Tacoma is is absolutely a “Fullbright” game. The cynical call their games “walking simulators” but I don’t understand that mindset. This term is supposed to imply that the game is “lesser” because it doesn’t involve twitchy combat and thus doesn’t require what munchkin players call “skill”. This is an immature line of thought; a game is good if it is fun and engaging, and Fullbright manages to directly engage me every time.

Combat doesn’t make a game good. The absolute best parts of Witcher 3 do not involve combat. I love that game but honestly W3’s combat is weak sauce. It’s fun, but there’s not much to it. No – the best moments are the emotional crescendos that the game is capable of producing inside of you, and those crescendos come only after you invest time in understanding the characters.

The best games are great because they have great story.

Tacoma takes place on board an empty space station. You are a contractor sent to recover the station’s artificial intelligence named ODIN. Along the way you discover what happened to the crew. The way this happens is so well done I am in awe.

Nearly everything is handled through augmented reality (AR) systems. You will see digital overlays all over the place. Pick up a book written in Russian, and a translation is automatically overlaid on it that you can read. Email is read through AR. You can find an AR yoga instructor.

How you discover what is happened is by viewing recovered AR recordings of the crew that the station recorded. They download into your AR device and then you can view them in a kind of holographic “playback”. You watch the crew interact and sometimes even access their own AR systems. It is through this mechanism that you unspool the puzzle.

It’s not overly complex but it takes some ingenuity sometimes. You’ll have to follow people around station as they split up inside of a single recording and sometimes figure out how to unlock doors so you can follow them.

The game affected me. I felt several moments of happiness, sadness, and fear for a bunch of people that I only learned about through old recordings and snooping through their email folders. At one point I feared I was witnessing the death of a crew member and I felt my chest tighten.

It doesn’t take a long time to complete – maybe three and a half hours to suck the marrow out of it. It’s cheap, too – twenty bones right now – so well worth your time.

I wish that Roger Ebert were still alive so that he could play Gone Home and finally experience a video game that can be clearly and unequivocally called “art.”

I wrote a thing once that attempted to tackle his statement that “video games can never be art.” Basically I said that the definition of the word “art” is what we have disagreement on and that a lot of what gamers think of as “art” isn’t so we should all just get over ourselves.

(Only I used a lot of swear words and I made a lot of references to pornography.)

Gone Home is art. I cannot think of a better word for it as it matches both the definitions I hold and the way Roger described what art is. Gone Home is an experience, but it is one that changes based on how the game is played but most importantly around who the player is. It is a series of layers, each one altering your understanding of the situation.

In Gone Home, you take the role of Kaitlin Greenbriar, a young woman who, on June 7th, 1995, has returned after spending a year abroad to the house where her parents and younger sister, Sam, live, near Portland, Oregon. She takes a shuttle from the airport to the house only to find it deserted – her family missing – and with no explanation for the events.

Determining what happened is the goal of the game. Throughout the game, you search the house. You find clues – papers, photos, tapes, etc. – all of which help you to piece together a puzzle. Not all clues are essential to “finishing” the game but missing one will alter your understanding of what exactly happened. In fact, there are clues that can be missed that will radically alter your understanding of the picture, to the point where it becomes a Romeo and Juliet level tragedy.

And that, right there, is the essential part of the game’s mechanic and why it meets Roger’s definition. With most “story” games like Grand Theft Auto IV or Red Dead Redemption, it is true that player choice largely does not affect the outcome. In many cases you might as well be watching an exceptionally long movie: the story is meted out in fashion, we are shown all of it, and we are told what the story means.

However, in Gone Home, the story and its meaning are absolutely dependant on your actions. It can be a story of happiness or tragedy or one of any point in the continuum of emotion. Best, its position changes as your understanding changes, and it is this mutability that gives the game its magic.

Further, the experience is one that will change you as a player. You may identify with everything that is happening (echoes of nostalgia) or you may find yourself understanding foreign experiences with empathy.

No game has ever left me in tears at the end. This one has, and I am glad for it.

Play this immediately. It takes about 2 to 4 hours. Do it in one sitting.

This will be filled with spoilers. Look away, ye weak-hearted.

Bioshock Infinite was billed as being the best game that has come along in years. The hype machine was turned on and the volume kept increasing: past ten, past eleven, up to fifteen at least. And then it was hyped some more.

I bought, played, and finished the game during launch-week and for the most part I enjoyed it. I thought the story and the environment it was set within was absolutely amazing – quite simply a triumph. I also found it wildly schizophrenic.
I felt that its over-reliance on straight up, balzout combat was out of place and off-putting. It was the drunken, racist guest who won’t shut up at Thanksgiving dinner and you wish would just fucking leave.

