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...