Max Payne 3

Above: Max's barber gives him the full Walter White.

At first, I wasn't enjoying Max Payne 3. Too difficult, too regressive, too joyless. And even though those things never really changed, at some point I bought in. It won me over through sheer determination. Stuff went wrong for Max, and then it went more wrong. Shit was dark, and then it got darker. You know what? I didn't always like it, but I couldn't help but admire it. That's the crux of my Max Payne 3 review at the Phoenix.

Afterward, I read Tom Bissell's review over at Grantland. We had similar reactions, and also both invoked Raymond Chandler in characterizing Max's narration -- which I should take as a sign that great minds think alike, and instead take as a sign that it's a lazy comparison. But I have to disagree on a fairly major point. Tom mentions the dreaded ludonarrative dissonance in contrasting Max's personal failures, poor self-esteem, and tendency to get everyone around him killed with his preternatural murdering ability. I'll let him explain:

Three seconds after claiming to be an incompetent failure, however, Max is leaping in slow motion from a speedboat while shooting an incoming RPG out of the sky and then single-handedly massacring an entire army of Kevlar-encased Brazilian commandos. Max Payne 3's hero is simultaneously a barely functioning alcoholic and one of the most sublimely gifted killing machines in video-game history. Which is a little weird.

True, but I think it's all perfectly consistent. For one thing, in the game I played, Max was not a bulletproof superhero who routinely emerged unscathed from unfair firefights. Actually, he died a lot. Dozens and dozens of times. My Max did a lot of slow-motion aiming and a lot of graceful leaping, but for the most part nothing useful came out of it. He was as likely to end up sprawled on the floor, his torso filling up with bullets, as he was to take out five enemies with a procession of headshots.

My experience with the game was one of near-constant failure. I came away thinking that what happens to Max is what would happen to anybody who takes on impossible odds: he loses most of the time. The only difference is that, as a video game character, he's reincarnated until he gets it right.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that my shortcomings as a player don't really count. That there is one true playthrough in which a single Max, and not his infinite multiverse counterparts, storms through all the action and survives. It's still true that Max's greatest asset is his desire for self-annihilation. Like Martin Riggs in Lethal Weapon, he's a man with nothing to lose, and whose death wish gives him the edge against almost any opponent. Max's self-loathing narration, his alcohol and drug abuse, his continued willingness to confront armed gangs -- it's all of a piece. He wants to die. Why else would he do any of the ridiculous things he does?

In that sense, he's the most plausible videogame protagonist around.

The Raid: Redemption

Above: Boys will be boys!

I want to start with some expectations management: as great as it is, The Raid: Redemption does not belong in the top echelon of action movies. Compare it to Die Hard, another movie about an overmatched cop trapped in a building with a bunch of lowlifes, and it's easy to see why. The Raid doesn't give us a sharply drawn hero, a memorable villain, or much of a story. Its faceless henchmen are just that, faceless, not like Die Hard's unforgettable team of Eurotrash terrorists, each of whom had a clear role and identity. When I say that The Raid is the best action movie I've seen in years, that's both high praise for the film, and an indictment of the current state of the genre.

What The Raid does offer, in spades, are fight sequences that are choreographed with aplomb and photographed with confidence. In an age when most cinematic action scenes are comprised of cartoonish CGI, incomprehensible blurs, and weaker impacts than touch football, here is a movie that radiates authenticity with every bone-crunching hit. It feels real -- not in the sense that you believe a real-life person could have the stamina that these characters have, or go the whole day without once having to go to the bathroom, but in the sense that you believe the people onscreen are getting hurt. The squalid tenement where the action happens feels like a real place, not a movie set. And as our hero faces down one frothing bad guy after another, you believe, despite the accumulated knowledge of a lifetime of moviegoing, that he might not make it through this thing.

So, no, The Raid doesn't have much in the way of a story. If you've seen the trailer, you've pretty much got it. A team of cops is set to infiltrate a high-rise and arrest a crime boss who acts as a landlord to the city's worst criminals. Naturally, about halfway up the building, the cops are ambushed and cut off. The ruthless efficiency of the gangsters would make a private equity firm proud. The crime boss calls in snipers from adjacent buildings to cover the windows, and their marksmanship is shown in detail. It's a small touch, but an important one -- the cops won't even be allowed to flee with their tails between their legs.

