It's Jackie Estacado's twenty-first birthday and the mafia assassin is about to receive the most unusual family heirloom imaginable. Jackie becomes host to a creature of literal darkness that seeks to puppeteer him as it has for generations of his ancestors. But Jackie isn't going to submit before he's revenged his girlfriend death and brought down the head of the Family that killed her.
The Darkness is a game which is difficult to pigeonhole. On the surface, it's a first person shooter with some demonic powers that augment the usual arsenal of weapons the genre has become known for. Sitting a shoulder button away from the usual assault rifle and shotgun are a whip-like tentacle, snake-like 'Creeping Dark', Darkness-powered handguns, and a literal black hole. These abilities unlock gradually, and by the time you're fully powered up, you have numerous options to tackle any given enemy encounter. You might start off by scoping out a room with the Creeping Dark, stealthily moving up a wall, through a vent, before slithering down behind an unsuspecting gangster and biting his face off. Now the other enemies are alerted, you might storm the room, using a tentacle to smash out the lights - the dark doesn't just provide a tactical advantage, it also powers your abilities. Seeing you're outnumbered, you might cast a black hole at the end of the room, sucking a half dozen guys into it, before switching to your Darkness Guns to pick off the rest. Figuring out such strategies on the fly is the most rewarding part of the combat, and if there's a criticism, it's that you often feel vastly overpowered compared to your foes, rather than being forced to use your powers as efficiently as possible to get out of trouble. When a room is finally cleared of enemies, the corpses provide the fuel needed to level up your powers. Standing over a dead body and hitting a button sends one of your Darkness tentacles burrowing into the chest cavity, emerging with a fresh heart to satisfyingly gulp down.
Though the general conceit is patently ridiculous, The Darkness manages to fall on just the right side of absurdity. The supernatural aspects of the narrative mesh well with the more traditional mafia revenge story, but it is the attempts made to ground the story in the real world that are most welcome. Instead of being just a generic, linear FPS, the game's developers, Starbreeze, have added a more open, adventure game element, that while nothing near the scale of a Grand Theft Auto, offers a version of New York that via streets and a working subway system, is open to explore. There's a distinct lack of handholding when it comes to navigating the city: simple tasks like being asked to meet your girlfriend at her apartment become enjoyable scavenger hunts as you need to use street signs, maps and even tourist information kiosks to find your way. The reward for finding your girlfriend is one of the most unique in video games, not because it is dramatic or thrilling, but because it is so simple and natural: She gives you a birthday cake and you have a chat. She invites you to sit on the couch with her. You throw your arms around each other and turn on the TV where, still in first person, you can flick through the channels, maybe watch an old episode of Flash Gordon; a couple of music videos; even To Kill a Mockingbird in its entirety. As game developers push the envelope of technology in the quest for greater fidelity to the real world, it's amazing to see a group of people go in a very different direction. To become immersed in this game world, it seems you don't need graphical tricks and programming advances, you need exceptional voice actors and a virtual cuddle.
The Darkness is by no means a perfect game. On a technical level it suffers from an erratic aiming system, and an agonisingly slow walking speed; on a narrative level, it descends into a muddle of comic book cliches that belie the game's source material; while the thrill of roaming the city and encountering its inhabitants is initially captivating, you'll quickly see the limited scope of the world, and simplistic side quests which merely serve to make you backtrack across familiar ground. None of these criticisms will stay with you for long after you've finished the game though. Instead, it will be those initial feelings of the unexpected, of a developer melding often stale genres to create something quite unlike anything else you've played. I've a feeling that when we look back on The Darkness in a few years, we'll see it as something special, something which didn't do everything right, but which pointed in the direction the medium was headed.
Friday, May 22, 2009
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Call of Duty: World at War
Derided as woefully short by some and nothing more than a bonus to the excellent multiplayer by many, for me there were moments in Call of Duty 4's single-player which I'd never experienced in a game, moments I felt genuinely pushed the medium forward in terms of storytelling and emotional involvement, moments that are sorely missed in its successor, Call of Duty: World at War.
