A Game Critic's Manifesto

I promise to know what makes a great gaming experience. I promise to write comprehensive reviews of games. And I promise not to give five-star ratings to games that aren't "Outstanding." With the exception of the Pac-Man game; well I just shot myself in the foot...

No seriously, that Pac-Man game should be played by everyone who has never played a Pac-Man game. I don't personally care for it, and it does have the one design flaw I mentioned in my review. But it's a unique, elegantly-designed game. I use elegant in the five-star sense of the word.

The first paragraph I promise to uphold (until I decide I'm done). I may not like "playing" the vast majority of games, but I will do this work so that you can know what few games are worth your time. (I.e. Read my reviews, particularly the ones that have four or five stars)

INSULTING POST TIME!

Yes, this post is about the Mass Effect ending. WHY THE FUCK DO WE CARE SO MUCH ABOUT IT?!

Not to say that I'm anti-children. The Take Back Mass Effect Campaign, which is currently at over $76,000 in donations, is, I realize, not just a cry for the changing of the ME3 ending, but sorta-primarily a helping of children. (Conspiracy theory time: Maybe Bioware made the ending bad on purpose, so that they could get more people to help children. A conspiracy to help children! Genius!)

But seriously, what's wrong with us? Why are we so worked up over an ending to a trilogy that wasn't even that good?!

Yes, I am not shitting (on?) you! And I will now make references!

For example, one of the reasons the Mass Effect games weren't particularly good was that the power, the interestingness of their average sentence (let's admit it) was low; this was probably because many of the characters were weak.

What's the best way to get rid of fun/interesting sentences? Get rid of fun/interesting characters! (Likewise, what's the best way to get rid of boring sentences? Kill off characters like Miranda Lawson, Kaiden Alenko, Ashley Williams, and Jacob Boringface)

And let's also admit that Bioware's take on 3rd person, chest-high cover gameplay was almost never "fun." And this is a way bigger negative thing then the ME3 ending, as shooting was at least a third of the experience. Not to say that, say, Gears of War was particularly fun to play either (to actually "enjoy" the GoW 2 -- the one I played -- you had to play it on at least hard difficulty, with a friend, whom you could talk to).

So with these major cons, what's the deal? This is, of course, a rhetorical question, for I think I know the answer.

The deal is, many people invested too much of themselves into the narratives and characters. There are people who played the first two games multiple times (wtf?) -- they suffered the boring gameplay and dialogue of the first games more than once -- in order to make different Commander Shepards. The poor souls. How meaningless their lives are! Oh, just thinking of them makes me feel sad. I can't write anymore....

Why Games Can Make For Boring Conversation

SHORT POST!

If it weren't for reviewing games, I'd have little to say about them. The reason has less to do with most games being cliches, and more to do with their inherent lack of nouns and verbs. Compared to other things, like movies and books and life, games tend to not have much wordage.

"What can the 'characters' in the 2D/3D space do?" "They can run, jump, explode, shoot, stab, 'interact,' go, stop," and yes there are more words, but not like there are in life or literature or film. NOT TO SAY THAT ALL GAMES ARE LIKE THIS. But you understand what I mean.

Therefore, being able to review a game is important. If I can say why it works or not, I can say something about it.

Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism Vs.The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms

HELLO!

Today we compare the classic in literary criticism Anatomy of Criticism, written by Northrop Frye, a man considered a genius by PhDs in English, to The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms (2nd edition), written by Murfin and Ray, two dudes (I think). Then we will pretend that this post is gaming-related.

Although the authors Murfin and Ray have names that sound like fish species, their book is better. It's better than the "classic" Anatomy of Criticism. And to not incite the rage of the literature world I will say fire-putting-outing remarks, such as, "You don't need to be angry, because you will never visit this site," and "I am talking about games criticism."

How is it that the Ray Fin book is better? Well, it is better by giving you its literary words, defining them, and then giving examples of them from the various arts. Frye's book, however, goes on a near stream of consciousness in which he analyses a ton of literature yet gives me, the games journalist wannabe, nothing with which I can analyze a story. To demonstrate this, I will select a passage from random, first from Frye's book: "The conception of art as having a relation to reality which is neither direct nor negative, but potential, finally resolves the dichotomy between delight and instruction, the style and the message. 'Delight' is not readily distinguishable from pleasure, and hence opens the way to that aesthetic hedonism we glanced at in the introduction, the failure to distinguish personal and impersonal (snoooooore)."