From then on, the movie is one mostly unbroken string of action scenes. Everybody runs out of bullets by about the 30-minute mark, both cops and criminals, leaving them to contend with batons, knives, machetes, and whatever impromptu weapons they can find. It's here that the movie hits its stride. Working mostly in an identical series of hallways and stairwells, director Gareth Evans and his co-fight choreographers (stars Iko Uwais and Yayan Ruhian) wring almost endless variety from their battles. I have read criticisms of The Raid that decry the repetition of the settings, but given the martial-arts chops on display, I wonder who even took the time to notice. Besides which, criticizing a low-budget movie for recycling sets is like slamming a sonnet for only having 14 lines.

Evans isn't a showy director who tries to dazzle audiences with fancy camera tricks. His m.o. here is to stick with medium shots and let his performers do the work. We're treated to full-frame displays of physical feats that are all the more impressive for appearing to be done without the aid of special effects. No one in this movie can fly or deflect bullets. The action is fast, yes, but it's comprehensible, and while there are plenty of cuts, they are all made in service of letting us know where the combatants are in relation to one another, and what they are doing. As viewers, we are grounded at all times.

With two other features under his belt, Gareth Evans is already showing growth as a director. His first collaboration with Uwais, Merantau, also featured kick-ass fight choreography, but it was slow to start and dragged for long stretches. (However, Merantau also features a fight in a service elevator between Uwais and Ruhian that is worth the price of admission alone. It's on Netflix streaming. Watch it.) The Raid gets started faster, is better paced, and has a sneakier sense of humor. But I think Evans can do even better.

What I'd like to see from him next is a movie that takes seriously its obligation to give us characters we care about, and a storyline that is about more than just the next plot point. I don't think that means easing up on the action. For instance, imagine if our hero in The Raid didn't lovingly kiss his pregnant wife goodbye before leaving for the disastrous mission, but left in a huff after a dumb argument. Imagine if, fighting for his life against a quartet of machete-wielding miscreants, in the back of his mind he knew that the last thing he may ever have said to his wife was an insult. None of that would require any more dialogue, or less screen time devoted to people kicking each other in the face and chest. Yet it would make him more of a character and less of a type.

All that said, if Gareth Evans just keeps making movies as awesome as The Raid, then we're in good hands for years to come. I hope other filmmakers are taking notice.

Journey

Above: I'm standing on the edge of tomorrow / And it's all up to me how far I go

My review of Journey is up now at thephoenix.com. It is the culmination of a lifelong scheme to infuriate honest gamers everywhere, and to troll good-hearted players for pageviews in a cynical cash grab. Or it's an accurate reflection of my experience with the game. One of those two things.

I admired thatgamecompany's Flower, mostly for the sensation of flight it gave, which remains the best use of the Sixaxis that I've encountered. Journey isn't much different from that game in the nuts and bolts. You wang around the levels, coming into contact with things that light up, and don't do much that feels traditional or objective-based. (Though Journey is more traditional than Flower in terms of your avatar's moveset, its appeal is also not predicated on your mastery of those moves.) I didn't find the same feeling of exhilaration in the moment-to-moment play of Journey as I did with Flower, and I also thought it strained much harder for relevance. I am all for games that break the rules in an attempt to offer a different kind of experience -- obviously -- but this one didn't do it for me.

I was interested to see that Tom Chick's Journey review was the only one indexed on Metacritic that resembled my own take on the game. Even more interesting was his follow-up, "The official Journey review FAQ," which was his response to the predictable shitstorm that arose after his original review. I have to wonder why a game like Journey, which has a Metacritic score of 92 and is the fastest-selling game in PSN history, needs such ardent defenders. Journey fans: you have already won! The slaughter rule is in effect.

This does speak to the difference between a game review and criticism, though. Are people concerned that Chick's review will dissuade potential Journey fans from trying the game? Are they just looking for validation of their own positive experiences, even though they could get it from almost every other review? Do they sincerely believe that Chick missed something, or that they can change his mind if they just call him an asshole loudly enough?

It is very likely that we'll be covering these topics and more at our PAX East panel, "Stuff Your Criticism, I Want a Review!" Friday afternoon at 3 in the Wyvern Theatre. Pick up a copy of the Phoenix before you come! You can roll it up and whack me on the nose with it.

The Darkness II

Above: Jackie quad-wields you in the face.

My review of The Darkness II is up now at thephoenix.com. Count me among many who were pleasantly surprised by the quality of the story. While the gameplay is a little slicker than before, I don't think it benefits by being more overtly game-like than its predecessor, and by having more traditional level design.

