Any town in which you choose to make your roost will have plenty to keep you busy, to the point where you're actually buying property once you realise you're in for the long haul. Or the large haul, as the case may be. Bandits are loaded it seems. With cabbages and terrible armor, more often than not, but at early levels you can't be choosy. There's plenty of aimless stuff to get yourself deeply addicted to as dragons systematically incinerate the world around you.

Dark Souls doesn't really do sidequests, but it does have the covenant feature. Each covenant is an entirely optional guild you can join and gives you a single focus which you can follow for adulation and some achievement-based collection achievements. They range from stealing souls, sneaking into other people's worlds for PvP, creating monster generators for other people, actually helping other people with bosses and other quests clearly intended to make completists throw hundreds of hours into every style of playing the game offers to get a platinum trophy. The swines.

Xenoblade's sidequests have the usual open-world format of finding hub towns, talking to several dozen people with exclamation points over their heads and walking out into the wilderness to find an entire pawn store inventory's worth of junk from the local environs. Among the pointless fetch and "kill X duders" quests, which are suspiciously played down (as if the game knows it's inane busywork) and conveniently automatically completed once the totals are met, there are plenty of better thought-out missions where you can assist the inhabitants with personal issues. This leads to building a weird flowchart of sorts where you can see a web of everyone's relationships with everyone else and how they're progressing because of your interference. It's oddly in-depth for something as minor as quest sponsor NPCs.

Winner: Skyrim. Just because of how crazy each minor side-quest has the potential to become, with the larger storylines for each guild on top of that. I'm at least 15 hours in and still doing quests for Whiterun's (my first town) populance.

ROUND 5: Crafting

If players are expected to run around collecting endless amounts of vendor trash from the monsters they hack apart, they're going to want a decent crafting system to sink those items and some time into for some sweet equipment.

Skyrim's trio of smithing, alchemy and enchanting (cooking hardly counts) gives players plenty to do with the minerals, reagents and magical sources they come across throughout the world. Vitally, each system awards players of differing temperaments: Smithing is all about diligence, with players needing to create a lot of low-level trash to raise their skill level to the point where they can make something worthwhile for themselves. Alchemy rewards experimentation, with reagents needing to be tested and combined to discover their effects. Enchantment is all about sacrifice and dedication, with the best enchantments locked away until the player has discovered them on other items, which they then destroy to learn their secrets at the cost of whatever gold the item could've been hocked for.

Dark Souls only really does Smithing, but it is so ridiculously in-depth that half the game's trophies appear to be linked to crafting items to their peak quality. There's very little variation in what needs to be done, however: Each ore and material needs to be grinded from particular monsters that carry them, and then weapons must be enhanced with those materials at an exorbitant price until they're at their shiniest. This is really the only way to get weapons and armor that can challenge the stronger enemies, and in some cases affect the enemies at all.

Xenoblade's crafting mini-game is utterly perplexing, like many of the game's features. Occasionally after killing an enemy, they drop gems which have specific traits related to that creature (such as fire resistance and hightened defense, for instance). If these gems are combined with others in this magical furnace back in town, you can create items that will slot into weapons and armor and enhance them. The trick is to find ways of combining enough of the same type of enhancement to create exceptionally powerful versions, but it's so often a crapshoot entirely left to chance. Or it might be because I suck at it still. I haven't got to grips with it fully yet, because there is just so much else to do.

Winner: Skyrim. Though to be fair, I've done very little crafting in all three games so far, beyond the necessary tutorials. They all seem fun though.

ROUND 6: Story

Story really takes a backseat in many of games of this type. If you ask about the story of Skyrim or Dark Souls, you're often told that you're missing the point. But hell, if I'm trying to pick a game I want to beat by the end of 2011, the culmination of the story is surely an important consideration?

Skyrim's story, so far at least, appears to involve dragons. Specifically, it appears to involve killing dragons and preventing some sort of dragony apocalypse by using the protagonist's innate (and mostly unique) talents of taking them out and using their own shouty powers against them. So it's like Condemned 2 then? Because I've met a few asshole bears in this game as well.

Dark Souls' story involves killing everything that isn't evil - the number of which can be counted on one hand, if something hasn't already lopped it off. There's nothing else besides some vague directions for the next goal given at every major checkpoint of the game, and some optional lore that equates to "everything's fucked", delivered by NPCs who haven't yet figured out they're supposed to kill you like everything else does.

