GamerNode: Plot Wholes's Columns

Childish Behaviour

A long time ago, I read an article on The Escapist that spoke of a three year old playing the ever-entertaining Star Wars Battlefront games. Finishing the first level with more than a little assistance, he then started the second level. Within minutes, he turned to his guardian (the article's author) and stated "this isn't fun anymore."

"Why?"

"Because it's exactly the same as the last level. All the levels are the same."

At first I thought to myself that the child was simply young and couldn't tell the difference between the Moon and the Death Star. But as I read on, I began to wonder if he was actually more perceptive than I was. The game's levels were repetitive, said the boy, and from anyone else this would have been an acceptable criticism of an FPS title, as, let's be honest, there's on...

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Time + New Developer = Change?

If you've seen the Max Payne 3 screenshots and various other tidbits of information this week, you're probably wondering what exactly happened to the dark, angry man with a bit of stubble and the ability to slow down time, and who this fat bearded man staggering around Brazil is. I don't know about you, but that looks like design blasphemy to me, and to those who followed the cop down the dark path in the first two titles it may seem like Link suddenly changing gender and using an Uzi to take out Ganondorf from a Harley Davidson.

Duke Nukem Forever had a thirteen-year gap between the last title and the now-cancelled one. But, by taking a close look at the demo reel that finally showed up only weeks before the game was completely cancelled showed a Duke that, by and large, hadn't really chan...

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Can Games Make Us Feel?

Everyone, at some point, has been in a pretty dark place, mentally. Whether it's just one of those days where you miss the bus only to have a second one splash muddy water all over your new shoes, or the day someone you loved left the realm of the living, we're all old friends with sorrow.

Videogames tend to be our escape from the mundane, and more commonly, emotionally difficult aspects of life. Have an argument with your folks, jump online on Halo 3, shoot seven hells out of the opposing team, and feel better, or simply delve into the world of Grim Fandango and forget anything exists outside the Land of the Dead. But do videogames represent the sorrow we experience throughout the course of our slow journey towards the afterlife?

Almost everyone I've ever spoken to was horrendously upset wh...

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Is E3 Still Gameplay Focused?

This year, I watched Steven Spielberg and James Cameron appear on stage at E3, to talk about both Microsoft Natal and Avatar respectively. They spoke of storytelling, of film, of true narrative and how it can be applied to videogames in a way that will engage on the same mental and emotional level as the latest summer blockbuster. The prospect of someone coming onstage at E3 and actually saying "gameplay isn't everything there is" was shocking, and something that filled me with the same warm happy feeling most people get when they realise they've finally finished the achievements for LEGO Batman.

I am by no means a gaming ninja: I found Ninja Gaiden 2 fairly tricky at times on an average difficulty, and I played Bioshock on "easy" the first time round because it was my first console FPS in ...

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Are Simple Storylines Better?

NB: These Plot Wholes columns are the ones that were due to go up in the time period the site was down. I hope you enjoy them, and I hope even more you'll make the effort not to scream at the sudden wave of articles.

The other week, I was sat on a podcast as a guest, and asked what game I felt had evolved the idea of narrative in games the most in the last few decades, as was Kyle Orland. My response? Super Mario Bros. His response? Space Invaders.

Why these left-field choices? Well, it's because they were so simple, and as a result they worked so well that you didn't really need to think about the storyline of the game so much as just play everything to death whilst dealing with a narrative that was present in everything you did.

Let me explain Super Mario Bros. as a choice a little bit more...

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Do Gamers Secretly Want to be Criminals?

Today, I watched my fiancé frantically call debit card companies, her parents and various other hotlines as her wallet was stolen on the way home, bag zipped, wallet secure, or so we wrongfully assumed. It got me thinking about how shocking it is when it happens: I've been mugged five times in London, and assaulted on two of those occasions. It was horrifying, scary and I never saw London the same way again. Yet, why does that shock me when I'm perfectly fine with stealing people's silverware in Oblivion, or stealing cars in GTA IV?

Human beings, by nature, are fascinated by crime and morally unjust acts. It's not because we're all secretly unbalanced and hell-bent on violence, crime and the destruction of the socio-political machine that is, at the moment, ticking over rather unsoundly. Ju...

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Are Sandbox Games Failing?

Are sandbox games a dying breed? With titles like Far Cry 2, GTA IV and various others competing to present you with the best possible open world gaming experience, more recently one that is as contemporary as it is realistic, it's hard to argue that sandbox titles are beginning to lose their aura of enticing quality.

