Video Games - What Are They Good For?

Video games are for nerds. Or kids. Or guys. Or pathetic 1,000 pound shut-ins. At least that’s what most folks seems to believe. In spite of the expansion of the game industry and the marketing muscle of companies like Microsoft, games are still the least-understood and most misrepresented entertainment medium in our culture aside from clog-dancing. And unfortunately, as with anything having to do with the media, it’s often the vacuous, sensational, do-nothing offerings that get the most press. How else do you explain the perennial popularity of Paris Hilton?

Games are rarely seen in a positive light; the average person doesn’t have much notion of what games are outside of the headlines and those tend to represent them as mindless and vaguely unhealthy at best and at worst, the catalyst for social degeneration. It’s not easy in that context to explain how gaming could be a worthy entertainment outlet for anyone.

Sadly, the negative press ends up burying the good that can be gained by playing games. Like any creative medium, there’s good and bad, fluff and substance, ham-fistedness and sensitivity. My favorite games have not only tested my reflexes—they’ve touched my emotions, exercised my problem-solving abilities and piqued my intellectual curiosity.

Don’t’ believe me? Here’s a laundry list: the Gabriel Knight series inspired me to visit New Orleans and to read up on Bavarian history, Wagner and the Knights Templar. The Longest Journey, Ico and World of Warcraft allowed me to visit strange and beautiful places I could never see outside my dreams. Other titles let me try my hand at different professions—I’ve been a lawyer in Phoenix Wright, a journalist in Hotel Dusk, a pirate in Monkey Island and the savior of France in Jean d’Arc.

Games can be so much more than blasting zombies. In fact, I would argue that great games provide as much edification and entertainment value as the best movies, books and art, and just like those better-established media, shouldn’t be judged solely by the titles that get the most press. The market is saturated by unimaginative movie tie-ins and Bruckheimer-esque shooters but thankfully some developers continue to make really smart and interesting games.

As a people, the Japanese can be counted on to churn out some wacky stuff. Witness the Katamari series, Loco Roco, Lost in Blue, Eternal Sonata or Cooking Mama. Leave it to them to figure out how to make addictive gameplay out of rolling up bigger and bigger balls of crap, being cast away on a desert island, righting political wrongs as the 19^th century Polish composer Frederic Chopin or chopping carrots.

Many European developers like the Adventure Company also continue to contribute titles that buck the heavy artillery/bouncing boobies trend. Their games are generally heavy on story and problem solving, light on T&A. It’s the difference between watching a Cohen Brothers movie or Die Hard.

You know, it does me good to know there are game developers who are crazy enough to think people are interested in things other than blowing shit up. I’m hoping those wild-eyed visionaries one day create a real life Holodeck—you know, like Star Trek? I for one won’t rest until someone else puts in the hard work necessary to makes my escapist dreams a reality.

While I’m waiting, I’ll focus my efforts on ferreting out those rare titles that contribute something to my consciousness while proclaiming their value to anyone who’ll listen. It’s not an easy job but somebody has to be unnaturally obsessed with it.

Unlikely Heroes: Offbeat Game Heroes Prove You Don't Need Muscle to Have Moxie

What would video games be without heroes? They’d be Pong, that’s what they’d be. Each and every video game would be Pong – and we’d all be playing it with our butts sweatily stuck to our naugahyde couches in corduroy bell-bottom pants while listening to Hotel California, swilling RC Cola and watching Sanford and Son! It’d be an ugly world, I assure you.

Luckily, we don’t have to face such a reality; video games have evolved a lot since the advent of Pong and video game heroes have evolved right along with them. Good thing too, because heroes allow escapist shut-ins like me to become someone else, someone more capable, more courageous, more attractive than ourselves. Perhaps it’s obvious what defines a hero but it wouldn’t hurt to refresh our memories:

The first definition of the word “hero” might be:

1) a large sandwich, usually consisting of a small loaf of bread or long roll cut in half lengthwise and containing a variety of ingredients, as meat, cheese, lettuce, and tomatoes.

Another definition of the word “hero” might be:

2) a person who, in the opinion of others, has heroic qualities or has performed a heroic act and is regarded as a model or ideal.

As appetizing as the former might be, the latter works best for our purposes.

