Friday afternoon tidbits

Ah, long weekends. I'll be spending mine with extreme sports, both actual and virtual. Snowboarding on Monday, weather permitting, and Skate 2 before that.

-Speaking of Skate 2, Gus Mastrapa wonders why the game so explicitly favors male avatars. In Gus's formulation, "if you chose to play with a female avatar in Skate 2, you're not playing a natural-born woman, so much as a post-operative transsexual." It's easy for me, a white, male gamer, not to notice these things, but lots of games make the assumption that the people playing are just like me. That is a little odd.

-I was surprised to see that Giant Bomb readers chose Metal Gear Solid 4 as their game of the year, and not just because it seemed absent from almost every top 10 list I read. It's just that, given the ongoing commercial struggles of the PlayStation 3, it's amazing that enough people even played it to box out some Xbox 360 titles. Then again, maybe the 360 vote was split, while PS3 owners had only this one game to rally around. (Although LittleBigPlanet also placed.)

-Two great write-ups about Braid came down the transom on the same day this week. Julian Murdoch at Gamers With Jobs writes about his inability to separate the work from its author. L.B. Jeffries at PopMatters defends the only universally maligned aspect of the game, its inter-level textual interludes. I'm glad people are still playing and thinking about this game.

-In the 1980s, only Galaga could provide a soft landing for a cocaine-addled Alec Baldwin.

-From Time's Karen Tumulty: "The metaphor came from our TV screens. On the day that George W. Bush gave his farewell address, the image that got the nation's attention was one of relieved survivors scrambling out of a jet that was sinking into icy water."

The Year in Review: Best of the Blog

Above: Actually the best of Insult Swordfighting.

Today through Christmas Eve, we'll be recapping the year that was. First up: the best of Insult Swordfighting, 2008.

I don't mean to get all introspective and self-centered on you, but on a personal and semi-professional level, this was a great year. I started tracking this blog's subscribers and page views last December. Since then, daily page views have more than quintupled, and the number of feed subscribers has increased more than tenfold. My thanks to all of you.

Just as satisfying was finding so many great blogs that I had no idea existed a year ago (and some of which didn't even exist a year ago). We are heading in the right direction, all of us, and I'll look forward to seeing what 2009 brings.

For those of you who are newcomers to Insult Swordfighting, here are some of the highlights from the past year.

January: The New Taxonomy of Gamers launched. I'll leave it to N'Gai to tell you that it was "the year's most essential blog series." I wouldn't go that far, but I am proud of it. It's the first thing I'd tell somebody to read on this blog, if they asked.

February: Some excellent discussion arose here and elsewhere regarding No More Heroes. I had too much to say about it to confine it to a review, so I wrote a blog-only review to supplement the Phoenix piece, which also triggered an interesting chat with the Brainy Gamer about the auteur theory in games.

March: A look back at sinking ships in games was not the greatest post ever, but it remains one of the most popular pages on this site for Google searches. Plus I have to pick something for March -- which was, if I'm to be honest, a pretty lackluster month, filled mostly with updates on the status of my Wii repairs.

April: Does relying on nostalgia help or hurt games? Is using familiar settings and characters a crutch, or an opportunity to enhance our appreciation for the classics? I looked at the contrasting approaches of Super Smash Bros. and Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII. Also in April: a big-ass think piece for the Phoenix about video games and social responsibility.

May: Oh hey, another weak month, but I think a post about when a game is finished raises some ideas that should be explored more. Not by me, of course. I have Gamestop users to make fun of.

June: Metal Gear Solid 4 broke my heart. The dialogue and the cutscenes were just too much. If you were to chart my enjoyment of the game as a function of time played, it would look like one of those waterslides that drops straight down.

July: ...right until the the conclusion, in which I stopped trying to convince myself I was enjoying MGS4 on any level.

August: I went temporarily insane, thanks to an overdose of Geometry Wars 2, poring over the leaderboards like somewhere in there was hidden the true name of God. Also in August: what I thought was a pretty good post about user experience never gained much traction.

September: Mega Man 9 has much the same impact as Metal Gear Solid 4, causing me to question my love for the franchise.