In the previous game, Jackie was the only one with magical powers, and his enemies could bring little more to bear than increasingly powerful weaponry. Here, they have enchanted abilities of their own, which may make for a more fair fight, but diminishes a key part of the allure -- the first game was like a monster movie where you got to play the monster.

The whole thing is a lot of fun and well worth playing, but after playing the PC version I would certainly recommend that you play on a console. The mouse and keyboard interface is all sorts of messed up. To use the Darkness slash power, you need to click the mouse wheel, and then move the mouse up, down, or to the side to direct it. It doesn't work well, and feels like you're flailing. Plus, you're likely to accidentally scroll and switch weapons. Additionally, when you're wielding two guns, mouse2 fires the lefthand gun, and the mouse1 fires the righthand gun. It feels completely unnatural.

Oh, and for some reason you use the N and M keys to swap between skill trees. Makes no sense at all.

At any rate, I expected the worst from The Darkness II and found it to be a worthy sequel. This has been a good winter for games, and Syndicate isn't even out yet. What a wonderful time to be alive.

Final Fantasy XIII-2

 Above: Caius and some lady who's barely in the game.

I reviewed Final Fantasy XIII-2 for Paste. I didn't like it too much, but then again I'm the guy who did like Final Fantasy XIII quite a bit, so make of that what you will. Because the review necessarily had to cover a lot of ground, I wasn't able to mention my single biggest gripe with the game, which would have required a laser-like focus on a seemingly minor point, and a mind-numbing amount of explanation.

Minds, prepare to be numbed.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 has a random battle system, but with a real-time element. Whenever enemies spawn, a timer appears and a big circle is drawn around your character. If you can run up to a foe and whack him with your sword in the first few seconds, you get the first strike, which casts haste on your party, and fills up your opponents' stagger meter. If not, most of the time you'll begin the fight on equal footing. You can also try to run away, which is usually successful, and in which case the enemies vanish.

Now, if you fail to run away, or if the clock otherwise ticks to zero, nothing bad happens unless you lose the fight. Usually, losing a fight gives you the option to "retry," in this case meaning that you end up right back where you were, no worse for wear. But if you lose a fight after the clock runs down, you don't have the retry option. You'll have to start all the way back at your last save.

It's not the most punitive punishment in the world, but it is a sufficient incentive not to let the clock run down. Almost every time enemies appear, it makes sense to try to get the drop on them. But the controls aren't very good, not compared to a good action game, and so you usually end up running around in circles trying to make contact. As a segue into a fight, this is still not a huge problem.

The problem comes when the fight ends. As a remedy to complaints about the last game, FFXIII-2 features big, open levels with no clear path to your objective. It's also fully 3D, of course, with a free-floating camera that you can control at will. When you are returned to the world map after your fight, the camera is no longer showing the same perspective. Your character is no longer facing the same direction. The only indication of which way you were going comes from a dotted line on your mini-map, which shows your most recent steps, and is not at all helpful.

And so, every single time a fight ends, it takes a couple of seconds to re-establish your sense of the game. There is a moment of complete disorientation, in which you spin the camera around and squint at the mini-map, trying to remember which way you were going. By the time you figure it out, quite often another random battle has triggered, starting the whole process over again.

It reaches a crescendo of shittiness in the Academia 400 AF level, wherein you are attacked within seconds of each new encounter by flying enemies that you cannot reliably run away from. Many other levels have an option to ride this Chocobo in order to avoid random battles, but not this one. I spent a solid two hours on an otherwise lovely Saturday morning feeling like K. in The Castle, knowing exactly what I needed to do but being stymied at every turn.

It isn't the biggest annoyance in the world; it's a small annoyance that happens thousands of times. It's not like a bad escort mission that you need to push through to be done with it. From the moment the game begins, it's there, throbbing like a toothache. It keeps you off-kilter and uncomfortable the entire time you're playing. And it makes it harder to focus on what the game is doing well.

It's not just Final Fantasy games that have these issues, but it does seem like RPGs especially can be so invested in their Big Ideas that they overlook the importance of giving users a smooth and responsive experience minute by minute. From Fallout's bugginess to Mass Effect's inscrutable interface, this stuff matters. At least, it should.

Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception

Above: Nathan Drake searches for something interesting to say.