Who comes to mind first when thinking of video game heroes? For most of us, it’d be guys like Sam Fisher, Solid Snake or Master Chief. They epitomize every man’s (and some women’s) desire to achieve mysterious, musclebound macho-hood. But come on – is there room in this puissant paradigm for the loveable schmoe, the empathetic Everyman, the hero who (like Festivus) is designed for the “rest of us”?

Some might think not. Fortunately for us all, throughout gaming history, along with the unstoppable commandoes, bulletproof cops and ruthless demigods, there have been more than a few 90-lb weaklings who decided they’d had sand kicked in their faces one too many times. Perhaps you know some of them…

Manny Calavera--Spooky Hero:

How often has Death been made into a game hero? Not often I’ll wager. Let’s face it–death in general isn’t something we much want to identify with. In 1998 though, a game came along with a hero whose distinct personality, investigative prowess and clever quips did a lot to rehab Death’s image. LucasArts’ Grim Fandango gave many of us our first taste of Film Noir, Art Deco and the Mexican Day of the Dead and Manny Calavera, its travel agent-slash-gumshoe protagonist, won that year’s competition phalanges-down for Most Charismatic, Best Dressed, and Most Likely to Talk Like Edward James Olmos.

At the start Manny’s not a hero type by any stretch. Turns out, this be-suited Reaper’s an unsuccessful salesman whose unglamorous daily grind consists of selling afterlife travel packages to the dearly departed. It’s a rube’s job with few surprises until Manny lands a client–a hot tomato named Meche--and uncovers through her a conspiracy to cheat the virtuous dead out of their Great Reward. Bringing down Hector LeMans, the crime head – er…skull behind the conspiracy means Manny’s gotta morph overnight from smalltime salesman to the afterlife’s equivalent of Sam Spade.

Fortunately for the recently dead, he’s up to the task and does it without even wrinkling his suit. Set on righting the wrongs, he and his hotroddin’ demonic aide-de-camp, Glottis zoom around dishing out the comeuppance like no one this side of Oblivion. It just goes to show – you don’t have to have muscles to be a hero. Heck, it goes to show you don’t even have to have skin.

Sora--Girly-boy Hero:

You could argue that Sora, the main character in both Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2 is not all that unusual a hero - at least not in the 'metro' world of Anime games. In that context, he's a fairly typical teenager with all the common attributes: the spiky hair, the pointy chin, the watery, effeminate eyes, the nearly-nonexistent nose... While these might make him seem at first blush like many another of those dime-a-dozen Japanese protagonists, Sora's different from those pretty boys. After all, how many of them have big, yellow Mickey Mouse feet and can claim Goofy and Donald Duck as sidekicks?

Sora, like most unlikely heroes, is made such by circumstances beyond his control. He's just a regular kid living it up Three's Company style with his friends Kairi and Riku in the lush Destiny Islands (a Logan's Run sort of a place where apparently no one older than 18 is allowed to live) until Evil invades the islands. When that happens, Sora is unexpectedly swept away from his idyll and into a maelstrom of apocalyptic drama and intrigue cooked up by the game's villain--the unfortunately named Xehanort.

Xehanort's more or less an overgrown emo-kid who whenever he's not maintaining his mega-mullet, is trying to destroy the universe with the darkness found in human hearts. His project nearly succeeds and for a while there it's touch and go considering the only thing standing between the universe and total annihilation is a 14 year old kid and a couple of Disney characters with speech impediments.

Sora's got a secret weapon though - not only does he have a bigger than usual heart, he's spunky and sincere, and I'm pretty sure it's an unwritten rule that no matter what they're up against, all big-hearted kids who are spunky and sincere come out on top. (Or is it big-footed characters who are stinky and insured who always win the day? I can never keep that straight. Hrm. Anyway…) Sora does his Anime origins proud by saving one Disney-themed world after another, defeating Xehanort and once again making the world safe for Disnocracy.

Old schoolers might like their heroes more strapping than sincere but in Square Enix and Disney's world, heart counts for more than height and that's pretty cool. Isn't it comforting to know a skinny, pre-adolescent kid can kick even more ass than those guys whose voices have already changed? Take THAT, muscleheads -- Yosh!

Abe--Frog/Monkeyman Hero:

Abe shuffled onto the scene in 1997 in Oddworld Inhabitant's Abe’s Oddysee, adding a decidedly amphibious element to the corpus of hero-dom. Before ascending to the level of hero, Abe’s your average Mudokon working stiff; just one of the thousands of troglodytic slaves at Rupture Farms meat processing plant.