From here be spoilers.

Bioshock Infinite takes place in the early 1900s. We, that is, the player, a character named Booker, are tasked simply: “Bring us the girl and we’ll forgive the debt.” Ah! It’s a kidnap/rescue mission? Okay. On with the show.

In this game, there exists a floating, idyllic city named “Columbia” and it is there that we must find the girl. The city silently and secretly makes its way around the world, held aloft by the will of mind-bending technology and hot-air balloons. It is a city we are not allowed to enter until we are baptized (though in whose name, we know not).

Once out of the waters, we are treated to a wonderful, enchanting spectacle. It’s a carnival, replete with booths selling candy and allowing us to play fairground games. We learn a great deal about Columbia and her history. Everything is vibrant and alive: the colors are deeply saturated, the citizens are laughing and happy.

There are no monsters. This is a paradise. We can see why one would choose to live here.

Oh, sure, there are signs that all is not well in fairyland. Subtle indications of racism abound (this is, after all, 1912). There are marks of a poor underclass. But these are fleeting glimpses, and we are on a mission to find a girl.

We play games. We pass vendors selling popcorn and cotton candy. Barbershop quartets anachronistically singing Beach Boys songs.

Eventually we find ourselves engaged in a kind of “lottery” game. We pick a baseball out of a basket with a number written on it. Lo and behold, our number is called, and we are the winner!

What is our prize? We are given the honor of firing a fastball at two living, breathing, captive humans – two people whose crime is only that they love each other.

Oh, yes. They’re an interracial couple. The game is “let’s chuck baseballs at the black woman and her race-traitor boyfriend.”

Charming people.

I, of course, chose to launch my baseball at the master of ceremonies instead.

In that instant, a police-person grabs my arm, pointing at a tattoo there, shouting that I am the devil come to Columbia! Holy shit! I’m the bad guy? This is crazy!

Well, you better fucking bet I’m the bad guy. Because in the next ten seconds I, the character, will have literally used a hand-held chainsaw device to chop off the face of one of the policemen trying to arrest me. I’m not even kidding: blood and brains and chunks of bone will fly away in high-fidelity as I am forced to butcher around five dudes, all unarmed.

There are no other options. I have to kill them.

That’s when I get a gun. And I have to kill more people. And keep killing them.

Let’s take a moment and put ourselves in the shoes of the police.

From their perspective, I am a fucking terrorist. They can’t have a clue who I am (even if I am the devil) because I’ve already killed everyone who thought that. I’m just a guy going around and killing cops. All the cops.

Going forwards, Bioshock Infinite ceases to be a game of wonder and exploration. It is now a game of mega-violent, gory combat (usually versus innocent, albeit racist policemen), punctuated by bits of wonder and exploration.

It’s a fucking shame.

I really wish I could describe the joy and beauty of the story and how aggressively polarized the combat is. If you have played the game, you understand.

Most people do not have the capacity to flip a switch in their heads that turns them into murder machines. Our character, Booker, is a war veteran (from Wounded Knee, no less), so it is plausible that this violence lurks within him. However, we aren’t given to know this about him for some time, and the Booker we are born into seems a peaceful, melancholy man.

A rattlesnake sheds its skin in a painful process that lasts days. Booker sheds his peace within moments, revealing a beast. It’s quite unnerving.

Another game I played recently was the reboot of Tomb Raider. In that game, we start as a young, 23-year-old woman, who literally screams to the men assaulting her that she doesn’t want to hurt them, she doesn’t want to kill them – she just wants to go home. Her journey from a peaceful student into a rage-filled killer exists but it happens naturally: only when we see exactly how brutal and vile her enemies are can she make the switch. It feels plausible.

Not so much with Infinite.

This bothers me. It bothers me because the schizophrenia of the game is so telling. It’s clear that we have a team of artists and writers who desperately wanted to tell a tantalizing story of great importance and weight. Somewhere on the line, someone said “we must insert combat of this nature because REASONS.” Because it won’t sell, maybe. Because we need to have a “hardcore mode.”

Because REASONS.

Now, to be sure, in the course of the story of Bioshock Infinite there is a switch: one in which we are justified in rage and killing, and that feels true and right (it is when we return from the “other world” and the oppressed have decided to start butchering civilians). But that could have been handled differently.

In the version of the game that exists in my mind, this is the story:

Booker comes to Columbia. He discovers that there is an oppressed underclass, yearning to be free. We tell the story as a mirror of the civil war and the freeing of the slaves. We find the girl, Elizabeth, and she helps us to free the serf class.

This is handled with as little violence as possible. Elizabeth can hop between worlds and travel in time! What fun puzzles can be made by jumping back and forth between worlds and years, stepping on butterflies, to see what changes?

