Surgency Games

I’ve never been a huge fan of Watchman. If this immediately invalidates my opinion on pretty much anything, I apologize. I understand the historical context of the graphic novel and Alan Moore’s completely unique influences on the comic industry, but the book has just never grabbed. Could be the art. Could be the writing. Time may tell. Regardless of my feelings for the comic though, I can safely say the game Watchmen – The End is Nigh, developed by Deadline Games, is in no way consistent with the themes and messages Alan Moore built the story around. The comic is about humanity and the struggle of how to live within a society that’s made up of so many individual personalities.

I think.

The game is about beating people up. And opening doors.

The cutscenes in the game are initially presented like moving panels from the comic book, complete with the limited color palette and stark character designs Watchmen is so famous for. Then, the game cuts to the Main Menu, where Rorschach and Nite Owl are rendered as fully 3D, normal-mapped, HDR-lite, next-gen action adventure video game characters. You pick what character you want to play. You press start.

Then the game goes back to another comic book cutscene.

Then the game starts, and you’re back in next-gen mode. It’s confusing. It has no sense of consistency or style.

The trial revolves around Rorschach and Nite Owl attempting to quell a prison riot at Sing-Sing. They are attacked by two or three inmates at a time. They fight them off using a two-button combo system that responds too slowly to button inputs and moves way too slowly to be any fun. Then you get to unlock doors by pressing the “A” button.

After I opened my second door I stopped playing. The fighting is bland and far too slow to be of much amusement. The style is broken and inconsistent. The writing and voice acting are good, but not being a fan of the series, you’re mileage here may vary, depending on how well you think you know Rorschach’s voice. I understand this can be a very polarizing topic.

If the game offers more than what is described above, the trial does a poor job of showcasing or offering enough incentive to keep playing so as to eventually get to it. Watchmen – The End is Nigh runs $20 and it’s hard for me to believe I’d ever want to spend that much on the full game.  I can only imagine the development team loved the content; why else make a Watchmen a game? Unless it was some sort of cash-in to take advantage of the movie that comes out this week.

But that never happens. I think.

What fortune. What luck. This week, not one, but two Vin Diesel game vehicles had demos released on XBL: Wheelman and Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena. Even better is the amazing, near-perfect juxtaposition between these demos as tools to market their respective products.

Wheelman offers a very simple demo, with great direction and purpose, showcasing what I understand to be the majority of gameplay elements present in the final experience. On the other hand, Chronicles of Riddick is a terrible demo, offering little player direction, a confusing context for action and muddled objectives.

Here’s the rub. I plan on buying Chronicles of Riddick and never want to think about Wheelman ever again once I have finished writing this article.

The problems with the Wheelman demo stem from the game itself. The level design is shallow and allows for almost no player improvisation, a must-have layer of design in open-world games. The controls are far too basic for their own good and driving the car (an action I would assume to be at the forefront of the game) is boring. The cars you drive can’t be destroyed, regardless of how much damage enemies inflict upon them or how poorly you drive.  Neither story mission present in the demo has any sort of obvious failure state, which makes success much less interesting.

There are a number of features I find interesting: the ability to “melee” attack other cars with the right analogue stick, supermoves that offer a unique perspective on the BulletTime® cliché and the ability to jump between moving vehicles. All of these mechanics and features were well presented in the demo. Getting through the demo and understanding the game is very easy to do. If you like the demo, if you understand and appreciate what they are going for, I imagine you’d like the full game.

But Chronicles of Riddick… What a terrible demo. A single load screen shows you all of the controls and then suddenly you’re hiding in an air shaft, listening to a couple armed guards talk about their day. A button prompt appears, telling you to cut off their conversation. You do. A cutscene plays of Riddick dropping from the ceiling and killing both men. Then, immediately, a couple more guards attack you. Hope you remember what the load screen taught you to do! If you hesitate for more than a second, the guards will shoot you down and you’ll get to start the demo over.

After that, it doesn’t get better. Your goals are unclear and the context of the narrative is never discussed outside of a brief conversation between Riddick and a woman on a viewscreen that I must infer is the titular Dark Athena. At one point you’re locked in a room with nowhere to go. In the corner of the room, if you stand in the exact right spot, you can interact with the environment and continue forward. I lucked into this interaction. Hope you can to.

It doesn’t help that the demo is brutally difficult. You have very little health, no understanding of the (absolutely necessary) stealth mechanics and dozens upon dozens of enemies who all have near perfect aim from across rooms the size of basketball courts. I died six or seven times before quitting. I never finished the demo.

But here’s the deal. The demo looks great, controls well, and has some brutally fantastic combat animations. Also, I have a history with Chronicles of Riddick. I know the past precedent of the franchise and I know that Starbreeze knows how to make a great game. I know I will buy Riddick the day it comes out it. I know I will enjoy it because all of my issues with context and unclear goals in the demo will (hopefully) be resolved by playing the game from the start.

On a micro level, every single person I worked with cared about the games we made; they cared deeply about making the funs and making the games profitable.

Over the last few years, throughout the halls of my old office – and throughout most of the industry – the discussion of “games as art” has slowly been creeping to the forefront. Gamers argue about it. Reviewers scream about it. Journalists deny it. And so far, it’s not gotten us anywhere. We go in circles and come back to the same point: are video games art? My point: does it matter?

Surely, from a historical perspective, it matters a great a deal.

But right now, does it matter? We’re so obsessed with the justification of our hobby that we don’t get much time to enjoy it. We care so much about the criticisms and the minutia that the whole becomes unfocused, unclear, worth less than the constituent parts. And for what? To prove games are just as historically relevant as movies and books and music and paintings.

History dictates the context. Regardless of what we think right now.

Art and commerce are important. They cannot live without one another. They each force the other to do better. The creator cannot starve; he must be paid to create and to flourish. The marketer cannot sell without a product; he must pay for content to be created. From an outside perspective, it’s easy to label one man a shill, another a sell-out. History will separate and showcase the most successful from each category.

In the here and now, the conversations and dialogues regarding “games as art” have always left me with the feeling that we’re missing something bigger. Tycho made an interesting point a few years ago, basically saying that, yes, of course games are art; they are made up of a number of artistic disciplines that suddenly don’t cease to be art, simply because they are combined together.

This discussion always tends to offer up examples of games that are visually appealing (or engaging), with storylines that work on multiple levels and often have something to “say” about humanity. All well and good. But are the games fun? Are they… Entertaining?

I think, more than anything else, right now games are struggling to find the balance between art and entertainment.

It might be a stage games are going through right now. It might be a non-issue six months from now.

This blog and my writings here will be based around the hypothesis that games with the right balance between art and entertainment are driving the industry forward.

I will focus on reviews, general opinion pieces and perhaps not-entirely-on-topic pop culture pieces for just the right amount of historical context. But at the core of it all will be that one shinning thought, reflected back, through as many examples as possible, either proving or disproving my theory.

I plan on this taking some time.