My review of Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception is up at thephoenix.com. I was a little disappointed by it. Maybe it's just a case of expectations: the stuff that was good was not really better or different than what I expected, and the stuff that wasn't good seemed like a regression from Uncharted 2.

Even though Drake's Deception hit a lot of the same notes that I praised so much in Among Thieves, here it felt more obligatory. There were slow parts where you walked through city scenes, and puzzles, and some decent platforming, and a whole bunch of awful interminable shootouts. Worse still, I found myself less drawn to Nathan Drake as a character this time around. He still has some great lines (and some great line deliveries, thanks to Mr. North), but I just wasn't buying what Naughty Dog was selling. And I wasn't really sure why.

At any rate, it's still a decent enough game, but I do hope that if there's a fourth Uncharted, that it brings with it a few more surprises.

Battlefield 3

Above: Jet gameplay. Not pictured: the pilot crashing immediately.

Ahoy-hoy! My review of Battlefield 3 is up at Paste. It is nice to be back at Paste.

This was a tough one to write, for reasons that I think will be clear when you read the review. When things go well, Battlefield 3 is stunning. The problem isn't just that things don't always go well, it's that sometimes they don't go at all. My play experiences tended to fall into one of five categories.

From best to worst:

1. Time of my life -- awesome squadmates, great connection, action-movie moments that make me weep with joy.
2. Dumbass teammates, but an incredibly fun shooter with constant surprises.
3. Connection troubles, lag, lost XP and unlocks. Starting to wonder if it's worth it.
4. "Joining Server" loop for three goddamn hours. Rebooting and cursing.
5. Single-player.

For instance, I once paired up with a squadmate who was a virtuouso with a tank. He was driving, and pummeling our enemies. I was acquitting myself serviceably in the turret, and ended the match with something like 10 kills to 2 deaths. (Usually, for me, it's the reverse.) Not only did we win the game, but we earned the ribbon for the best squad, and even though it was all him, it was a feeling of satisfaction that lasted me through many worse performances.

Even when there is little or no cohesion, the game is still somehow incredibly fun, if only because so many variables are at play. At times, I held down capture points by myself, just a solitary man lying in some tall grass with a heavy machine gun. Once, after respawning, I wiped out the entire squad that had cut me down just moments before. And then, of course, there are those magical moments when you accidentally crash a helicopter onto somebody. I find it hard not to run upstairs and recount these things to my wife in excruciating detail.

There's every reason to believe that the Battlefield experience will get better, and I hope it does, because right now the thin candy shell is not properly supporting the chocolatey middle. I don't think I'm done with this game, not by a longshot.

Batman: Arkham City

Above: Batman struggles with the new Google Reader interface.

My review of Batman: Arkham City is up at thephoenix.com. I think that some reviewers have gone a little overboard with their praise (even though this review score was hilarious), but it's still a great game, and one of the better ones I have played this year.

For as much as people are still griping about the sins of past Bat-games, I think that if this were a new IP, we'd be more measured in our praise. Arkham City can tip too far into fan service, and sacrifice narrative cohesion in favor of Jeph Loeb-style stunt casting. Even though I like Rocksteady's interpretation of lesser villains like Clayface and Solomon Grundy, they also serve the same function in this game as the moles do in Whack-a-Mole. The same was true of Arkham Asylum, but less so. City is the better game; Asylum was the better yarn.

Now that we're in the thick of things, I feel even more behind than usual. I've got a Battlefield 3 review in the pipeline (which marks  my long-awaited return to Paste!), and Uncharted 3 on deck for the Phoenix. Somewhere in there, I've also got Lord of the Rings: War in the North to play. First world problems, indeed.

Rage

Above: Some manner of anger. Fury, maybe.

My review of Rage is up now at thephoenix.com.

The buzz I had been hearing was not good, and the game's first few hours seemed to confirm it. Where Rage attempts to modernize, it doesn't work. It is kind of creepy how much time you spend standing mutely while people give you orders, and how un-interactive the world is. But where Rage plays to id's strengths, it soars. I forgot what it was like to play a first-person shooter as pure as large portions of Rage are.

There is strategy involved, of the sort where you're deciding whether you want to do a little damage or a lot of damage. There are fun, unexpected weapons to use, like a mind-control slug that allows you to walk an enemy, zombie-like, into a crowd of his compatriots before blowing him up. Traditional weapons are all given a chance to shine, as smartly designed levels transition from close-quarters combat to wide-opeen battlefields.