Xenoblade actually persists with a fairly strong plot (which means a lot of cutscenes, but you can't have everything) that sees shit get real very quickly that convinces a mysterious protagonist with a mysterious past go off and find his mysterious destiny. It's fairly JRPGy, all things considered, but it's elevated a bit with a truly novel setting, some badassery, some weirdness and some pathos that somehow creates a JRPG narrative that doesn't make me feel embarrassed to be playing the game (hey ArbitraryWater, how's Final Fantasy X-2 treating you?).

Winner: So far, Xenoblade. But hey, it could all go horribly pear-shaped as the typical JRPG illogic sets in. Likewise, Skyrim's main quest storyline could be amazing, but considering how few of the game's players will commit to it makes me wonder why they would bother with something spectacular. I do think some of the short stories in the many books of Skyrim are fantastic in their own right, though.

So after adding up the number of wins, I think Skyrim has it. Honestly, I don't think I was going to play either of the other two games until Skyrim was done, but it's nice to have it scientifically verified in a battle royale all the same. I hope this helps some of you guys make your mind up, too, or at least try one of those two other games once you're done with Skyrim. Like always, post your preferences and dissensions in the comments below. Thanks for reading all this too, by the way. It sure turned out to be a lot of words to reach the astonishing conclusion that Skyrim is pretty great.

BONUS COMICS!

Skyrim

Xenoblade Chronicles

Deus Ex

Or am I just getting grumpier? It's difficult to broach the subject of whether or not a sequel to a game is of lesser quality than the original: So much is dependent on the very nature of sequels, and how there will always be diminishing returns from those same beats and nuances that were once so powerful in their (relative) originality. When a game's sequel is functionally identical, perhaps excepting a few bells and whistles and a whole new plot, does it not immediately pale in comparison to its forebear? Is it possible that a sequel can be better from a purely mechanical perspective, and were one to play the sequel first instead it would be just as enjoyable an experience, if not more so?

It's these sorts of dilemmas that make it tricky for me (and professional game critics too, I can only imagine) to objectively rate a new game in a franchise with a strong pedigree if it decides to stay the course and make no major changes, lest those changes disturb that winning formula in some way. When a flawed - but still decent enough to be worthy of a sequel - game takes strides to improve everything that was wrong and belt out an amazing sequel that fixes almost everything, such was the case with Dark Cloud 2 or Pikmin 2 for example, it receives well-deserved accolades aplenty for a job well done. There should be no such brownie points for just treading water with a franchise, though, I believe.

So I'm going to talk about a few of the games I've played this year that were direct sequels. There was no shortage of those in 2011, fortunately for this blog post if unfortunate for other reasons. This also raises the question about why I keep setting myself up for disappointment by playing sequels, but I digress.

Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception

It's currently perceived as entirely too trendy to underrate the newest adventure of Messrs. Drake and Sullivan, as many publications have been wont to do of late. For the record, setting aside my own issues with this game for a moment, I agree with Brad's 5-star rating for this game. I've always perceived a 5-star rated game as one you could happily recommend to a complete stranger who had never played a video game before. If you'd never played an Uncharted game before, UC3 is entirely capable of rocking you like a hurricane.

My own personal problems with this game are both legion and insignificant, so I won't be going into too much detail in case I sound too much like a complainypants. Generally, I felt the traversal lacked some of its original player-friendly "I'll just fix that slightly off-angle jump for you" accuracy, I missed having that bonus achievement meta-game in the single player where'd you raise cash for multiplayer items and other bonus features, and that the online was completely closed off to me since I was a cheapskate for renting a 10 hour long game instead of buying it new. These are all minor complaints though, and could be countered by how the game cleverly used the character of Cutter in its marketing and later in the game itself, or the many set-pieces that were just as thrilling and cinematic as those in Uncharted 2.

However, the most self-evident and therefore damning thing I could say about this game was that I reached the conclusion of the story and did not want to jump back in on a higher difficulty. That was not the case with UC2, or even many lesser action-adventure games I'd played through twice or more before now. I had simply had my fill of this one. I don't know what that says, exactly, but it's probably not positive.