Eventually the right events collide and the revolution unlocks. At this point – and only at this point – do things switch. Revolutions are watered by blood, so of course blood must run, but at what cost? The serf army goes rogue and starts killing the civilian populace in anger. A populace who, though racist, do not deserve death in this manner.

Now we fight. We fight to save the lives of children and their mothers, protecting them over the corpses of their fathers. We rush to get lifeboats working. We disconnect the islands from one another to slow the advance of the mob. We close gates and raise bridges. Destroy gunboats and ultimately make hard choices about life and death.

Then is when we come to the kernel of our story, and the light of the myriad-verse comes to play. We then make our fateful choice once again in the baptismal waters, and the story ends.

Discuss.

I’m also spoiling other stuff: The Sopranos, Lost, Hamlet. This is rant about story consistency.

Then I explain how ME3 should have ended.

Short review: If you liked the previous games, pick this one up. Play it, get enraged at the ending, and then come back here. I have candy for you.

Spoilers from here on.

The ending of Mass Effect 3 has been called “controversial” in a lot of places because, frankly, nearly everyone hates it. These people are gamers who have invested possibly hundreds of hours into the storyline of the universe and the trilogy – a fact that speaks to the overall awesomeness and engagement of the world and the story (thus far).

The background and events approach Tolkien-level obsession to depth and detail. The developers crafted a grand space opera:

In the future, humanity discovers it is not alone. The galaxy is riddled with alien species, and, for the most part, the various species co-operate with each other, despite histories of war and tension.

All of these alien races are inheritors of grand, almost magical technology that was left behind by a long-dead spacefaring empire. This empire, the Protheans, were wiped out some 50,000 years ago by the Reapers, who are basically the Borg as imagined by H.P. Lovecraft.

The overall arc of the trilogy is this: the Reapers have returned. They are destroying everything. They are taking all living creatures and turning them into borg zombies. They are “glassing” planets. We don’t know why: it’s one of the great mysteries.

There are several factions with different ideas as to what we should do but basically there’s the Alliance (which wants to fight the Reapers) and then there’s Cerberus, which is a kind of shadowy, human-centered (and racist) cabal who think that the Reapers should be controlled. Cerberus is led by the Illusive Man (read: Martin Sheen).

The primary theme of Mass Effect’s storyline is that of tolerance. All the species learn to tolerate each other, to make peace, to work together to raise the floor of all societies.

The primary theme of Mass Effect’s gameplay is that of player choice. Decisions you make in the first or second game radically alter the story in later games. Characters may be killed. Your choices – even from the first game – have an effect on everything.

One of the reasons I played ME2 so many times was because I wanted to see what different choices led to. The ending of that game was heavily dependant upon the choices I made as a player.

Not so much with Mass Effect 3.

Without going too much into the minor changes that can happen, there are really only three endings, all of which are a choice that happens in the last 10 minutes:

1) You decide to control the Reapers, or
2) You decide to destroy the Reapers (and all synthetic life, including your AI friends), or
3) You decide to create some sort of synthesis beteween organic life and synthetic life.

Regardless of which choice you make, the following things happen:

1) Your character, Shepard, dies, and
2) The Mass Effect relays are all destroyed, ending any kind of galactic travel, and
3) Trillions of people die (because of said relay destruction)

To make matters worse, the ending is sewn up in the most awful way possible: we are introduced to a new character, some sort of god-like alien, who controls the Reapers. This alien takes the form of a little human boy to communicate with you (we aren’t even given the stupid cliche from Contact where the alien says “I chose a familiar form to speak to you with”).

This alien tells you why he sics the Reapers (a synthetic lifeform) on the galaxy every 50,000 years or so and it makes absolutely no fucking sense whatsoever. Here’s his reasoning:

After a certain point, every galactic society creates artificial intelligence that rebels against its creators and causes wars. That, in its mind, is a bad thing. What’s its solution? To send a fleet of artificially intelligent, synthetic constructs to annihilate everyone. So that they don’t get destroyed by synthetic lifeforms.

Yo dawg! I put some world-eating synthetic lifeforms in your galaxy so you can be destroyed by world-eating synthetic lifeforms while you get destroyed by world-eating synthetic lifeforms!

Now, I’ve got no problems with uncompromisingly bleak endings. Especially if they are consistent with the story as it has been told.

For example, the ending to The Sopranos has Tony Soprano, the main character, presumably getting shot in the back of the head while eating dinner at a restaurant with his family. We see him smiling and laughing with his family while Journey plays on the jukebox. In the background, there’s a man wearing a Members Only jacket – a subtle nod to a previous episode about mob killings.

