There are few games that I follow as closely through their development as The Last of Us. I've always enjoyed Naughty Dog games ever since the old Crash Bandicoot days on the original Playstation, and the Uncharted Trilogy remains my favorite franchise for the current console generation. It's something about the way that Naughty Dog writes their characters, and their dialogue that makes things more relateable than other studios' games. Their characters aren't just plot vehicles, they feel like real people. They communicate with each other like real people would, and without the usual bravado that most video game heroes succumb to.
When I first heard that ND was making a survival adventure game, I was more than a little surprised that their next game was taking such a serious tone. The Uncharted series has its dark moments, but nothing like what they were promising with The Last of Us. To be honest, I wasn't even sure they could pull it off. Nathan Drake was always capable of showing a dynamic range of emotions, but in the end he relied on his own humor to stave off the horrors of his own deplorable deeds. Everything I read about The Last of Us before its release indicated that the campaign is filled with heavy, emotionally raw subject material. Naughty Dog had crossed over into the darker side of story driven gameplay.
My sources weren't wrong. The Last of Us is a pretty grim game so far, and though I haven't finished the campaign yet, it's pretty clear that things aren't getting sunnier any time soon. It's interesting to see how much this game really contrasts with what Naughty Dog did with the Uncharted games. Nathan Drake's exploits were always these grand, sweeping adventures that find their grounding loosely tied to real world mysteries and mythologies. Furthermore, Drake is larger than life in his own right as a character. He can do it all. He's acrobatic, charming, intelligent, and he's merciless as he fights his enemies and the environment.
By comparison, The Last of Us paints a much more relateable picture. It's true that the post-apocalyptic world that the main characters Joel and Ellie must navigate through is well traveled territory, but it feels much more like something we can imagine ourselves living in. The landscape is harsh and unforgiving, and traversal is more realistic. There aren't any convenient hand holds for scaling buildings, and many of the obstacles are either man made or they are a result of the world's natural state of decay. It's brutal, but it probably hits the mark better than most zombie survival games have to date.
Then there's the character interaction. TLOU doesn't offer much in the way of humor, which is a pretty big change for the developer. The story this game is trying to tell isn't some light hearted tale of companionship and compassion. TLOU's characters have grown accustomed to the harsh world they live in, and they act in a way that they feel is required to survive. Joel is ruthless because he has to be, and it's important to understand that he isn't the game's real hero. I haven't finished the campaign yet, so I don't know if Joel ultimately finds his redemption, but it's clear that he hasn't always been comfortable with the moral ambiguity that the world has forced upon him.
Ellie, on the other hand, has grown up without ever knowing the world that Joel and the others took for granted. She's tough, but she has also been sheltered to a certain extent. In the beginning of the game, she talks about how she had never been outside of a quarantine zone before. Instead, she grew up in the relatively safe custody of the rebel Fireflys and under the protection of the military. This innocense is what makes some of the random dialogue so great as Ellie and Joel travel together.
At one point, Ellie starts making odd sputtering sounds with her lips to which Joel inquires whether she is feeling alright. She tells him that she never learned how to whistle, and it makes sense. In a world where everyone is trying so hard to cope with such overbearing hardships, why would anyone take the time to teach a child to whistle? It's one of the joys that has faded from their world. It also makes it all the more comical and triumphant when Ellie later masters the trick taking Joel, and us as players off guard during a later sequence. Little touches like that pull players into the game more than action alone could. Ellie and Joel may not be as chatty as Drake and his cohorts, but they still come to life just as convincingly.
I won't go into gameplay elements at this point since I haven't finished the game, but expect to see the second installment of the game discussion once I have. TLOU is one of those games that you never really want to finish, but once I do, the next installment will be posted.
~Krimmit
It's been a while since I sat down and dusted off my console backlog, and since 2012 started out with such a flood of games to review for the blog, there are a few that I never really got to dig into. There are even some that I started, and never got to finish (Gasp!). So, with a day off on my side, and a little bit of good old determination, I sat down with my neglected binder of Xbox 360 games and dug in for the day.