Mostly, it's a game about shooting, and so it gives you the tools to do that. You can carry 8 weapons at a time in rage. Your sniper rifle scope stays steady, even when you're zoomed in. The action is smooth and lightning fast.The best summation of Rage that I've read came from the Dead End Thrills blog, which in a post that was otherwise all about id Tech 5, had this to say about the game itself:

It reminds us how far we’ve erred from the thrills of ‘run-and-gun’ into pedestrian ‘stop-and-pop’; how we’ve lost the rhythm of the firstperson shooter; and how look and feel are still more important than gimmicks and Gamerscore.

I couldn't agree more.

Of course, it's fair to say that not all of Rage consists of these shooting sections, and I'm with everyone who finds the vehicle portions and the world-building to be suspect. But I'm also the guy who will dismiss a game completely if I don't like the inventory menus.

I'm not contradicting myself. What I care about is what comprises the bulk of the experience. It doesn't matter to me how great the story is in an RPG if I am spending all my time grappling with the interface. And it doesn't matter to me that Rage's shooting portions are stitched together in a dead world with the occasional mandatory driving section, because those are easy and brief. If my buggy had constantly been blowing up, and if I had to spend long stretches doing more in the city hubs than picking up missions, my impressions would have been quite different.

As it is, if Rage had simply been a linear corridor shooter -- paced more like Metro 2033 than Borderlands -- it probably would be one of the best of the year.

Driver: San Francisco

Hey there! Forgot to mention that I reviewed Driver: San Francisco for Joystick Division.

Don't have much more to add that isn't in the review. It seemed like a good game and I kept waiting for the moment that I would completely buy in, and it never came. I had some fun with it, for sure, but I'd play a couple rounds of multiplayer, or a few missions in the campaign, and start thinking about other games I could be playing, or things I had to do around the house. I never had any problem turning the game off.

Next it's on to Rage, it looks like, with some time for the Portal 2 DLC and a little more Resident Evil 4 HD. There's not enough time in the day.

Shadows of the Damned

Above: Garcia Fucking Hotspur. 

With the fall review season in full swing, I've done the only logical thing and devoted all of my column space to a game that came out in June. Excuse me if I want to share the love.

You can read my review of Shadows of the Damned at thephoenix.com. In it, I make the case for Shadows as one of those litmus test games -- you might like it or you might not, but if you're on board with the notion of games as art, then you at least ought to check it out. Which is easy enough to say for somebody who skipped over it until the price went down. But the price went down! What excuse is there now?

I drilled down a little deeper in my biweekly column for Joystick Division, in which I mused about what makes dick jokes art. The column is mostly a comparison between one crude-minded game that nobody liked, Duke Nukem Forever, and this one. Why are wall boobs reprehensible, and why is a huge dick cannon hilarious? Find out!

Lots going on lately, and nothing at all. I should have a review of Driver: San Francisco up on Joystick Division by the end of the week. And I still haven't played Dead Island or Gears 3. Life is hard, man.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Above: Adam Jensen prepares to enter the Matrix.

My review of Deus Ex: Human Revolution is up now at thephoenix.com. I'll level with you: I don't think it's a very good review. There was so much I wanted to say that I ended up not saying any of it. I tried to explain the game in the broadest terms to somebody who had never heard of it before. I felt like I needed more words. That's what the blog is for.

Part of the problem is that I am still a little confused about what I think of the game. When a game shows itself to be capable of greatness, it is all the worse whenever it falls short -- which DX:HR does, often. It's not like a lot of mediocre games that maintain a baseline of competence the whole through. Those are easy to figure out. This game consists of stratospheric highs punctuated by crushing lows. The mental arithmetic necessary to give it a score, and then call it a day, seems like it's either overcomplicating or oversimplifying things.

Let's start with this: for sustained stretches, DX:HR is brilliant. It is, at heart, a game about corporate espionage, and they've managed to make sneaking around office buildings and reading emails into a genuinely thrilling experience. Part of that is due to the interface. The stealth mechanics are intuitive and robust. Taking cover might make your character a little too invisible, but line of sight works just as well, and you never get a sense that the AI isn't playing fair. Every time a guard spotted me, I knew it was my fault and not the game's. When I was successful -- such as when I snuck past a room full of guards in a penthouse apartment, and waited for the elevator while listening to them talk about how they were going to kill me -- I wanted to find somebody in real life to high five.