Suddenly, the screen goes black and the audio cuts out, mid-song. We get the blackness for a long, long time until finally the credits roll.

That ending? Perfect. It’s exactly how Tony lived. It’s completely consistent with all the storytelling that they had done. It was uncompromising and brutal but that’s what The Sopranos was about.

Some will argue: “Well, who killed Tony? That’s unresolved.” Those people miss the point entirely: Tony killed Tony. That was the major theme throughout the entire show: that Tony’s lifestyle was self-destructive.

Compare that to the ending of Lost, which was just a muddled mess of conflicting, under-edited ideas. Further, new concepts were introduced at the end, concepts that are brand new, things that we, as an audience, should probably have been aware of before (I wrote a thing about this previously).

The only person who has been able to introduce characters in the final act and have it work was Shakespeare when he wrote Hamlet, and that was essential because we need someone to explain what happened because everybody dies. Pro tip: If your name is not, in fact, “William Shakespeare”, you should probably try to avoid this storytelling trick.

So, adding a new alien species at the end of the Mass Effect trilogy is cheap and amateurish. There are better ways. There are always better ways than hail-mary deus ex machina plots. It felt tacked on because they ran out of ideas.

BEGIN TANGENT

Here are other things that don’t make sense:

First, the “synthesis” ending is just fucking stupid. Seriously? A pulse of energy can suddenly add circuitry to all living creatures? Are you shitting me?

Second, how the fuck did all those characters who I just saw on the planet Earth not five minutes ago get aboard a starship that crashes on an alien planet? I know that they wanted me to see that those characters survived but let’s not break the story with Fridge Logic. Show them celebrating on Earth.

Third, now that the Mass Relays are destroyed, well. Whupz? All those aliens are now stranded in the Earth solar system. They probably didn’t bring enough food to eat (you know, alien biologies and all), nor did they probably bring the stuff to settle planets with, so, uh, good luck?

That’s to say nothing about the trillions of people stuck in other star systems that depend on shipments of things from other star systems to survive. Scarcity of resource creates war, so I guess the entire “trying to save the galaxy from war” bit gets thrown out, too.

END TANGENT

So, here’s my “rewrite” of the ending:

Make it all about the Illusive Man. He was set up as the bad guy from very early on. An ambiguous bad guy, a complex bad guy. A bad guy who had a motivation: he wanted the human race to be the top dog. He nominally wanted to protect humanity, which is why he sought to control the Reapers.

Make the Reapers just what they were: Borg-like things who just rove the universe. Every 50,000 years they make their way back to the Milky Way. That’s fine. They don’t need deep motivations.

But then let’s say that the endgame has it that the Illusive Man has succeeded: he figured out how to control the Reapers (presumably during the time between ME2 and ME3). Rather than ordering the Reapers to fly themselves into a star, though, the Illusive Man decides to use them as a weapon to eliminate all other advanced species from the galaxy.

He has to elminate the current human alliance, of course, because they won’t understand and they traffick with aliens too much. Thus, the Illusive Man is a threat to everyone.

The final showdown is then about him, and how corrupt he’s gotten, and how wrong he is. The overall theme of the story remains about tolerance and growth, about co-operation and sacrifice. It remains consistent.

So that’s how I’m going to say it went down in my mind.

Here’s a nutshell review: Deus Ex: Human Revolution is all the good bits of the original Deus Ex without all the tedious and masturbatory pseudo-intellectualism.

But let’s dig deeper.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a game by Eidos: Montreal. It’s a modern action role-playing game, very similar to the popular Mass Effect series (which is produced by my former masters). It could be easy to call DE:HR a “Mass Effect” clone, but to do so implies an ignorance as to the title’s history.

So let’s pause and talk about that for a moment.

1999 and 2000 were watershed years for the action RPG genre, giving us first the seminal System Shock 2 (my ten year retrospective) and then Deus Ex itself, designed by Warren Spector (who also gave birth to such gems as the Toon and Spelljammer pen-and-paper RPG games). This is to say nothing of other games that walked in the edge of the genre (such as Half-Life).

The original Deus Ex, set in the year 2052, was a fantabulous game for its time.

To be sure, it had some really hokey shit going on. For instance, the future’s equivalent to Homeland Security was headquartered in a secret bunker beneath Ellis Island. The overall plot (the world is really a crazed knot of intrigue and backstabbing) was told and not shown (via found ebooks that you could read, each holding several thousand words of rather boring text). It gets further confusing because once you get a grasp on the conspiracy (which looks to be a war between various “Illuminati” factions) the introduce some motherfuckin’ aliens up in the mix and everything gets even more confusing.