1) Max Payne 3
This is one of those games that I got as a rental through red box, found out that there was only one disc in the case, couldn't finish the game, then got the full game and never finished. Poorly punctuated, and grammatically incorrect sentences aside, I put about an hour into the second half once I bought the full version, but I never really went back to it until just recently. Once I picked it back up, I couldn't stop playing it again. Max Payne 3 isn't a very long game by single player campaign standards, but it's still longer than most first person shooters and the total run time usually takes around 8 hours. I haven't finished it yet, but here's what I think so far.
I remember playing through most of the first game of the series long ago, and at the time it felt pretty game changing. I understand that the development of the franchise has changed hands since then, but I never got to the second title. That being said, I haven't been too hung up about any tonal shifts in the game's central plot arc or with the overall tone or style of the story telling. However, since I started playing this game last year, I have gotten increasingly more annoyed by the cinematic style used between game play sequences. It borrows pretty heavily from 2004's hit movie Man on Fire with text popping up on the screen periodically for emphasis. The concept seemed pretty cool for the first couple of hours. Beyond that, I got pretty burned out, and I'm not one to skip cut scenes so I continue to endure it.
Rockstar always does a really great job with dialogue though, so even though the narration is riddled with cliche, and many of the game's central characters have as much depth as the plastic disk the game is written on, It makes things extremely entertaining for a late 1980s action flick fan like me. That's pretty much what this game is though. It's exactly like a dark, convoluted tribute to the great action flicks of years gone by.
The violence of this game can also be jarring at times, but then again shooting people in narrow corridors in the seedy underbelly of Brazil should make players uncomfortable. There is no glorification of violence to be found here even though gore is abundant. Furthermore, Max is never glorified for his actions in any way. For most of the game so far, Max is nothing more than a fall guy for some of the campaign's more nefarious characters. He drinks, he pops pills, he smokes, and he's basically the most miserable thug you could imagine. Whether or not he finds his redemption has yet to be seen, but whether or not he deserves it is the grander question.
2) Driver: San Francisco
I know my fellow blog founder reviewed this game a while back, but I never bothered to touch this game until the other day, and I'm still pretty glad I did so far. I feel like I've been playing nothing but shooters lately, and a little change of pace was just what the doctor ordered. I haven't played a Driver game since the days of the original Playstation, and I felt that Stuntman for the PS2 didn't really hit all the free roaming notes that I expected it to. Hence, I had little interest in the franchise up until this point. But there it was, sitting in that binder sleeve just staring at me.
Driver: SF is another game with a relatively short run time for a free roaming game. The main campaign missions take around 10 hours to complete, and I think I must have put in around three or four hours so far. The mission types stay true to what I remember from the good old Driver days, with a little bit of the stunt work from Stuntman mixed in for flavor. Still, SF puts a new spin on things by introducing the "Shift" mechanic, whereby the main protagonist can take control of other driver's bodies, and drive any car he wants.
The ability is introduced by one of the most convoluted and highly improbable plot deliveries imaginable, but who cares? Shifting opens up a whole new level of player strategy that keeps things entertaining even though some of the game objectives start to become repetitive. It's plain to see that Driver: SF isn't too interested in taking itself seriously either. After I had completed a few of the main story missions, I was treated to a little "Previously on Driver: San Francisco" vignette that recapped several of the main plot points so far. It was pretty great, and also pretty cheesy.
If Max Payne 3 is the equivalent of a 1980s action movie, then Driver: SF is best summarized as a 1980s buddy cop show with an emphasis on driving. It's kind of like Smokey and the Bandit, but you're the cop....and you are in a coma....but you are solving crimes in your mind. Yeah...it sounds stupid, but the game is really quite fun, and the visual fidelity is pretty awesome for a free roaming car game. Car models all look true to their real life counterparts, and every vehicle drives differently.