Verisimilitude aside, there are very telling signs of what constitutes a sandbox experience, and what is simply one quality aspect of the game copied and pasted hundreds of times onto a larger map. Whereas Liberty City was full of life, various characters, themed islands, and varied missions, Ubisoft's Africa was essentially the same six missions and vehicles dotted around a mountainous landscape devoid of any real motivation for off-hand exploration.

To take two examples in co...

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Gotta Catch 'Em All

As Gordon Freeman traverses the ruins of City 17, he'll occasionally see a lambda symbol etched onto the devastated remains of buildings, walls, or random air vents. Our silent protagonist will then think "aha! Health! Guns! Ammunition!" personally, I think "right, that's one, now where does the guide say the next one is?"

Collectibles are running videogames. Even logical collectibles, like the supply caches I mentioned in the above example, are simply tools to wrench more life out of a game that, quite honestly, doesn't need it. Do you really need every golden and coloured banana in Donkey Kong 64? Of course you don't, but you'll usually do it anyway, and it's only gotten worse with the introduction of achievements and trophies.

Think about it. Where do most collectibles fit in, when playin...

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Bringing it Home, Part Two

Note: if you've not played to the end of Mass Effect, Grim Fandango or Gears of War 2, avoid the first three paragraphs.

My nerves are shattered. I've been guiding Commander Shepherd through Mass Effect for fifty-two hours now, and I've just seen him crushed beneath a building's structural collapse. My heart stops. Please don't tell me they're going to kill him off. I watch patiently, praying that he made it through, not just because immersion and character identification are working their magic, courtesy of Bioware: it's because I invested fifty-two damn hours into this man and I am not going to see him fall to a few pebbles after killing thousands of enemy soldiers. He rises, and I triumph.

I've been trekking across the underworld for four years. I've been living on ships, in ports, in bar...

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Bringing it Home, Part One

For me, the opening thirty seconds of a video game, film, book or any other form of art is what makes or breaks the experience. Bear in mind I am in no way referring to media that, in itself, requires no narrative, such as Counter Strike, or physics textbooks. Story-driven experiences need to have that hook, that certain "je ne sais quoi" that draws you into the world of its creator's own imagination for long enough that you're not sure whether you ever want to leave again.

With video games, the task of coming up with a stimulating opening sequence is fickle from the beginning. Do we create a short film, or make it interactive and player-driven? Will it have an orchestral, grand soundtrack, or the wonderfully honest musings of DMX? The questions are endless, but the one question they'll alw...

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Beam Me Up, Shepherd

Space. The final frontier. At the moment, it's also the final frontier of creativity in terms of science fiction, if you're ignoring alternate dimensions. The main problem with space is that it's a big place, full of a lot of planets, stars, black holes, gas clouds, asteroids and other bits of geological wonder, but very rarely do we consider that it might also be boring.

Mass Effect is a game that manages to bring half of the galaxy (as we'll be exploring the other half in the 2010 sequel) into your living room on a normal level. You do indeed fly around in your own ship, the high-tech wonder Normandy, but you're not actually doing any of the flying itself. That falls down to a team of thirty people you'll never see sitting anywhere else, and a pilot who seemingly never sleeps, though, see...

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Holy Metacritic, Batman!

For the purposes of my argument, I'm simply going to ignore the LEGO title that takes advantage of the various instant-success comic book franchises so readily available to game developers as of late. Games like Spiderman 2, Arkham Asylum and other games we've loved and are valiantly hoping to love become our internal marking criteria when we engage with the characters whose role we play in a game's storyline.

Everyone wants to be a super-hero, when you think about it. Deep down, you know you'd love to fly, turn invisible and throw cars at bad guys, or even -be- a bad guy. But when you can't feel the wind rushing past your mask, and you've replaced arm gestures for the right trigger when slinging webs all over Manhattan, is it really possible?

Most folks would say no. The only titles in whic...

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Onward, to Glory

You'd think RTS titles would have such a wealth of epic storylines. There are huge armies, forts, even villages and cities, not to mention heroes of the land, huge monsters, aliens and other such antagonists. Yet, whenever it actually comes to it, there's not really that many titles you can name that have narratives that really stick in that genre.

StarCraft and WarCraft are still, hands-down, the best examples of telling a story and keeping it interesting, even while you're waiting for a Protoss Reaver to finish building, or watching Orc peons chopping wood.

Three races will always compete in the "Craft" universes, and they'll always be along the same lines, interestingly enough. Elves and Protoss will always hold the position of lofty, intelligent, near-immortal wispy little men and women ...