However, the gameplay was amazing. It centered around stealth and conversations and had an open-world exploration quality that was new and exciting. Further, it had some absolutely excellent mission set pieces (such as the airport and airplane levels, or even the Statue of Liberty).

It spawned a less-than-stellar sequel set in 2072, Deus Ex: Invisible War. Invisible War possessed an even more confusing plot (especially since the end of the first game left the world in fairly dire straits), and even more volumes of text that had to be collected and read just to understand wtf was going on. DE:IW ended with what can only be called an “apocalypse” so there really can’t be further games after that.

Enter our current game, which is actually a prequel, and is set in the year 2027.

I want to step off the game review for a moment and talk about “cyborgization” as a whole in games and in literature. I’ve played various “cyber” games on and off since the 1980s, starting with Cyberpunk 2013 (later Cyberpunk 2020). Even back in 1988, I laughed at the idea that humankind would be able and willing to undergo voluntary limb replacement and cyborgization within twenty years.

It’s 2011 now. While we actually have crude bionic hands that can actually be controlled by thought, this kind of technology is at least twenty years out and will be another twenty before it’s cheap enough to be affordable as “voluntary augmentation.”

It’s like the mythical flying car. Futurists have been saying that we’re only 10 years away from them for over sixty years. So I put this stuff into the same bucket as I do goddamned mecha and consciousness downloads: neat fictions, but entirely implausible.

But let’s just say we eat this Red Pill, accept this fiction, and see how far the rabbit hole goes.*

Human Revolution is a grand-old Deus Ex game. There’s a rich back story filled with intrigue and betrayal told to you via ebooks and hacked email accounts, but the back story never feels overbearing and I was able to follow it without referencing a handwritten notebook. The main plot is relatively simple: avenge and/or find your kidnapped girlfriend.

The interface and gameplay have been polished to a shine. I absolutely love the art direction (which can be summed up as “everything glitters with gold”). The voice talent is strong (though after a while I could only hear Clint Eastwood’s voice when the main character speaks).

One of the things Human Revolution does well are conversations. At many points you will find yourself having to convince someone of something, and the way its handled is well-done. The outcome of conversations will affect everything in the game afterwards, too, which is a nice touch (sometimes people come back to haunt or help you). Cybernetic upgrades can help you read and influence people through subtle application of pheromones. This game mechanic was well-done, too.

Human Revolution manages to marry 3rd person “cover” mechanics to 1st person combat very well. I’ve not seen a stealth game that pulls it off this well (not even Arkham Asylum or Assassin’s Creed 2).

The city hub maps are delightfully crafted and full of life and detail. They never feel small, even though my game designer’s mind knows that they actually are. The future vision of Shanghai is absolutely phenomenal (but again, one of those things that certainly can’t happen in sixteen years – you’ll understand when you see it).

However, there aren’t any individual “mission” maps that stand out in my mind as being particularly awesome – there’s nothing that approaches Deus Ex’s “airplane” level, for instance. Most of these maps boil down to a practiced “you’re in a warehouse and need to escape” look-and-feel, which makes me sad because there’s so much that could be done there.

There’s another thing: the names, man. The names. Every name is symbolic in some way. Your character is supposed to be the progenitor of a new kind of augmentation and is named “Adam”. There’s an AI you’ll meet named Eliza. I found emails from a hacker named Kevin Mitnick. There are also names that will be familiar to fans of the original games.

The game ate my brain. If you’re into this kind of thing, it will eat yours, too.

I say check it out because you know there’s going to be another sequel.

(And now I want to figure out how I can play the original again.)

* Yes, there really is a Wikipedia article dedicated simply to the Red and Blue pills.

Recently, Ubisoft unlocked its cage, put it under the knife for a high-definition make-over, and then trotted it out as a downloadable for XBox Live. I snapped it up – err, down – and over the past week or so finally managed to finish its twelve hours of gameplay.

Spoiler: It’s not all that.

The premise of Beyond Good & Evil is everything you could possibly want: an open-world adventure wherein you play the part of Jade, an investigative reporter. Jade wears green lipstick and her adoptive father is a talking pig. Half of the inhabitants of this world are anthropomorphozitroned animals: sharks, birds, goats; some of her best friends are Rastafarian rhinoceroses.

This is a stealth game: getting into combat is not the idea. Your job is to break into places and take photographs of Very Bad Things to expose a Very Bad Conspiracy.

There’s also some hovercraft racing.

The game has a lovely, whimsical art direction that borrows from the Zelda series. The style suits the limitations of the engine well, and its voice acting is top-notch.

However, it feels like its only half of a game. The stealth components are creative but sometimes overlong. Combat (which shouldn’t be the focus of the game) shows up at irritating times. There are only two or three minigames. Character advancement is virtually non-existent.