October: The year in swooning quiz brings chuckles, guffaws, and, presumably, the undying hatred of everybody mentioned.

November: In a post almost as self-indulgent as this one, I say hello to an old friend, and goodbye to his kick-ass Super Nintendo games.

December: I answered some of the questions in Shawn Elliott's reviews symposium. Man, it seems like that happened just yesterday.

Tomorrow: Year-end superlatives.

Quiz: The Year in Swooning

Match each of these games with the breathless excerpt from its review.

1. Grand Theft Auto IV
2. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
3. Dead Space
4. Far Cry 2
5. LittleBigPlanet
6. Fable 2
7. Fallout 3
8. Resistance 2

A. "Is it possible to give a game an 11? If so, this would be the game that would merit that score."

B. "I now know how film critics felt after screening "The Godfather." ...doesn't just raise the bar for the storied franchise; it completely changes the landscape of gaming."

C. "It is not hyperbole... an achievement that rivals greats like Half-Life 2 and BioShock. Its nuanced and labyrinthine plot, fully-realized characters and devastating attention to minute graphical details are beyond reproach."

D. "...a staggering, genre-defining achievement - marrying an utterly immersive world, memorable characters, incredible production values, some of the most inspired ... mechanics ever devised and so much heart ... Stands so far ahead of the majority of the games ... that it would be a crime against gaming not to laud this title as anything other than a masterpiece."

E. "...a landmark title that fundamentally changes the genre. Better than the original in every way, it is an amazingly rich adventure packed with anything and everything from exploration to fierce gun battles to harrowing car chases. It's incredibly polished, enormous in scope, and one of the best games of 2008."

F. "While the single-player experience is a great tale with an epic scope, it is equaled, and perhaps surpassed, by the multiplayer modes, which are perhaps some of the best I've ever played, and I'm particularly picky about my multiplayer."

G. "...one of the most important games to be released this decade. A tall order with the hype machine running overtime for the game but the way it reinvents how video games are played is sure to have lasting effects indefinitely."

H. "One of the greatest RPG’s ever made, a must own game for fans of the genre and anyone who wants to experience something truly unique."

Answers:

1. B (Game Informer)
2. A (IGN)
3. C (GameSpy)
4. E (GameShark)
5. G (Kombo)
6. H (WonderwallWeb)
7. D (Xbox World 360)
8. F (IGN)

Metal Gear Solid 4 in a nutshell

Joystick Division's Gary Hodges on MGS4:

Playing through MGS4 in all its extravagant glory, I can't help but think of it as something like a Tyrannosaurus rex: the biggest, most extreme, most fully realized example of something that's ultimately an evolutionary dead end.

Can't put it much better than that.

Old soldiers never die, they just talk a whole lot

Only about a month late, my Metal Gear Solid 4 review is up now at thephoenix.com.

MGS4 is currently sitting pretty with a Metacritic score of 95. It's a little too much of a coincidence for me that a "one of a kind masterpiece" would be released only about five weeks after the last game the enthusiast press was falling over itself to anoint the best game ever. To read the blurbs about MGS4 on that Metacritic page is like witnessing one of those revivalist worship services where people speak in tongues and collapse to the floor in the throes of religious ecstasy. It's scary and weird, and when I played the game I just didn't see it. Not at all.

The first half of the game was a blast to play -- we're agreed on that much. But as the ratio between gameplay and cutscenes tipped further and further before toppling into the abyss, all I could think was how backwards it all seemed. Gamespot says, "For anyone who appreciates games that rise above the simple act of pushing a few buttons and pulling a few triggers, Metal Gear Solid 4 is a stimulating ride that you won't soon forget." I could not agree less.

"Stimulating" is the last word I would use to describe hour-long stretches without player interaction. In fact, this game could have used many more simple acts of pushing buttons and pulling triggers, because for the most part you don't do anything at all. I like a good cutscene as much as the next guy, but I was hoping the notion of "interactive movies" as something to strive for had gone out with the Sega CD.