The first of these occurs during the game's main title sequence, a scripted, on-rails scene that echoes the tram ride at the beginning of Half-Life. In first-person, unaware whom exactly you're inhabiting, and with only limited control of your character, you're thrown into the back of a taxi cab and driven off at high speed. Held captive by AK47-wielding men, you strain to look out of the car's windows. You see a Middle Eastern city, war ravaged. Sporadic gunfire echoes through streets. Civilians run through bombed out houses, clamber over mountains of rubble. You turn the right stick on your controller, trying to see what will happen to the group of men lined up against a wall. You move the left stick to try and escape as they're gunned down by a gang of soldiers. As you reach your destination, you're pulled from the car, dragged through a giant set of gates, into a town square. You look around you, watching as a baying mob screams with delight as you're tied to a post. At this point you figure you're probably a soldier, probably American. You look around you, trying to figure out where the exit is. You've played games before, you know how they work, you can second guess what's about to occur. Any moment, you think, a platoon of elite special forces will zip-line from a helicopter to rescue you. Or maybe they'll blow a hole in one of the walls and burst through, guns blazing. You expect the man holding the shiny gold Desert Eagle in front of you to take the first hit. Maybe you'll have to pick up his gun to fight your way out, maybe you'll be handed a different one. An M16 perhaps, or an M4 Carbine. You know the difference; you've played this type of game before. The man with the Desert Eagle raises the gun. You stare down the barrel. Any second, you think. Any second, and this guy is going to get it. You've played games... Then he pulls the trigger. The screen flashes white, black. Your jaw drops. The hairs on the back of your neck stand up. It's as close to death as you've ever felt in a game. This game sold ten million copies.
Martin Scorsese once referred to certain film makers as 'smugglers'. Directors like Samuel Fuller and Vincente Minnelli worked in the mainstream, producing movies that the masses wanted to watch and could enjoy, but all the time getting their own message across, smuggling it in. While much is written about the innovative storytelling devices of Braid or Bioshock, COD4 was a much more accessible and mainstream game which managed to smuggle in a genuinely surprising moment right at the start. Not only that, but it did it again, arguably even more effectively later on: After rescuing an injured comrade and rushing to escape an imminent nuclear blast, the bomb detonates, blowing your helicopter from the sky. You wake up in the wreckage of the burning Black Hawk. You try to stand, but fall over after a few steps. You manage to crawl out of what's left of the helicopter, emerging into near darkness. Dust and debris block out the sun; a blooming mushroom cloud envelopes the sky. You spend an agonising few minutes trying to figure out what you're supposed to do. You don't seem to be able to go anywhere, or do anything. You wonder whether the game has glitched, or whether you missed a clue. Gradually it dawns on you that the only thing you can do is die. Slowly. It's an incredibly powerful moment, one of the most touching I've experienced in any medium, not least because it's present in such an unexpected source: COD4 isn't a game which is sold as anything other than a blockbuster experience. It's presented as the kind of gung-ho, jingoistic, full on roller-coaster ride that Michael Bay would make if he was making computer games instead of movies.
So what of its successor? COD:WAW is the very definition of a game which ticks the boxes of expectation. From the multiplayer to the single-player, nearly everything in game has an analogue to its predecessor, yet none move the series forward and at times even regress it. Take the opening credits, for example: In COD:WAW, as the titles appear, you find yourself tied to a post. You watch as your fellow soldier's eye is burned out with a cigarette. You watch blood spray across the wall of the tent as his throat is slashed. Your captor looms over you, brandishing a bayonet. You're next... Then, the rest of your platoon bursts in. They kill the man that was about to kill you. They hand you a gun. You have to fight your way to escape. Whereas COD4 took your expectations of how a similar scene would play out and flipped them, surprising and moving you, COD:WAW merely reinforces every preconception you had and gives you the obvious. It's a problem that purveys the whole game: With only minor exception (the addition of an infinite flamethrower to your arsenal does change how you can approach some encounters), each level is an FPS cliche. There's the storming a beach level; the close quarters battle through some trenches level; the wide-open scramble from fox-hole to fox-hole while you're fired at by tanks level; the hold a position until reinforcements arrive level; the palette cleansing turret shooting and tank driving levels. Not every stage needed to be a revolution, but a near constant feeling of familiarity and the ability to second guess every 'surprise' event just keeps reminding you that this is very definitely a video game, and the result is that you feel detached from any of the dramatic incidents that occur.
Treyarch's Call of Duty games have always been in a tough spot. Forum fanboys hold the developer up as the guys that make holiday season filler entries in a franchise, while the series' creators, Infinity Ward, toil away on the next 'proper' instalment. It seems rather harsh to totally dismiss Treyarch's games as there's nothing intrinsically wrong with either COD:WAW, COD3, or their earlier side-stories. COD:WAW retains many of the things that make the series so enjoyable to play (the spot-on aiming and feel of the weapons, for instance) but be it because of developer disinterest or inability, or publisher pressure, never strives or amounts to being anything more than generic.