InFamous 2

I'm not just picking on games Brad's given 5 stars to, just to be clear here. But inFamous 2 is, like Uncharted 3, another sequel that didn't really do anything new and ultimately felt like a lesser product as a result. I could list my issues with the game again, but it's largely pointless: Most of them are either subjective (such as my inward sigh whenever large monsters appeared and I had to once again follow the unchanging routines to bring them down) or were evident in the first game (such as the flawed karma system) or both (Zeke).

I don't believe the second game was objectively better. I think there were more than a few missteps here and there, but also there were several balance fixers and an attempt to meet the fans' requests that Cole have more fights with bigger monsters and other supervillains. It might well vary from person to person.

Dragon Age 2

Just so I'm not torturing myself with wondering if these sequels are fine and I'm just being weirdly dismissive of them with crazyperson accusations, I'll move onto a sequel that was unanimously considered worse for many of the same reasons I have for disliking the ones listed above: Simply that they seemed to have been rushed to meet the crushing demands and expectations that the former game's development didn't have to languish under, while it was still a new (or yet unproven) IP. While many confess to liking this game, myself included, it's a mere shadow of its original in almost every aspect: Story, characters, combat (possibly debatable: I could not abide the Gauntlet-style enemy spawning, personally) and the overall diminished level of complexity.

However, and this might undermine the point I've been making so far, Dragon Age 2 was a sequel that did decide to do things markedly different to its ancestor in an attempt to stand out. So maybe treading water is the ideal solution after all, especially if the only other option is drowning.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

I'm just going to end with one game that took pains to embrace the gameplay philosophy of a highly regarded but fairly ancient (in terms of how fast game technology seems to age at least) PC game. Human Revolution, I felt, did a spectacular job in bringing Deus Ex to the current generation: It was just as happy to change aspects of the original Deus Ex to bring it up to modern standards as it was to simply ape what endeared the 2000 game to so many. Of all the sequels I played this year, this was probably my favorite. Or Dark Souls.

I've probably not blown anyone's minds with a diatribe about how sequels are kind of bad, but I do wonder why it seemed so much more pronounced this year. Video game sequels frequently surpass their originals, due in part to fixing up mechanical issues and listening/responding to complaints, so this recent spate is a little dispiriting. Maybe I am just imagining it though.

Thanks for reading one duder's 1000-word-long "what is video game" existential crisis, and please feel free to state your opinions on the games I've mentioned and how you believe they stack up against their precursors. No seriously, do that, because I'm feeling like a jaded pessimist at the moment.

EDIT: Okay, taking into account the comments and "this was a good sequel" contributions of many dissenting and (thankfully) polite GBers, I'll briefly go over all the other sequels I played this year:

Dead Space 2 - Fine game, did everything a sequel was supposed to in terms of expanding the world and fixing some of the issues people had with the first game. If I have any reservations, they're about how much of the larger plot is being directed by the various spin-offs and multimedia. I'm wondering how long it'll take for the video games to start directly referencing important events from those sources. Not a real complaint, I'll readily acknowledge.

Portal 2 - Had pacing issues, because it was so much larger, but overall a great game and worthy sequel.

Arkham City - Actually preferred this to the original, but perhaps for the wrong reasons (I enjoyed the highly expanded Riddler/Side-Quest stuff).

Saints Row 3 & Skyrim - I'll be joining a great many of you in playing these games to death when they show up next week and after.

Witcher 2 - Still dying to play this. It'll either involve waiting until I get a PC, or until that 360 port shows up.

I think my chief error (among many, perhaps) was that the phrasing of the name of this blog post made it sound like an incendiary generalization. Of course not every sequel this year was disappointing, and if there were some that--subjectively--failed to deliver, it's only because of the sheer number of them made it statistically probable. I'm just blanking on why these particular ones didn't appeal as much as their originals did, when so many others were as awesome if not better this time around.

So yeah, next week I'm going back to my goofy nonsense topics and knocking it off with my poorly thought out rabble-rousing. Also comics!

BONUS COMICS!

The Binding of Isaac

(Probably helps if you've seen this first)

Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception

Deus Ex

Welcome all, to this second entry for a series where I look at games that have been clearly influenced by a masterpiece of the silver screen. Now, given it's Halloween, and I hear John Carpenter's kind of a dude that's all about the spooky shenanigans, it might strike some of you as strange that I'm covering one of his few that has nothing to do with horror: 1981's Escape From New York. Well.. it's... screw it, I wanted to do this one.