Abe’s meteoric rise from custodial engineer to Oddworld Messiah is brought on by the revelation that his employers plan to keep the factory going by turning employees like him into entrees. Unwilling to march smilingly into the meat grinder, he makes the fateful choice to defy the Man (or...whatever those Glukkon creatures are) and affect his own -- and consequently, everyone else's -- liberation. He succeeds in winning his freedom and in the subsequent Munch’s Oddysee, Abe once again takes on the role of Great Emancipator for a race of aquatic kleenex-box-shaped creatures called Gabbits, bringing down the evil Vykker's Labs in much the same fashion he took out Rupture Farms.

Whether in 2D or in 3D, Abe’s a singular figure. Poor posture, a big head, bulging eyes and a sewn-shut mouth usually preclude a guy from achieving the protagonist’s ideal. The upside of that awkwardness is that while Abe’s physical flaws might prevent him from becoming the cover model for Superheroes Quarterly, they also make him exponentially more sympathetic. He's like Ralph Macchio in the Karate Kid. I mean, who watches the Karate Kid and roots for that jerkoff Johnny? We all want Daniel to treat that creep to a dirt nap, don't we?

Hey, in honor of Abe and Ralph Macchio, let's make up a whole new title for the scrawny, sympathetic hero. How about..."Spirited Slouch"? No good. "Ballsy Mama's Boy"? No poetry to that. "Plucky Pantywaist?" This is harder than I thought. I better sleep on it.

Honorary title or no, Abe sets an example and levels the playing field, giving hope to green, skinny, googly-eyed guys everywhere.

Raz--Carnie Hero:

No list of heroes is complete without a circus-born, ten year old, goggle-wearing psychic and Razputin or "Raz" from DoubleFine's 2005 Psychonauts helps wrap up this one. Raz is a psychically-attuned kid who runs away from his acrobatic circus family and crashes the party at Whispering Rock summer camp in hopes of becoming a psychic agent or "psychonaut". He quickly realizes something at the camp smells and it's not the latrines. Someone has woven a bizarre plot to kidnap campers' brains so Raz and his girlfriend Lili Zanotto, ("she's NOT my girlfriend!") cleverly combine their formidable psychic abilities to unravel it.

Raz tracks the perpetrator by jumping in and out of various characters' psyches. It's no joke following the villain's topsy-turvy trail through the delusions of paranoid milkmen, the myriad regrets of has-been actresses and the jealousies of lovelorn artists. These mental gymnastics are no hindrance to a determined psychonaut however, and Raz has training, raw talent, acrobatic skill and a cute girlfriend (she's NOT my girlrfriend!") on his side. Using nothing but mindpower, Raz defeats the corrupt Coach Oleander and the Evil (domo arigato?) Dr. Loboto, rescues the kidnapped camp instructors and restores all the stolen brains to their rightful owners. At the final count, it's Raz - one, Bad Guys - zero. Who says being cerebral isn't cool?

...to be continued.

Nintendo Knows What Girls Like

I only became a handheld enthusiast about 6 months ago. Before then, I didn't think the handheld had anything to offer anyone over the age of 10 but once I got ahold of my husband's DS lite and a game called Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, I was hooked.

I played the hell out of that game and couldn't wait to get my hands on the sequel to it. I was perfectly satisfied living out my vicarious lawerly career on a borrowed DS until the day I discovered the existence of the pink DS.

From that day forward, my thoughts were consumed by a moral battle of great intensity and breadth. Having a perfectly good DS at my disposal, I hardly needed to blow another $130 on a second one just because it was PINK. Money aside, I hated to think that I could be so easily taken in by such transparent marketing manipulation. You know, the whole "Now in three colors - collect them all!" strategy. By far though, the hardest thing to come to terms with was well...my attraction to the pink.

As a kid I was a tomboy, and as a teenager embraced the whole punk thing--meaning, I wouldn't have been caught dead associating with anything pink. Pink symbolized to me female subjugation, weakness, vanity, frivolity - all things I wanted nothing to do with. I remember the horror I felt one christmas when I was 16 and my older sister gave me a pair of pink Chuck Taylors. I pulled them out of the box with my fingertips and held them away from me like a dead rat, hoping to burn them at the earliest opportunity.

Having upheld this no-pink policy for most of my adult life, how then could I find myself so inexorably drawn to a bubblegum-colored video game gadget? The shame of it!!