The whole thing has caused me to rethink my stance on the entire series. I loved the first Metal Gear Solid without reservation. I hated the second one, mostly because I didn't want to play as Raiden, but also because the story went so far off the rails that I had no idea what I was doing or why. I always assumed that Sons of Liberty was the aberration. But then I could never get into MGS3, again because it was so front-loaded with cutscenes that I was unable to get into the rhythm of it each time I tried to play. Now that MGS4 has similarly failed to work for me, I have to conclude that the original was the exception.

The data doesn't lie: I'm not a fan of the series. It feels like I just found out I was adopted.

Yvonne Abraham thinks you're dumb

Why does Boston Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham need to bring video games into this screed about lunatic sports fans -- not once, but twice?

In fact, one of the many reasons I wasn't out rioting when the Celtics won the championship was because I was at home, playing Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. It's one of numerous non-idiotic things I do with my time. I also like to read books, cook, and spend time outdoors hiking and snowboarding. But none of those things would mark me as the kind of drooling ape only Yvonne Abraham has the courage to take on in the pages of a major metropolitan newspaper.

Abraham's implication, which I'm sure she spent upwards of a second and half cogitating, is clear: rioting is a brainless activity, and playing games is a brainless activity. Can't have one without the other. There you go! That's your lede! Now to break this column into several vapid, Bill Plaschke-like one-sentence paragraphs, and sit back and wait for the accolades to roll in. Yvonne, you've done it again!

(I am glad to see that it's not just sports bloggers who are always accused of plying their trade from their mother's basements, though.)

But the thing is, the cutscenes are really long

Apparently, you're not supposed to complain about the length of the cutscenes in Metal Gear Solid 4. If you're the game's Associate Producer Ryan Payton, you're not even supposed to acknowledge that they are long.

I already talked about some of the problems with these scenes on a dramatic level. In that post, I brushed aside the question of length, but it's something I want to get back to because I'm getting the impression that it's something people would rather we not discuss -- and I don't just mean Konami's PR department.

Cutscenes are integral to the game's identity. I get that. To remove them would be to make it something else, something not Metal Gear. That still doesn't make them off-limits for criticism. Kojima and company included long, non-interactive narrative sections as a major focus of their game, so logically those sequences should also be well represented in any critical discussion. The question is: Would MGS4 be better if the cutscenes were shorter?

I say yes.

Here's why: At their core, what these cutscenes do is take control from the player. They do so in a couple of ways. First, and most obviously, they simply show events unfolding without any player input. In MGS4, there are several moments during cinemas in which the player can hit a button to view brief, hallucinatory flashbacks, but while that's a cool feature it's really not the same as feeling like you're directing the scene. So these scenes take away one of the most fundamental characteristics of the medium. Whether they add enough in return to make up for that is open to debate.

On another level -- and this has always been one of my biggest pet peeves about games -- they don't let the player control something as basic as starting and stopping according to his whims. When you load up Metal Gear Solid 4, you need to do so with the expectation that you don't know when you'll be stopping. You need to accept that Hideo Kojima will make that decision for you. I do not consider this a virtue, although I'd be happy to hear arguments to the contrary.

Here's an example of when the cutscene length starts to seem silly. I had about an hour to squeeze in some playing time last night, and since I had last saved at the end of some long cinematics, I was eager to get in a little bit of sneaking before dinner. I turned the PlayStation 3 on at 5 o'clock. At 5:50, I saved and turned it off, having not touched the controller once. There wasn't one instance of gameplay that whole time. While some of the scenes I had watched had been entertaining, at about the 20-minute mark I began to feel irritated that I wasn't doing anything, and by the time I was done "playing" I was just this side of pissed off. My only other option would have been to skip the movies entirely, but then I wouldn't have known why I was doing anything. Some choice.

Some games do clever things with the notion of eliminating player control, BioShock and The Darkness being two recent examples. Although Metal Gear Solid 4 is often inventive during gameplay, it fails to break conceptual ground with its cinematics. They're awfully traditional. They're just amped up, loud, and long. The player's actions are the bridge that connects cutscenes, instead of the other way around. This seems misguided to me.