To start with, I should probably break down this movie to its core components before starting with the game comparisons so people unfamiliar with this Kurt Russell joint can know what to expect. Besides a kick in the pants to go watch it already:

• Mysterious badass is dropped into a dilapidated city for a specific purpose.
• Dilapidated city might be roaming with dangerous prisoners and other ne'er-do-wells. Certainly the case with the movie.
• Mysterious badass will also die if he doesn't hurry. So no dawdling. As if mysterious badass was even lame enough to dawdle. Hint: He is not.
• Ernest Borgnine.

So taking these factors, please join me with this thing that I wrote about a movie and some video games. If you would.

The Legend of Snake Plissken - Metal Gear Solid (Series)

Perhaps the best well-known factoid among Kojima-ites is his love of 80s American movies, with the second being that the dude is completely crazy in the head. Each of his highly distinctive intellectual properties are based, in some minor or major part, on growing up with the brash, imaginative and visually distinctive sci-fi and action movies of the period: Snatcher was heavily influenced by Blade Runner and Terminator (whereas SD Snatcher was influenced by the Peanuts parody of Blade Runner, "It's Time To Die, Charlie Brown", which I just made up), Policenauts by Lethal Weapon and his flagship series of Metal Gear has, of course, a growly taciturn Special Ops protagonist named Snake. Solid Snake has probably long since surpassed Plissken as the be-eyepatched mercenary of note in the minds of many gamers, but the similarities between the two couldn't be clearer. He even adopts the name "Iroquois Pliskin" as an alias in the second game. Spoilers?

Similarly to Plissken, Snake is often placed in dangerous scenarios all on his lonesome and must complete whatever task he has been assigned, preferably within a time limit. Whether or not Isaac Hayes is more menacing than a 20 foot tall nuclear-powered mech is a debate for another time, as is whether or not Snake Plissken could've saved himself a beating or two if he'd just pretended he was a cardboard box more often. Such are the differences between films and games.

New York, New York, It's a Hell of a Town - Batman: Arkham City

I suspect a tiny lightbulb just popped over your heads after wondering what reason would I have to cover a 30 year old movie and the video games that have been influenced by it, and the relatively new release of Batman: Arkham City is it. Pretty much the entire plot of the movie has been dropped on the Caped Crusader, as he spends one awful night crossing a walled-off ruined city housing thousands of convicts to procure a life-saving antidote to the poison he just drank (wrong movie) fed to him by the Joker. All the movie's components carefully detailed above are evident here, besides maybe Ernest Borgnine - but then The Penguin is a more than adequate substitute. Watching Escape From New York now, I can't help to note the resemblance in scenes where Snake glides into New York from above, meets resourceful lowlifes that have barricaded themselves inside buildings once worthy of note, is dumped into gladiatorial arenas and that one perplexing scene towards the end where he finds a trophy shaped like a green question mark.

Of course, Arkham City has a lot more going on for it than the basic plot structure and familiarly dystopian setting it shares with Escape From New York: There are sub-plots aplenty, most of which are also homages of movies: Everyone's favorite palindromic serial killer Zsasz has been offing people who answer public phones, Riddler's ramshackle deathtrap hostage rooms are reminiscent of those of another sociopathic intellectual, and there are the grim adventures of a sniper too improbaly awesome to be caught, until he is because I don't know if you know this but Batman's the World's Greatest Detective.

The Future Ain't What It Used To Be - Dystopian Games (Fallout, Deus Ex)

Getting a dystopia right in any medium is a difficult task, mostly because it has to feel like the genuine result of something we may one day run afoul of if we don't sort out our more destructive and selfish tendencies. While the world of Fallout is a relatively straightforward tale of gigantic nuclear missiles turning the world into a giant toilet, the ongoing dystopia of the Deus Ex franchise is a more subtle one where domestic terrorist cells are rising up in an attempt to quell the increasingly corrupt and powerful ruling classes, with the rift expanding further thanks to prohibitively expensive augmentation technology and an equally costly epidemic.

In both these cases and that of Escape From New York, these settings serve as heavy-handed portents meant to horrify and entertain in turn with just how bad everything's gotten - whether those things be abundant crime, nuclear proliferation or the growing chasm (and resentment) between the "haves" and "have nots".