I didn’t really feel any empathy for the oppressed people I was supposed to be saving. Jade and the Pig are supposed to be foster parents for a bunch of children who were orphaned in a war. Okay, fine. But later, (spoiler) those children are kidnapped by aliens to be used as food. I didn’t care because I had no sense about their character at all. They were introduced in act I and I promptly forgot about them as I went globe-trotting.

The greatest sin, however, is the lack of any real plot. There is a conspiracy, and there are Events That Happen, but at the end of the game, when all is revealed, I couldn’t find the capacity to care about anything that was happening. Mostly this was because it didn’t make sense.

There was some sort of mystical mumbo-jumbo shit that felt tacked on at the very end. Jade is somehow immortal? Or has some magical life-force inside her? And she can bring people back from the dead? These are revelations that happen in the latter half of the final act. I can’t help but think that the game would have benefited from some hints and clues to this being spread about during the previous ten hours.

Worse: I don’t really remember what happened in the game. I remember enjoying it while the controller was in my hand, but ultimately the story is lost. It is unlikely I’ll replay it.

It’s ten bucks. Take it or leave it.

You should just go find my review of Assassin’s Creed II and copy and paste it here. Then add “it’s better” and “the ‘brotherhood’ element is defined but doesn’t go very deep but that’s okay because it’s totally awesome to whistle and have all the guards die, instantly.”

I loved this game. My girlfriend, however, did not. Upon my completing it, she announced that she was very happy to have her boyfriend back.

I want to start with some history to edumacate those of you who may never have even heard of a ten-year old game or understand its importance.

In August of 1999, Irrational Games and the now-defunct Looking Glass Studios released System Shock 2, a first person shooter with heavy role-playing elements. It was critically acclaimed and yet never managed to find an audience.

System Shock 2 is widely regarded as one of the best games ever made. I’m not kidding: it has a handful of “Game of the Year” trophies and consistently hits the top ten in all the lists by all the publications. It has a place in the hallowed halls with Pong, Tetris, The Legend of Zelda, and even modern classics like Portal (which really wouldn’t exist without SS2).

I played System Shock 2 for the first time in the year 2000. Now, ten years later, I have finished it again. It was – and remains – The Scariest Game I Have Ever Played.

After a decade, the gameplay shows some wear and tear. Time has proven a few gameplay elements to be poor experiments (the massive level of weapon degrade, some of the ways that context switching is handled) while others have become staples of first-person RPG games.

The interface itself feels a tad clunky. Default keybindings are sometimes awkward. The triggers feel wrong. The inventory screens feel inverted. Ten years of usability studies have occurred since the game was released, however, and it could be (and likely is) that my irritation at the controls comes from a decade’s worth of handling more intuitive systems.

However, I don’t want to talk about the game’s mechanics. I want to talk about the experience of playing the System Shock 2. About how the simple concept of granting the player choices makes the game scarier than anything I’ve ever played.

It’s pretty fuckin’ scary, my friends.

This concept alone tells me all I will ever need to know about whether or not “good graphics” make a game better. A good game makes the game better. When there’s a phase spider chittering towards you and you’re down to only one bullet, you don’t really give a shit so much about the visual fidelity applied to its fangs.

(Ditto for the cryokinetic monkeys with cybernetic brains.)

One of the most important engines generating SS2’s nightmare fuel is the sound design. You nearly always hear what is going to eat you before it makes itself known. This gives your lizard brain enough time to simmer in the understanding of the Big Suck That Is About To Happen.

When Doom III was released, it was claimed to be the “scariest game ever made”. That was bullshit: the game’s fear factor was artificially generated by the fact that your character, a marine, could not figure out how to duct tape a flashlight to his gun. Monsters didn’t inhabit the game world; they lived in secret closets and jumped out at you

RARRRAHGHGH!

without warning. After this happened the fourth time it was expected – and once something is expected, it can’t be startling. “Oh, the bad guys will be coming out of the floor over there as soon as I’m past this trigger point.” There’s no fear because there’s no tension. There’s no tension because you don’t have to make any decisions.

A typical System Shock 2 “Decision Time” goes like this: You’re crouched in a small alcove on the personnel deck. The walls are smeared with blood. Between you and your goal, around the corner (a first-aid station), you hear the shuffling feet and psychotic whispering of a demented, possessed crew member. He probably has a shotgun and you’ve only got five hit points. If he hits you, you’re dead.

Four of your weapons – the ones you have plentiful ammo for – are broken and useless. You do have three shotgun rounds but you want to save those for a real emergency. Normally you might just run in there and smack the guy’s skull with your space wrench, which doesn’t break and doesn’t use ammunition. But seriously: if he hits you at all it’s game over, load an old save.