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Small Cog, Big Machine

To work as both a games journalist and a writer of fiction means my two styles of writing tend to merge more often than I'd like. Sometimes when I'm writing my own stories, I suddenly remember I'm supposed to be writing someone else's stories, and vice versa.

The thing about creating fiction is that, if you're closer to steampunk and science fiction, you'll find you need to create universes yourself, rather than designating your work "fan fiction" and simply grasping at someone else's. Don't get me wrong, some of the universes I've written for are fantastic, and often offer me a lot more inspiration than most universes I create myself. But the thing with videogame universes is they're not designed for someone to simply sit and read or look at, scene by scene, until it finishes. They're desi...

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Leave Them Laughing

Videogames are a serious business. Well, you'd think that judging by the current lack of humor in their dialogue, and the absence of any characters that fit the generic "funny" archetypes we experience through television shows, books, and radio.

Many would claim humor died with the death of Nintendo's fabled loyalty to its hardcore audience, using physical comedy in games like Luigi's Mansion and Wind Waker to put a smile on our faces and make our bellies rumble with mirth. Personally, I think it still exists; it's just evolved into a more subtle creature that we don't always notice, nowadays.

Portal is a great example. From the get-go, you're introduced to a robotic voice with little to no indication whether she's hindered by speakers or uses an artificial voice emulator. GLaDOS is complet...

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Joysticks and Popcorn

It could be said that the videogame industry is the new Hollywood. Actors such as Keith David, Seth Green, and Patrick Stewart, not to mention celebrity voice actors such as Stephen Fry, are all jumping at the chance to offer up their acting skills to a medium in which no one will ever even see their faces.

In the last twenty years, things have begun to come full circle, and we're beginning to see fewer videogames based on films, and more films based on videogame titles instead. Recent cinematic adaptations have been poorly done, such as Max Payne, a film that should have been an action flick interspersed with some dark, twisted dialogue reminiscent of Sin City. Instead we got two hours of people talking, the occasional gunshot, and a demon/angel creature that has never featured in either ...

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God-Given Talent

Plunging back into the realm of Too Human this week, it began to become a persistent thought that perhaps videogames are butchering and manipulating mythology to serve as a basis for their own universes. Sometimes it's a lack of narrative-based creativity on the behalf of the scriptwriters, and sometimes simply a studio of Viking-obsessed developers determined to bring that beer and horned helmets feeling to our living rooms.

It begs the question; why are developers substituting original storytelling for the same tired old myths we'd prefer to keep in the museum in their true format, and warping them into game-worthy versions of their original incarnations? I don't know about you, but I sure as hell don't remember Thor ever being more than fifty percent machine in any of the tomes of Nors...

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What is it Good For?

"In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war." - Warhammer 40K.

In the grim darkness of the games industry's concepts and design department, why is there only war? Western narratives have become centred around conflict, genocide, homicide, nuclear winters and opposing forces, and yet any games we cannot find some form of military subtext in suddenly becomes redundant in its lack of aggression.

The Call of Duty titles are a prime example of the obsession with war. Admittedly, it's already happened; the first three games were based on World War Two, and the series has also focused on the recent war in Iraq as another background for its ongoing franchise. But why are we only comfortable in a video game when we're holding a gun?

It could be argued that we're no different to anyone ...

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Insanity Sells: The J-RPG

As I sit in the local Oriental eatery, wolfing down chicken ramen and immersing myself in printed web-manga, I think about what the Japanese have done for gaming culture. The video game explosion has never been demonstrated quite the way it has in Japan, and the sheer amount of games they release each week is testament to it being one of the staples of their entire economy. However, there is one genre of video games that has been dominated by the Land of the Rising Sun for decades -- the role-playing game.

The narratives have always been absurd, melodramatic, and sometimes downright hilarious in their complete disregard for plot threading, sensible juxtapositions, and even common sense, but time and time again we find ourselves drawn back into the world of big swords and even bigger hair....

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Lazy Heroes

I'm running through the post-apocalyptic wasteland that is Washington D.C. My heart thuds its way up my throat. My feet feel like lead. I can feel the urgency; the need to find my father. Years of isolation without him have driven me to hunt him down. What I'll do when I find him, I'm not sure anymore. I sprint blindly around the next corner, stopping only to take the head off of a rampaging Super Mutant with my hunting rifle. But all of a sudden, I see a small boy. He tells me his father has died, thanks to a new type of six-foot long ant that breathes fire, and he wants me to clear the scuttling little things out of his town. I could play the hero, and clear them out. Or I could take the key to his dad's stash of weapons, ammo and stimpaks, and "remove" the child.

Or I could just keep g...

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