I also like the fact that you can purchase different vehicles with in game currency. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense given the fact that you can jump into any vehicle, but you sometimes bounce back to a default ride for specific city events. I haven't finished the game yet, but the story seems good enough to carry things through to the end.
As things slow down for the summer release season, it looks like I will still have plenty of blog fodder to chug through in my backlog. There are a couple of action RPGs that I have been too intimidated to touch yet, but they will most likely take a pretty good chunk of time, and they will keep me busy enough to prevent me from spending all of my money before the new consoles launch in the winter. Until then.
Stay Frosty!
~Krimmit
Summer time is a notoriously slow season for quality video game releases. There are some inevitable summer sleepers that risk the peril of skating below game of the year radar, but some gems garner enough attention to be memorable and wildly successful. It makes sense from a marketing standpoint. Game developers operate under the assumption that a majority of their customers still fall somewhere between the 12 to 18 year old range that still relies on their parents to buy games for them. With this sort of business model, the winter holiday season is the best time to market and release games.
As an adult gamer, I don't really care when a game comes out, but this particular practice does tend to make it more difficult to catch those hidden gems when they hit the market unless I'm really paying attention. Digital distributors like Steam have alleviated this issue somewhat by offering sales during off seasons, but I digress. This isn't a long winded rant about business strategy. I neither have the knowledge required to speculate the marketing practices of major video game publishers, nor do I have the desire to research and quote credible sources in order to form an argument on the subject. Instead, let's stick with what I do know.
There are two games that I'm really looking forward to this summer. They are total must haves for me, and the fact that they are wildly anticipated summer games is saying something about off season releases. It might be somewhat telling that the games I'm about to discuss are both survival based games, but in many ways they couldn't be more different. One is a story based game with an interesting focus on character development, splashed with some crafting and environmental puzzle solving. The other is an open world survival game with a strong influence on player agency and environmental awareness. Still haven't figured out what they may be? Wonder no more!
The Last of Us
There are very few development studios that I admire more than Naughty Dog Studios. Ever since they broke out onto the market with Crash Bandicoot, and the Jak and Daxter trilogy, I have been hooked on anything they put out. The Uncharted trilogy remains my favorite current generation franchise even though I thought the third installment fell a little flat, and it felt a little self important. Still, Naughty Dog is constantly setting the standard for developers who strive to build cinematic, story driven games.
Uncharted gave gamers a protagonist who could form meaningful relationships with other characters, and an even more meaningful relationship with the environment around him. Sure, the combat is rather basic given the window dressing, and some people complain that the gameplay itself does little to advance the standard of interactivity, but few can pull off a spectacle like Naughty Dog can.
So what is it about The Last of Us that warrants so much excitement? Well, it's a number of things really. After watching several of the available gameplay videos that have been circulating over the past year or more, TLOU shows incredible promise as a heavily story based companion game with a focus on strategic inventory management and adaptive combat. What this means is that Naughty Dog has maintained its focus on building compelling characters and dialogue interactions, but they are building a more complex combat system which should set this game apart from the Uncharted games.
Game footage shows the main characters searching through post apocalyptic city ruins for supplies, and fighting through more believable enemy scenarios than those found in previous Naughty Dog games. The developers have stated that TLOU is a survival adventure game first and a shooting game a distant second, so that in itself is pretty interesting from my viewpoint.
Another compelling aspect of this game is that combat really feels like something dangerous that should be avoided if possible. Enemy encounters hold a weight that most games fail to capture outside of titles like Dead Space and the original Resident Evil installments. Human enemies react dynamically to your actions, and encounters really seem to play out in a way that feels organic rather than scripted. There are infected humans who act much like zombies, but different infected types require different tactical approaches to be dispatched or avoided.
All in all, The Last of Us looks like a survival story with interesting survival based gameplay. It isn't your own story, but the character development should be strong enough that it will leave players wanting more. I do have some concerns over the game however. With any story driven game, my immediate concern I have is that there may only be so many ways that a given encounter can play out. With the Uncharted games, enemies would move around combat areas in a way that was challenging, but combat was predictable.