I fought the impulse to buy it, telling myself I didn't need to waste the money, and I held out for a good 3 months. Then a few days ago I was browsing Amazon.com for games and there it was - the adorable, shiny, cute-as-a-bug's-ear pink DS! I couldn't stop myself. I ran out after work and bought the damn thing. What can I say? I had a rough week. It was near that time of the month. My dog died. Whatever--all I know is, me and my pink DS are finally together and life is immeasurably better. It's hardly been out of my hand for a week.

The lesson here? The lesson is that fighting temptation is pointless. Principles shminciples. From now on I'm giving in immediately -- at least if the issue concerns something shiny and pink.

Gamesnobbery: A Study in High-Falutin' Geekery

Anyone who plays games has at least one obnoxious, know-it-all friend who thinks he’s the authority on gaming. (Note: if you don’t have a friend like this, then the obnoxious know-it-all is you.) That friend thinks he’s the best at every game—all the games that count anyway—he’s sure to have a strong opinion about which games are worth playing and which ones you’d have to be an idiot to enjoy. He’s up on all the latest and most obscure import titles and when you discover something new and exciting to you, he rolls his eyes as if to say “that game is SO last year.”

Within my circle of game enthusiast friends there are more than a few game snobs. For those of you unacquainted with game-geekus uberificus, I’ll share my observances of the species in its natural habitat. Understand that game snobs come in many equally tedious varieties, described as follows.

The Techie Snob
The Techie Snob won’t speak to anyone who owns a console. He proudly declares his Mensa membership, wears a “Fuck Ipod” t-shirt and built his own PC from black market parts ordered through a contact in Dubai. He openly exhibits his contempt for anyone who can’t rattle his system specs off on demand and believes aside from Doom, there are no real games.

The Old School Snob
To get an idea of what the O.S.S. is like, imagine that old Dana Carvey Saturday Night Live skit, the Grumpy Old Man. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Grumpy_Old_Man#A_Grumpy_Old_Man

The O.S.S. is pissed about everything about the current state of gaming, insisting that everything was better in the old days. This attitude generally signifies a serious misapprehension– one that mistakes frustration for fun. “Back in the day, we didn’t have any of these wussy, hand-holding World of Warcraft MMOs with their signs and their quest markers and their maps. In Ultima you had to figure things out for yourself. You wandered aimlessly for hours gathering materials so you could spend even more hours painfully grinding crafting xp until you finally had the money and gear to leave your starting town--then, the second you set foot out of the city limits you were ganked by high level players who killed you and robbed your corpse of everything you’d worked so hard for and you had to start all over again. Now THAT’S an MMO.”

The Wannabe Game Designer Snob
This brand of snob knows zippo about technology, programming, business or art, but is convinced with his encyclopedic knowledge of game titles, he could be better at game design than all the development teams put together. He’s extremely talkative, holding forth at any opportunity about the “right” way to balance weapons or place spawn points. Will bore you to tears outlining how his Counterstrike maps are better than any of the official ones at the drop of an empty Mountain Dew can.

The PvP Snob
If a game doesn’t entail kicking another player’s ass, this guy isn’t interested in it. He can argue for days re: the optimum spec for every class in [insert MMO title here] and has every Battlefield 2142 map memorized. He goes by names like “N00bHunt3r” and can often be found in Gamespy lobbies making pronouncements about other gamers’ questionable skills and sexual orientation.

As you might imagine, aside from these few examples, there are many other sub-classes within these major snobbish orders, such as: the Genre Snob, the Nintendo/Microsoft/Sony snob, the Fashion Victim snob, etc. The list is extensive and various of these will perhaps be examined at a later date if they irritate me enough.

God of War - the Non-Ladies Man

Is it absolutely necessary that the women in God of War II be so damn ugly? I just finished playing the game and I was amazed that they somehow managed to make the environments gorgeous and the female characters utterly wretched. I remember thinking the same thing in God of War the First—that the artists who made the female models either were misogynists or had never actually seen a woman’s body.

It’s funny too considering both games have erotic little uh…”minigames” wherein Kratos, the demigod hero of the franchise demonstrates his bedside manner to some enthusiastic ladies of the night. I don’t generally have too much issue with incidental cheesecake in games—however, what I DO have issue with his badly done cheesecake.