What do you do?

It is moments like this that create the tension in the game. In Doom III, your options are pretty much “just shoot everything” since you can’t really find alternate routes and you can’t formulate a plan for a room since it’s nearly always going to be “the super silent monsters are going to drop from the ceiling without warning”.

If, as a player, you are not required to make choices there’s no reason to be afraid. Why bother? You’re just on a train-ride. If you fail, you fail. Might as well watch a movie at that point.

Decision time: You have one repair tool. You have two weapons that are broken. One of them is pretty effective against robots but shitty against fleshy targets. The other is excellent at pulpifying dudes but just dents machine entities. Which one do you repair? What’s the likelihood of there being robots in the area I’m heading into? What if I fix the pulperizer and then run into a combat mech? Ugh ugh ugh.

This focus on player choice crops up everywhere. Even from the very beginning, during character creation: Are you going to be a soldier, a hacker, or someone with mental powers? Okay, now make some further choices. And whenever you get the game’s equivalent of experience points (cyber modules), how are you going to spend them?

You’ve been getting your ass kicked pretty hard lately. Maybe you should invest in some more hit points? But, you know, you’ve almost got your hacking skill maxed out, and that’s super useful. Maybe you should up your heavy weapons skill? You don’t have much call for them very often but when the Big Monsters come running, being able to bazooka one is pretty awesome.

I love the game Half-Life. It’s got some scary moments in it (partly because it, too, uses sound to start the terror engines). However, it doesn’t have many choices: you are going to go from point A to point B. You never have to decide what abilities to grow and which ones to allow fallow. It’s far more twitchy; success or failure in the game ultimately comes to clicking the buttons at the right time.

Half-Life doesn’t really serve as a “horror” game. I think in order for a horror game to be successful, the player has to be injected with self-doubt. Is this the right thing to do? Or that one?

2007’s Bioshock (my review) tried to capture this and failed. This is disheartening as the guys who made Bioshock? Same guys who made System Shock 2. In fact, it is almost the same game.

Except for the entire “not being scary” bit: while Bioshock forced you to make choices (not many of them, mind you), there are no real consequences for making a choice, good or bad. The meticulous balancing of the game protects even the worst skill choices, leading to the same tepid boss fights having the same tepid difficulty.

Sure, you can choose to eat the little kids instead of rescuing them. However, no one who understands even rudimentary game theory is going to do that: the reward for saving them is so much better than for eating them.

In System Shock 2, a bad build choice will result in extreme difficulty for everything. Better: you won’t know how badly you’ve screwed yourself until you can’t go back.

There is a strong argument to say that is bad game design – that the enjoyment of the player is of paramount importance, all other priorities rescinded. It doesn’t matter how great a game becomes if the player quits in frustration early on. This is a true statement but makes several assumptions about the target market which may or may not be accurate. Sometimes, people want difficult games. They want to be afraid.

Players want to feel like their choices matter. If I make a choice and it is the right one, I feel elation. If it is not, then disappointment. I fear disappointment. I hope for elation. It’s that simple.

Reduce or eliminate that tension and there’s no point to even playing the game.

Shock 2 is long out-of-print but you might be able to find copies on eBay for a small handful of ducats. Once you’ve got a disk, you’ll need to do some magic to make it work in modern hardware. This can be frustrating but ultimately is worth it. there are several mods that update the graphics, even.

And some mods that make the game harder.

By that time I was fully in hate with the game. But I was not going to let it defeat me. I was committed.

I really, really liked the game up to when you land on the planet. After that, it seems like the designers engaged in an experiment: how long can we artificially prolong this game with pointless min-boss sections and tedium?

However, the disc is worth picking up because it also has Escape from Butcher Bay on it as well, redone with the newer engine and replete with its own gamer skittles. That game is absolutely worth your time.

There will be spoilers in this review. I am sorry for that; I tried very hard to write about what, exactly, made this game so powerful to me without doing so but was unable. If this is a problem, you should stop reading now and simply know that I give this game the strongest positive review I can, and you should buy it immediately. Spoilers come at the end of this; they’re marked.

Let us begin.

Redemption is from the same family as Rockstar’s flagship series, Grand Theft Auto. They are not brothers, however – there are obvious genetic differences, and, in many ways, RDR has more in common with Bully than Grand Theft Auto IV, despite using the same engine.

It is the year 1911 and the “old west” is quickly becoming a faded memory. You play John Marston, a former outlaw. John turned a new leaf many years ago: he married, had a son, bought a farm. He has been living that life for fifteen years, despite having a notoriously intemperate disposition. He wants nothing more than to be left alone, to be happy with his wife, to raise his son, and maybe earn a few dollars from his farm.