One minute, you would be prowling through a corridor area that is largely devoid of obstacles, and the next moment you are standing in a room with fallen stones and waist high walls that are perfect for cover. It's fair to say these areas are built as scripted combat arenas. Enemy spawn points were fairly obvious as well. What remains to be seen is whether or not enemy areas will be as identifiable in TLOU.
Furthermore, does the game take cues from other games like Dishonored in that many combat opportunities could be avoided all together in favor of a more stealthy approach? One of the game footage sequences showed the main character dispatching several bandit type enemies by using the environment and his inventory to his advantage, but could the encounter have been circumvented entirely if he had been stealthy enough to pull it off? Furthermore, if one of the bandits were left alive to escape, would that have consequences after the encounter? Would he and his comrades come for revenge?
Perhaps I'm putting too much emphasis on what could be possible with a game like this when the confirmed gameplay elements are exciting enough on their own. It's never good to set your expectations too high when they are bound to be unsatisfied with the final product. That being said, The Last of Us still looks like a pretty amazing game that releases on 6/13.
DayZ Standalone
The DayZ mod for Bohemia Interactive's Arma 2 game and expansions has been something of a phenomenon in the PC gaming world for the past two years. The mod started off as a shaky, unstable mess in which players were thrown into a barren, post apocalyptic world swarming with erratic, shambling zombies. There were no instructions, no missions, and no objectives. Your goal was only to survive. Danger came in the form of starvation, exposure, zombie attacks, and interference from other players who inhabited the world.
Then, the community embraced the game with such enthusiasm that it soon evolved into an Internet sensation. Mods of the mod surfaced as user support increased and different game modes emerged. Soon, you could find Dayz servers featuring different maps and weapons. There has always been a lot of love for DayZ, and it showed as sales for Arma 2 skyrocketed on Steam.
All of these things made the inevitable announcement that DayZ creator Dean "Rocket" Hall was building a standalone version of the beloved mod for PC and possibly for console systems in the future more intriguing. Hall promises that the standalone game will feature even more survival systems than the mod, and since it won't be encumbered by some of the limitations of Bohemia's own Arma 2 game, there is much more potential to what the developers can accomplish.
I've played my share of the original mod and its variants, and the only disappointing thing about them is that PVP, looting, and survival is about all you can do. Sure, it's fun to group up with a squad and raid NPC encampments in DayZ: Origins, but aside from that, what is there to do beyond that? At least Dean Hall has promised that there will be a great deal more lore and back story to the new DayZ universe, and that players will really be able to take ownership of the world in a way that hasn't been possible within the mod.
Furthermore, Hall has stated that there is a bigger push for realism in the standalone game in reference to having a number of visual cues that are typically found in shooters being removed entirely. For example, the standard HUD will be less invasive, or it may be removed completely meaning that there will be no more health or ammo counters to aid players in game. The developers seem to be aiming for more of a simulation effect in this regard.
The draw for me is that DayZ has the potential to be the kind of game that lets players write their own stories, and create their own missions. There isn't a scripted scene to be found anywhere that forces you to enjoy the game the way developers want you to. Also, there isn't any sort of finite quality to DayZ. The game has no ending, and if you die, you just start over again.
The full level of customization that this game will allow has yet to be seen, but it seems that the Alpha build will be available for purchase some time in June 2013. I for one can't wait to jump in. Dean Hall may have some lofty expectations for the game's final product, but then again it's nice to see a developer show such enthusiasm for a product.
Though past summer release seasons have proven to be barren wastelands of mediocre release titles, this June seems to be a fairly promising month. Things will naturally slow down quite a bit for current generation consoles with the Playstation 4 and Xbox One coming out this winter, but it's nice to see that at least the PS3 lineup is getting some love before its successor launches. Both of these games have generated so much buzz that it seems likely they will both sell well, and they are certainly must haves for me.
As always, stay frosty!
~Krimmit