BONUS COMICS

Batman: Arkham City

Limbo

Deus Ex

Absolutely nothing? Or does Optional Lore (which we conveniently have a wiki page for) actually enhance a game and, in some cases, provide an equally riveting alternate to a traditional narrative?

This week, rather than demonstrating how not to get TPK'd in Temple of Elemental Evil, I'm discussing how different games are able to provide their backstories in an optional, unobtrusive format and the pros and cons of each feature. I'm not sure why I felt the need to spell that all out like this was the introduction to an essay. Forgive me for putting on airs of professionalism, y'all, and let's get on with this shiznit already.

Most early games - as we all know from the many "games ain't got good stories yet but maybe soon?" blogs, editorials and articles that spouted up around the time Ebert was decrying the artform (or just "form". The jury might be still on out that) - used to lead with a scrolling marquee or some pixel anime folks despairing of their lot in life as a cybernetic man derided them over their missing military camps in broken English. As the years went on, though, games started developing ways to convey the plot to the player while also making sure not to distract too much from all that interactivity people had grown to expect from games. So cutscenes began to be phased out in favor of interminable periods of time where dispassionate NPCs droned on about where the story was going next to players as they impatiently jumped and crouched around the room and politely pointed guns at the NPC to hurry them up.

An interesting but rather elementary method to provide info to players who cared, and easily ignorable trash to players that didn't, was Doom 3's perhaps most notorious addition to the medium: Jump scares. Being too dark to see. Diet Squish vending machines. Why can't I hold a gun and a flashlight simultaneously. No seriously, why is so goddamn dark. Audio logs. These logs provided key parts of information in a jigsaw-style "put these all together for the full plot", which meant the players took their time to explore every corner of the setting to find them all. Of course, they were invented entirely so players would deliberately open closets to see if there were any more audio logs, thus making the cheap jump scares inserted in said closets a thousand times more effective - hence the audio log thing would catch on and spread to other shooters of a general horror bent. It also helped create little sub-stories about survivors who usually didn't make it, but somehow survived long enough to travel across the game world haemorrhaging audio diaries.

Moving up, we have the optional lore of games like Elder Scrolls. While not alone in doing this, especially among CRPGs, the Elder Scrolls games proved their mettle with slightly excessive attention to detail by crafting many, many tomes that ranged from practical tips about monsters, spells and legendary items to miniature novel serials about dark elf Mata Haris sleeping around and Arthurian-esque crusaders who are constantly beleaguered by minions of the demonic ruling class. Any Mage's Guild worth its salt would have entire bookshelves of these novels, generally having the same three over and over - this sort of suggested that the mages were either all children when it came to sharing, or simply weren't able to read. Players who found themselves immersed in the Elder Scrolls world might spend ten minutes away from swinging wildly at monsters who appeared closer than they actually were to read these books whenever a new one appeared, while the slightly more pragmatic players would just steal them all and sell them. Bless their hearts. Likewise, games with similarly dense settings like Mass Effect or Dragon Age - or those from a larger external franchise like Batman: Arkham City with plenty of comic lore to shoehorn in for added flavor - would occasionally pop up with lore entries after talking to people, finding books/scrolls/computers or reading newspapers over people's shoulders like a bunch of deadbeats. It's then all conveniently stored in a database half the players probably won't bother to read.

Then we have games like Demon's Souls and its "spiritual" sequel Dark Souls (honestly, saying Dark Souls is a spiritual sequel is like saying Ocarina of Time is a spiritual sequel to Link to the Past. Except OoT happened first, or something. Christ, Achron makes more sense than Zelda's timeline) which seem to eschew plot all together, besides an exposition-dropping opening movie and the occasional dying NPC that tell you to go ring a bell. I mean, if you wanted. Then you're thrown into a world of death and more death and left to your own devices, if those devices include an inevitable and overzealous navel piercing by an eight-foot-tall black knight. The Lore in that game has to be scrabbled together from notes you find and dubious cloaked NPCs who might well be lying to you, because the little player notes on the ground sure do. It all adds to that particular game's "discover by doing, and then making a mental note not to do that next time" approach to progression.