....Oh! Sorry. I fell asleep for a moment. What just happened? Oh right, the Frye quote. Okay. Well...what's its problem (it being a representative of pretty much the entire book)?

Its problem is that it doesn't organize itself very well into all the terms and ideas it wants to tell. While the Bedford Fish book starts each section with the idea in bold, and then defines the idea and gives an example of it, the Frye book often gives you an example and says what literary terms could be ascribed to it, and then the author moves on. Thus what happens in Frye is that the learning becomes little. And when I say little I mean nothing.

But with the Fish, it becomes a lot of learning, about critical terms, with which I can use to critique things. To prove that the Bedford book does what I say it does, here's a random example from it: "anagnorisis: A term used by Aristotle in his Poetics (c. 330 B.C.) to refer to the moment in a drama when the protagnoist "discovers" something that either leads to or explains a reversal of fortune -- that is, the protagonist gains some crucial knowledge that he or she did not have. In a tragedy, the revelation is usually closely associated with the protagonist's downfall, whereas in a comedy it usually signals his or her success."

BAM!

And then they site examples from Oedipus Rex, The Crying Game, and The Sixth Sense.

With this not-famous-in-the-literature-world book, I can get tools that allow me to analyze almost any new narrative (including game ones). With the famous one, I can say something like, "Uh, Northrop Frye (he was a Genius!) said something about how....uh...poems are emotional sometimes?"

Not to say that Frye's book is useless to LITERATURE people who totally failed to notice themes in the canon they read. But that opens up a depressing conversation about being a PhD student in Literature. Games are more interesting.

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light (PC Singleplayer) Review

OH NO! I have a game that is actually quite good but isn't great so I can't get excited about it! It's in that zone of "really good but nothing special." Unless you play the local co-op, where it is something special.

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light is a Bastion/Diablo-camera'd, puzzle-filled, action game, with a hint of RPG. You (in the singleplayer) play as Lara Croft (surprise!), and your mission is to save the world from an Aztec demon.

So the story and writing are cliches, complete with average voice-acting and never-have-had-English-lessons Aztecs who speak perfect English. But not important. Although the skin isn't good, the baby seal meat under it is. And said meat is made of collecting weapons and stat-boosters, getting achievements, solving puzzles, escaping traps, murdering.

In the singleplayer, Lara gets the following: guns, a spear (that you can throw over and over again, as it respawns in your hands), passive powerups, bombs you drop and manually blow up from anywhere, a grappling hook, and an ability you charge-up by collecting gems and/or killing things (the charge-up charges down when you get hurt). In the co-op, your Aztec time traveler friend will wield the golden spear and a shield; Lara loses the spear but keeps the grappling hook. With these tools split between Toltec and Lara, you and the person sitting next to you will help each other do everything. My experience of the online co-op was fun, using each other's avatar's unique skills and our ability to speak with our mouths. It was fun until the Online co-op lagged out. And then it kept lagging out. And then, after a year of patches, we tried again and it lagged out.

But this isn't a review of the co-op.

It's not the presentation that keeps this game from being great, but the combat of its first half; it's too easy; even on the hardest difficulty setting, I never came close to dying in combat until after half of the game.

But at least many of the puzzles are exciting. They often involve spikes and poison and lava and death. And when you die it ends up feeling almost funny ("Doh!"). Dying rarely feels bad since the game respawns you at the point right before you died, although with a smaller gem score.

Those gems. If you get a high enough of a score (racked up by collecting gems and killing things), you can unlock a something. If you do any of the other extra tasks, you'll be rewarded with a something. But almost sadly, many of the rewarded weapons and powerups feel useless (and many of them actually are; like half of the powerups boost something to the detriment of something; many of the weapons feel pointless when compared to other weapons you've already collected).

I think most of the time you'll play the extra stuff because either they provide a fast-paced challenge or because you're a completionist.

So in your busy lives, dear readers, should you buy this game? It has a low price of fifteen dollars, with up to fifteen hours of gameplay. It doesn't have amazing visual art nor sounds amazing, but it eventually becomes quite fun.

My answer: If you have someone in your home who'd like to play a game with you, on the same screen, then download the demo and see if you can get the controls for two people working (YouTube says that one person can use a keyboard and mouse, and the other a gamepad -- if you don't have two gamepads). If the controls work, then I highly recommend this one. You can do all the puzzles together and then one (or both of you) can do a speed run.

★★★★☆