The first of these occurs during the game's main title sequence, a scripted, on-rails scene that echoes the tram ride at the beginning of Half-Life. In first-person, unaware whom exactly you're inhabiting, and with only limited control of your character, you're thrown into the back of a taxi cab and driven off at high speed. Held captive by AK47-wielding men, you strain to look out of the car's windows. You see a Middle Eastern city, war ravaged. Sporadic gunfire echoes through streets. Civilians run through bombed out houses, clamber over mountains of rubble. You turn the right stick on your controller, trying to see what will happen to the group of men lined up against a wall. You move the left stick to try and escape as they're gunned down by a gang of soldiers. As you reach your destination, you're pulled from the car, dragged through a giant set of gates, into a town square. You look around you, watching as a baying mob screams with delight as you're tied to a post. At this point you figure you're probably a soldier, probably American. You look around you, trying to figure out where the exit is. You've played games before, you know how they work, you can second guess what's about to occur. Any moment, you think, a platoon of elite special forces will zip-line from a helicopter to rescue you. Or maybe they'll blow a hole in one of the walls and burst through, guns blazing. You expect the man holding the shiny gold Desert Eagle in front of you to take the first hit. Maybe you'll have to pick up his gun to fight your way out, maybe you'll be handed a different one. An M16 perhaps, or an M4 Carbine. You know the difference; you've played this type of game before. The man with the Desert Eagle raises the gun. You stare down the barrel. Any second, you think. Any second, and this guy is going to get it. You've played games... Then he pulls the trigger. The screen flashes white, black. Your jaw drops. The hairs on the back of your neck stand up. It's as close to death as you've ever felt in a game. This game sold ten million copies.
Martin Scorsese once referred to certain film makers as 'smugglers'. Directors like Samuel Fuller and Vincente Minnelli worked in the mainstream, producing movies that the masses wanted to watch and could enjoy, but all the time getting their own message across, smuggling it in. While much is written about the innovative storytelling devices of Braid or Bioshock, COD4 was a much more accessible and mainstream game which managed to smuggle in a genuinely surprising moment right at the start. Not only that, but it did it again, arguably even more effectively later on: After rescuing an injured comrade and rushing to escape an imminent nuclear blast, the bomb detonates, blowing your helicopter from the sky. You wake up in the wreckage of the burning Black Hawk. You try to stand, but fall over after a few steps. You manage to crawl out of what's left of the helicopter, emerging into near darkness. Dust and debris block out the sun; a blooming mushroom cloud envelopes the sky. You spend an agonising few minutes trying to figure out what you're supposed to do. You don't seem to be able to go anywhere, or do anything. You wonder whether the game has glitched, or whether you missed a clue. Gradually it dawns on you that the only thing you can do is die. Slowly. It's an incredibly powerful moment, one of the most touching I've experienced in any medium, not least because it's present in such an unexpected source: COD4 isn't a game which is sold as anything other than a blockbuster experience. It's presented as the kind of gung-ho, jingoistic, full on roller-coaster ride that Michael Bay would make if he was making computer games instead of movies.
So what of its successor? COD:WAW is the very definition of a game which ticks the boxes of expectation. From the multiplayer to the single-player, nearly everything in game has an analogue to its predecessor, yet none move the series forward and at times even regress it. Take the opening credits, for example: In COD:WAW, as the titles appear, you find yourself tied to a post. You watch as your fellow soldier's eye is burned out with a cigarette. You watch blood spray across the wall of the tent as his throat is slashed. Your captor looms over you, brandishing a bayonet. You're next... Then, the rest of your platoon bursts in. They kill the man that was about to kill you. They hand you a gun. You have to fight your way to escape. Whereas COD4 took your expectations of how a similar scene would play out and flipped them, surprising and moving you, COD:WAW merely reinforces every preconception you had and gives you the obvious. It's a problem that purveys the whole game: With only minor exception (the addition of an infinite flamethrower to your arsenal does change how you can approach some encounters), each level is an FPS cliche. There's the storming a beach level; the close quarters battle through some trenches level; the wide-open scramble from fox-hole to fox-hole while you're fired at by tanks level; the hold a position until reinforcements arrive level; the palette cleansing turret shooting and tank driving levels. Not every stage needed to be a revolution, but a near constant feeling of familiarity and the ability to second guess every 'surprise' event just keeps reminding you that this is very definitely a video game, and the result is that you feel detached from any of the dramatic incidents that occur.
Treyarch's Call of Duty games have always been in a tough spot. Forum fanboys hold the developer up as the guys that make holiday season filler entries in a franchise, while the series' creators, Infinity Ward, toil away on the next 'proper' instalment. It seems rather harsh to totally dismiss Treyarch's games as there's nothing intrinsically wrong with either COD:WAW, COD3, or their earlier side-stories. COD:WAW retains many of the things that make the series so enjoyable to play (the spot-on aiming and feel of the weapons, for instance) but be it because of developer disinterest or inability, or publisher pressure, never strives or amounts to being anything more than generic.
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