And it seems, too, as though the character building and varied playstyles aren't just lip service. I tried my hardest to avoid fights and to build up my hacking abilities. For the most part, it worked. One of my favorite parts was when I entered a new section of an office building, sneaking around as usual, only gradually noticing that nobody seemed to be around. I saw one guard dead on the ground, and then another, and then I encountered a security robot that I had re-programmed several minutes earlier. My own lethal Roomba, puttering through the corridors, taking out the trash.

Then again, sometimes the stealth approach just wasn't happening, and the non-lethal goal seemed unattainable, so I would slowly and methodically murder everybody in the room. If you don't upgrade your combat capabilities, the shooting is clunky, but it still is not an impossible task to systematically pick everybody off with a sniper rifle, especially if you're in a room with multiple levels and numerous back passages. And what's nice about all of this is that there is no sense that the game is guiding you one way or another. The environments, the enemies, the tools -- they are there for you to take or to leave.

But when the game stumbles, it faceplants. To some degree, it's not even the game's fault. I once read an article about air traffic controllers, who work one of the most stressful jobs you can have. For hours, they stare at a screen that is full of hundreds of little dots all moving in different directions, and their job is to know what each one of those dots is doing in relation to all of the others. Occasionally one of the controllers will lose his focus, and suddenly instead of seeing hundreds of planes flying through the air with clockwork precision, he just sees a bunch of manic dots. And then he loses his shit and has to be placed on leave.

This is essentially how I felt every time something went wrong in DX:HR.

There's something to be said for gameplay based on the idea of your careful plans going awry. (This was one of the central pleasures of Far Cry 2.) When this game is humming, you're like the air traffic controller who knows what's up. You know where every guard is. You know where all your cover is. Your weapons are armed and ready. You have a plan for getting through this area, and it's working, and you could not feel better about it. When you get busted, though, it's not fun, and there aren't often clever ways to regroup. Usually you just restart.

If you're playing as I did, it's not worth fighting or running. Since I put no skill points into making my character a fighter, getting spotted meant instant death. Often I just gave up and let them kill me. Occasionally I'd hide in a vent for five minutes, which felt like a moral victory, but was boring and less productive than reloading. And because of the way the game saves your progress, if you die after updating your skill tree or earning bonus XP, you have to do all those things over again when you restart.

This isn't the worst thing in the world; it's a small annoyance that happens over and over. And it's one of those obnoxious things that only happens in video games, which a smart game should have figured out get past. DX:HR feels like it should be smart enough for that. For all its brilliance, it trots out the same old classic tropes that have been stale since the first Deus Ex: crawling through vents, stacking crates, atrocious voice acting. You can emerge from a vent into a locked room, and the people in the room will start chatting with you as though nothing unusual has happened. Oh, and there are the boss battles.

I don't want to be the millionth person to complain about the boss battles, but some things are unavoidable. It's not that they represent sudden, jarring difficulty spikes. It's that the rest of the game is based on player choice, and the boss battles have an Optimal Strategy that you can't deviate from unless you are a masochist. Were the game true to its principles, then there would be a way to hack your way through a boss battle, or to avoid it altogether. Instead, you can pick up the weapons that are helpfully scattered around the room, and then discard them when you're done. That's lazy.

Would I recommend that most gamers play Deus Ex: Human Revolution? For sure. But you need to be prepared to struggle with it a little. Wrestle it to the ground. It is not perfect, but it is not quite like anything else out there.

Are game reviewers bad at games?

If you've ever talked about video games on the internet, then you have encountered people who worship at the altar of difficulty. They claim that any game worth playing is worth playing on the hardest setting, that high scores are more important than a good time, that second place is the first loser. Stuff like that.

These people are not usually game reviewers.

I've always found it interesting that game reviewers tend to be modest about their own abilities. They might claim to know a lot about games. They are confident that they can write about games better than the average player. But, when it comes to skillz, it seems to me that most critics are happy to accept their limitations. So that's the topic of my latest column for Joystick Division, "Doing it wrong: Are game reviewers bad at video games?"

I did a little bit more legwork than usual this time, in that I actually solicited opinions from several writers I respect. They all gave me thoughtful answers.* Since I could only use a little bit of what they said for the column, I thought I'd use this space to reprint their responses in full.

The two questions I asked:

1. Do you consider yourself good at games, however you define "good"?
2. Do you think it's important for a game reviewer to be good at games?

These were their answers.