This being the world of guns, however, it doesn’t last. His wife and son are “taken into custody” by government agents. They want him to track down a few members of his former gang. These men have gone off the reservation and the feds are calling in their chips: capture or kill these guys and you get your idyllic life back.

Thus we set our story’s stage.

The game’s story unfolds from this point. I’ll get back to that later. First, let’s talk about the actual “gameplay” itself.

Redemption is filled with the standard third-person combat mission styles. Go here, kill people, go somewhere else. Most storyline missions are muscle attached to this basic spine. However, like Bully (and unlike GTA), the real meat lies in the secondary and non-combat missions.

Early on, you will find yourself herding cattle, hunting rabbits, taming horses, and skinning coyotes. You’ll find treasure maps. You’ll chase down horse thieves and rescue damsels in distress. You’ll test your strength in arm wrestling, your wits in card games, and your dexterity in a wicked little game with knives and fingers.

You will find yourself dueling in the streets of a ghost town at high noon. Shoot the gun from your opponent’s hand and earn extra honor or simply blow his head off to stay alive.

Think back to every western movie you have seen. Those elements are here, and you’ll be part of them.

The game world is massive in scope, though I think it is physically smaller than many other sandbox games. Each of the three main regions has several sub-regions, each with their own flavor. We start in a region called “New Austin”, representing Arizona and Texas. Eventually, you move south into Mexico, and then north to the Great Plains (replete with the last buffalo) and the snow-covered Rocky mountains.

The terrain is terrifyingly beautiful. Human beings are few and far between but the land never feels desolate; there are always coyotes and raccoons and vultures to keep us company. It is vibrant in a way that Liberty City is not and can never be.

Much of your time will be spent riding horseback. Rumor says that the developers spent a huge amount of money doing motion capture on the equine species and it shows. Horses are an integral part of the Redemption experience and riding them to their fullest capabilities requires some skill. You’ll learn the basics early. Mastery will not come for some time but it is satisfying when it does.

The voice acting through the entire game is, in a word, stellar. I thought I had heard good voice acting in a game before. All those previous reviews where I said the voice acting was good? No, no. Those guys are average now. This game sets a new bar for quality, and it does it twice (you’ll understand when you complete the storyline).

The music is subdued and perfect. It hints a blend of spaghetti western noir with burgeoning jazz sensibilities – especially in the later acts of the game. It’s a fluid thing, almost intelligent, and only ever serves to enhance the mood. The music serves strongly in the game’s Crowning Moment of Awesome, but it does so with the subtlety of switchblade between the ribs: silent, efficient, powerful.

There is an underlying sadness to the game. This comes not from the main story but is rather indicated by subtext: it is 1911. The west is gone. The savage Indians are not-so-savage anymore; civilization has arrived and it carries with it the death of the Old Ways. But, as John says, those Old Ways never really existed except inside the nostalgia of those trying to forget.

The story of the game draws from the great westerns of the past fifty years. It sings of The Searchers, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Unforgiven, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The game’s final chapter echoes the death of the west as played out in The Shootist. Each of these films – and many more – are homaged in some interesting and loving way.

Like GTA IV, Redemption‘s skin covers a story that is cinematic in scope. However, where GTA IV’s Niko Bellic is driven forward by the whips of vengeance, Redemption’s John Marston is motivated by the love of his family and the fear for their safety. Boiled down, John Marston is a father first and a gunslinger second.

This path leads us to the game’s Crowning Moment of Awesome.

Here there be spoilers.

In the third act, there are several missions that climax with John finally killing the leader of his old gang. The federal agents, true to their word, let him go and John returns home to his wife and son.

One might think that the credits should roll. But they do not. Instead, there are several missions (maybe ten or so) wherein John re-integrates with the farming lifestyle. He kills crows for his wife. Buys cattle. Herds horses.

John is a father. Most of the missions at this point are about developing a relationship with his fifteen year old son, Jack. He teaches Jack to ride, to shoot, to hunt. He is a father.

It’s a dynamic shift in the narrative. It’s smooth. The music (pay attention to it) changes through this; it becomes less adventurous and more contemplative, following John’s patterns. The impatient among you may want to skip the dialog sessions, but I urge otherwise: listen to Abigail’s nervous chatter about John’s time away from them. Hear Jack’s frustration at his father leaving them.

It’s important.

Because, as expected, the law men return. And hell follows with them.

There is a dénouement afterwards. The story picks up again in 1914. You will play Jack, now a man. And his story is one of revenge.

I cannot impress upon you how great this game is.