The women in the GOW games remind me of Renaissance sculpture. Renaissance artists apparently had more access to male models (not to mention a general preference for sultry young Italian boys), hence their female subjects were often based on male models. The muscular thighs and broad shoulders of Michelangelo’s sculpture “Night” for instance--

--make it painfully obvious that the artiste figured he could use a male model, slap a pair of grapefruit halves on his chest and none of us would be the wiser.

Now don't jump to the conclusion that I’m making statements regarding the "preferences" of the artists on the God of War team, but I can’t figure out why in hell they make their female characters—from prostitutes to goddesses—look like used-up Vegas strippers with bad boob jobs. All of them are haggard and hard in the face, with watermelon-sized breasts that in their granitelike immovability, manage to avoid being remotely sexy.

Granted, all the humanoid characters in GOW I and II are hard-edged and that works for walking/talking stone deities, mythological beasts and bloodthirsty warriors. But a fondly-remembered wife, a bevy of brothel babes or luminous incarnations of feminine divinity? Not so much.

The God of War franchise has now produced two extremely entertaining and successful games so I’m sure there are people out there who’ll wonder why the hell I’d bother mentioning such an admittedly minor aspect of the games. But I’m sorry – there’s precious little acknowledgment of the feminine in games or the game industry as it is. Considering that most of what does exist comes in the form of game hotties, it’s insulting when game developers choose to represent them as nothing more than a pair of ginormo-boobs supported by stiff, disproportionately masculine bodies and fail to take the entire feminine package into account. I’m just saying – if even the babes are getting short shrift, where does that leave the rest of us?

Adventure Games Resurrected

I've been lamenting the death of adventure games since 1999 or so, after the last Gabriel Knight game came out. I'd just discovered the joy of PC adventure gaming in 1996 and was living in a fool's paradise, thinking the genre would go on forever. Little did I know it'd be stomped into the ground by the Great Console Uprising.

Once people got themselves a taste of the ol' plug-and-play, it was all over. No one wanted to spend half an hour installing 8 CD's and that impatience was reflected in the types of games folks wanted to play. No longer were people satisfied with moving along at a point-and-click snail's pace or using every single object in their inventory in random, nonsensical combinations to solve a puzzle--they wanted action! Fire and gunshots and heads exploding everywhere! What could Myst offer in comparison to that?

I remember denying the trend, thinking if I closed my eyes, the 800-pound platform gorilla would just go away. But it didn't. Even when faced with a burning desire to try the original Halo on Xbox, I fought to maintain my allegiance to the adventure game. I went so far as to email Jane Jensen, the designer of all three Gabriel Knight games, hoping she might give me some insight into why no one was making adventure games anymore. I was such a fan of the Gabriel Knight series I think I'd harbored the hope that as a result of my email, Jane would become my friend. We're both women, right? We both love games. There still aren't that many women out there who love games so I thought that alone might make give me some cool points in her book.

It didn't play out the way I hoped though. She was polite enough but she had no comfort to offer me. All she said was there was no perceived market for adventure games anymore and that was why she'd left the game industry. Harsh news to deliver up cold. And she didn't even soften the blow by offering to take me out for a latte. Jane, if you're out there somewhere, I miss you!

Anyway, it was a sad 6 years or so trying to find something to fill the adventure game void. In the process, I played some godawful adventure titles, just horrid things with third-string graphics, exercises in frustration masquerading as puzzles and sophomoric storylines. You could say for me they were adventure game methadone. Eventually I gave up and got pulled into the world of MMO's and never looked back. And then came a little game called Hotel Dusk.

Hotel Dusk is a DS game developed by japanese company Cing (who also developed another game I hadn't heard of called Trace Memory). I was skeptical about playing it since I wasn't too impressed with other handheld games--I just can't get past the tiny screen--but when I saw that you hold the DS vertically like you would a book, I decided to give it a go.

It wasn't the greatest game ever but it did have great characterization, interesting dialog, and a story so compelling it kept me playing long enough to fall asleep with the DS in my hand. Wait one minute...what does this remind me of? It's right on the tip of my....that's IT! It reminds me of my favorite PC adventure games! Yeahyeahyeahyeahyeah!

Over the top? Yes. But that's how excited I was. I'm just saying Hotel Dusk made me realize the handheld is likely to give adventure games a new lease on life and that's great news for those of us who love them. Impressions of other handheld adventure titles forthcoming...

My So-Called Second Life

Behold, a new temp gallery of 3D texture-based imagery.

http://bmunchausen.com/Gallery2/main.php