Justin McElroy, Joystiq:

I don't think I'm particularly good at games. I find I'm just good enough to finish pretty much ever game on normal with occasional frustration. In fact, that makes for a pretty good metric: If it's more frustrating than that (or not possible) I know it's a difficult game.

I believe in Koster's theory that fun in video games is really the sensation of learning, so if you were the sort that was so inept they were unable to learn, I think it could hamper you as a critic.

Sparky Clarkson, Discount Thoughts et al.:

I hope not.

I don't consider myself to be particularly good at games, and it doesn't bother me that I am not. I happily admit that I am incredibly terrible at shmups, have nothing like the reflexes needed to become a masterful multiplayer FPS player, etc. The prevalence of online leaderboards is of great assistance in calibrating this opinion. I'm not terrible at everything; my skills are probably about average, all games considered. And, I think this level is a good place to be as a reviewer. If anything, I should like to be slightly worse at games than I am, because while my skills are middling compared to dedicated gamers, they are much above those of occasional players, which means I may systematically underestimate difficulty. A reviewer needs to be good enough to finish a game if he wants to (whether he *needs* to is an argument for another time), and bad enough to fail at least a few times. This is a peculiar part of reviewing games. Being a "good reader" in the context of a book review means having an eye for plot and the quality of prose; it does not mean getting through the book without dying and having to start a chapter over three times. Games uniquely place barriers in front of players to prevent them (hopefully only temporarily) from seeing all that the game has to offer. A good reviewer needs to know what it's like to fail at each game, and a sense for when those barriers are too high, or even too low. So, I believe it's important for a game reviewer not to be too good at games.

Brad Gallaway, GameCritics:

I do consider myself good at games, yes.

I don't think I’m in the top tier of players and I don't put in enough time on any one thing to ever call myself "the best", but I'm adept in a wide variety of genres and can hold my own regardless of what I'm reviewing. Essentially, I take the jack of all trades approach – I’m pretty good at most, expert-level at none.

I do think it is important for a reviewer to be good at games, although I don't think that expert ability is required. For example, I don't think a reviewer needs to have a pro competitive level of skill in a game like Street fighter, although they do need to be able to perform the moves and (at the very least) finish the game a few times with a few different characters.

Primarily, I think that a good ability is important so that the reviewer is able to complete whatever it is they’re reviewing, and also to have the proper perspective on design and difficulty. If the reviewer isn't good at playing, then I think it would be hard to put stock in their opinion. If they claim a game is too hard or designed poorly, is that really the case, or do they simply lack sufficient facility? If they don't understand how game systems work and aren't able to properly utilize them, then how can they give a fair estimation of what the game is? It's a bit of a clumsy comparison, but how could someone review a movie if their vision is impaired, or how could someone review a book if they had a fourth-grade reading level?

I think there’s plenty of room for a variety of reviewers, but in my opinion there has to be a base competency in order for a review to be written.

Rob Zacny, RobZacny.com et al.:

I like to think I'm good, but the record tells me otherwise. I'm a Bronze League Stracraft player, I generally get taken to school in real-time strategy games and struggle to maintain a 1:1 kill-to-death ratio in Bad Company 2. Where my skill can be tested in a competitive setting, I generally prove myself to be a middling sort or gamer.

But is that a good measure? I review games, usually a different one each week. My objective with most games I play is not mastery, however satisfying that would be, but understanding. I don't excel at most games I play, because I my skill level is limited enough that I really have to work at a game to get "good" at it. But I would still say I'm good at games because I can quickly take any new game in almost any genre, acquire a basic level of competence with it, and then figure out what systems are at work and why they do or don't create a satisfying experience for me.

Ultimately, it's more important that a reviewer be good at analyzing and communicating experiences. Being good at games can help a lot when that skill leads you to having a richer understanding, and you can share that with your audience. If you were to go back to GFW Radio, Shawn Elliott sounded like he was a great shooter and RTS player, and that led him to offer special insights on how games like Company of Heroes or Team Fortress 2 worked. He was operating at a higher level than most people do, and he was able to bring back unique views from that level. That's where skill can make someone better at reviews and criticism. But it's not a requirement. Basic proficiency, knowing what you're supposed to do and why, is all you really need to bring to a game.

Thanks to all these folks for responding. Enjoy the column!

*All except for Kirk Hamilton, that is, who has apparently forgotten that I made him. Also he might have been busy covering PAX or something?

Bastion

My review of Bastion is up now at thephoenix.com. You can add me to the chorus that's been singing its praises. It's a tight and smartly designed game that has a real heart. It also has a kickass soundtrack that you can buy.