Ultimately, like a great many things, the effectiveness of optional lore in any given game is entirely dependent on how that game presents itself. A linear action game, moving from one set-piece to the next, would fill the blanks between levels with cutscenes. They're generally content to ape movies in that sense, which is perfectly fine in the case of the newly released Uncharted 3, currently putting the bombastic Summer blockbusters it liberally borrows from to shame. It's the more open-world games, which depend more on player agency, that allows those players to discover the world on their own terms - whether it be optional lore, a new dungeon to explore, a cache of valuables or that giant beating heart hidden in GTA IV. What the hell was that about, anyway?

BONUS COMICS

Dark Souls

Batman: Arkham City

Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World

Part 5 of this ongoing exposé into the entirely too wholesome world of Namco's animu RPG series. The world needs to know:

You'll be glad/distressed to hear that this will be the last blog on Troika's second of three projects (did they know they'd only make three games before going under? Is that where the company name comes from?) The Temple of Elemental Evil: A Classic Greyhawk Adventure. The game is based on one of those notoriously difficult modules for the pen & paper D&D, that alongside Tomb of Horrors (which would make an amazing game if FromSoftware wants to make one with their Dark Souls money) would have gamers in the 80s cowering in fear whenever the DM pulled it out of his nerd bag (which I guess would be a rucksack with d20 stickers on it?) to play through it that session. Seems a bit weird to wait until the fourth blog to talk about this game's pen and paper roots, but hey. "But hey" I say. Like that excuses everything.

So, allow me to lead with this showstopper and lose the respect of almost all of you (the remainder of which never had any such respect to begin with):

The core of the game is its second dungeon, the eponymous Temple of Elemental Evil. You have a really schizophrenic four-floor dungeon full of mini-temples to the four elements, random rooms full of furniture and bugbears just standing around waiting to attack people, weird gardens with ladytigers, storage closet areas with gelatinous cubes (well, where else would you put the vacuum cleaner?) and many other things I don't want to spoil for people who haven't played the game yet. It reminded me a lot of the bonus dungeon in the Baldur's Gate 1 expansion: Tales of the Sword Coast. Not just because it kept on going, but that each floor would be graphically and thematically different and filled with crazy shit and encounters with creatures that have no business living in immaculate, furnished rooms under a church.

Then you have the nodes, where the game really decides to fuck around with you. The nodes are entirely optional: It's basically ToEE's equivalent of those super difficult optional dungeons that you'd want to progress through to get the best ending, or at least make the final boss a complete pushover with the rewards you earn. The above Balor was one such superboss that could be found in these nodes, along with a bevvy of slightly insane NPCs who have been trapped in the nodes for weeks or more. Hey, just like the wizards on that frozen island in the Baldur's Gate 1 expansion: Tales of the Sword Coast! What? You can also recruit a demonic Charisma Carpenter, if hot tanar'ri sorceresses with very few spells that prevent you from being able to sell shit to vendors is your deal. Works for me!

What amazed me most about the Circle of Eight stuff, besides the fact it rarely fixed anything (or fixed so much that I can't even imagine what the original was like) is how they were able to create so much additional stuff with the art assets the game had lying around in its coding. [Disclosure here: ArbitraryWater insisted on a level cap and no fan content to make it a more "traditional" contest between VGK and I. Though I may have broken those rules with the Balor thing above. So let's all pretend that never happened. Okay?] It makes me wonder if a really industrious team could somehow acquire those same assets through legal means, boosting them with their own contributions, and create more 3e modules for the Indie market. A pipe dream, alas, as I can barely follow who owns the video game rights to D&D any more.

That's it for my whole ToEE undertaking. VGK will continue talking about getting killed by low level creatures over on his blog and ArbitraryWater's been talking about ToEE's fan additions in more detail on his latest too. No doubt others will take up the mantle of challenging ToEE and then talking about it. But as for me, I'm all done with this great, Snider-approved CRPG. No more super-tough, quasi-medieval fantasy for a while. Next up: Dark Souls!

I leave you all with this final ToEE comic, all Stand By Me epilogue style:

And now, a different thing:

BONUS COMIC!

Continuing the whole "what sets apart the Tales games" series from last time, I'm adding one more this week for Symphonia. Perhaps the best Tales game? Maybe. I haven't played Vesperia yet. Or Legendia. Or Abyss. I am an expert on this series, everyone.