I am trying to remember if the cutscenes bothered me so much in past MGS games. They certainly didn't in the first one, although I remember one afternoon when a particular scene resulted in my being 20 minutes late to work. When I think about that game, though, what I remember are the mindblowing in-game moments: The first fight against an invisible Gray Fox, rappelling down the communications tower under helicopter fire, battling Sniper Wolf across a snowy field.

3/5 of the way in, I don't feel that MGS4 is creating the same kinds of memories for me. That's why, although I'm certainly enjoying the game, I keep writing these long, negative posts about it. There is still a ways to go, though. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Why does everybody in Metal Gear Solid talk like that?

Above: "Funny you should mention the war economy; I was just drafting a ten-minute speech about it."

Tycho from Penny Arcade has an unorthodox opinion about the cutscenes in Metal Gear Solid 4:

I actually like the story of Metal Gear, but it's not told well. I don't care if a cutscene is long provided that it's well paced, but these cutscenes aren't simply long, they're eternal - and they feel even longer than they are because they're pure overreach. The script is insipid, didactic, and its insights are trite. The humor doesn't work, period, and it works even less against the backdrop of perpetual war.

Usually, when people talk about the cutscenes in the Metal Gear Solid series, it's only to argue for or against their length, and the quality of their integration with the gameplay. Most people seem to agree that the cutscenes, taken at face value, are done well.

And in Metal Gear Solid 4, from a production standpoint, they're better than they've ever been. Graphically, there seems to be little separating cinematic cutscenes and in-game, player-controlled actions. With no loading time between them, Kojima's team has achieved a seamlessness that has eluded past MGS games. (I should mention here that I've only just finished Act 1, so these are just my impressions so far.)

It's not just the technical side. Artistically, maybe only SquareSoft can compete with Kojima on the cinematic level. I agree with Michael Abbott: "...[Kojima] is a fine and gifted filmmaker. One can easily track his maturation from the original MGS. Unlike other so-called cinematic games like Mass Effect, the filmmaking in MGS4 is visually creative, high-caliber stuff." Kojima uses depth of field and simulated handheld cameras, among other tools, to showcase an aesthetic sensibility that outstrips that of many Hollywood directors.

As a writer, Kojima is less successful. The MGS series has drawn praise for its story, not least because after four games, it's clear that we're dealing with a science-fiction saga as epic in scope as anything comparable in literature or film. These games have real ideas about human conflict, about free will and fate, and now about the intersection of warfare and commerce. That they are not terribly penetrating insights almost seems not to matter -- we're just glad to see a game that takes a point of view at all (compare MGS4's take to the rigidly moralistic viewpoint of Call of Duty 4).

But that's not where I think the writing falters. I'm talking about the nuts and bolts. I'm talking about the words Kojima uses, and the manner in which they are communicated. This man needs an editor.

No one ever lived in Kojima's universe who wasn't waiting for an opportunity to wax rhapsodic about the deepest philosophical questions to anybody willing to listen -- or even to those, like Tycho, who aren't. Characters make their points, and then they keep talking. No one is reluctant to bare his soul. Everyone speaks in paragraph form. People in Metal Gear Solid don't have conversations; they trade soliloquies. The cutscenes are so long because nobody ever shuts up.

This post probably gives the impression that I'm not a fan of the game, and so far nothing could be further from the truth. I'm all the way in, to the point where I've been spending my non-playing time counting the minutes until I could get back to it. But Tycho's comment rang me like a bell, because I do think he's right, and I think in some ways Metal Gear Solid 4, like Grand Theft Auto IV before it, has provided another excuse for the community to anoint a savior. MGS4 ain't it.

In fact, I'd be willing to bet this game would be one of the worst things you could show to a Roger Ebert type in a bid to gain respectability. It focuses so much on the virtual performances that someone with no prior investment in the characters would be unable to look past the clunkiness of the storytelling. For us as players, it's easy to see why we're absorbed: We have a stake in Solid Snake's fate, which makes the game's long sequences of passivity acceptable.

Would the same be true of someone who wasn't playing? I doubt it.