Hmm. Guess that's it.

Link roundup

Hello! You wouldn't know it from watching this space, but I have been busy lately.

First, my review of Child of Eden is up at thephoenix.com. I liked this game, although I utterly failed to connect with it on the level that most of its ardent fans seem to have. My biggest takeaway was that the Kinect version was slightly, though clearly, inferior to the gamepad version. I continue to think that the Kinect will never work if it is used to perform the same actions that a gamepad does. There's a reason Dance Central was awesome -- it would not have been possible to play it with the stock controller.

Also, I appeared on the most recent episode of the Experience Points podcast. Scott, Jorge, and I discussed what makes a game overrated or underrated, and how the expectations we bring to a game color our experiences. I had a great time recording the podcast. I hope you enjoy listening to it.

Finally, while it's not nearly as incendiary as the first, my most recent column at Joystick Division is all about the game I've been playing the most recently: Words with Friends, on the iPhone. In a late-breaking update, I am happy to tell you that I have won a game or two since that column was published. And also lost several more.

Duke Nukem Forever

After 14 years, what's another couple of weeks to wait for my review of Duke Nukem Forever at thephoenix.com? I tried something a little different this time, writing as a credulous fanboy in an alternate universe in which DNF was released more or less on time. I think it's pretty funny, but I'm never the best judge of my own jokes.

As it turns out, I may not be the best judge of a game's quality, either, because I honestly thought Duke Nukem Forever was all right. It's not spectacular, it's definitely dated, and it displays some major lapses in judgment -- but, so help me, it's a lot of fun in places, too. Yet I've rarely seen such negative reviews for a major release. Maybe seeing the Metacritic scores before I played the game put me in a forgiving mood. But I'd definitely take this over a more technically competent but entirely soulless shooter like Killzone 3. Despite all its problems, it's got a spark.

Not that things started off all that well. I was prepared to hate it as much as anybody when, in the first few minutes of the game, I fumbled around with a white board, first scrawling a bunch of nonsense and then erasing the whole board, while all the while the soldiers around me talked about what a genius I was. Even though that was part of a quasi-dream sequence, in the game's reality, it still seemed clear that Duke was as exalted by others as he was in his own mind.

A little bit later, I managed to scratch out the word "Duke" in a book for a breathless fan, who didn't seem to notice that my handwriting looked like that of an illiterate child with palsy. Then, as I walked away from the fan and his father, I heard the dad remark, "I thought he'd be taller."

Finally, I thought. The biggest problem with the textual reality of Duke Nukem Forever is that everyone else seems to think Duke is as great as he does. That makes it hard to buy any claims that the character or the game is satirical. To see his bravado punctured, even a bit, was welcome. Then it rarely happened again. But my favorite parts of the game tended to be those which seemed aware that Duke was not an admirable character.

At a few separate points, Duke is shrunken to a tiny size, and still spouts tough-guy bullshit with a voice that sounds like he's been inhaling helium. This is legtimately funny, and also makes for some of the most fun parts to play. One standout scene was a platforming sequence through a kitchen, which worked as a spatial puzzle and also included some inspired twists, such as when Duke had to hop from one hamburger bun to the next in order to avoid being burned on a griddle. Maybe I'm easily impressed, but this struck me as inspired.

Actually, I know I'm easily impressed, because much of Duke's dudebro humor worked for me, too. Not all of it, but it turns out that I am the sort of cro-magnon who is legitimately entertained by seeing a button prompt labeled HUMILIATE. I laughed several times during Duke Nukem Forever. I laughed when it made reference to other games. (My favorites quips, in ascending order: "Power armor is for pussies!" while looking at Spartan gear; "I hate Valve puzzles!" while futzing around with steam pipes; "I was expecting a monkey!" after climbing a staircase and killing the pig that was throwing barrels at me the whole way up.) Most jokes miss the mark, but that's not a problem unique to this game.

(For what it's worth, though, I laughed more during the second chapter of Transformers: Dark of the Moon than during the entirety of Duke Nukem Forever.)

Duke Nukem Forever makes more sense, as a game and as a cautionary tale, when you realize that the whole thing is 3D Realms' attempt to make Half-Life. The point of Duke 3D was to take what worked about Doom and give it an attitude, and the point of Duke Forever is to do the same for Half-Life. Yes, it is more than a decade too late, and this isn't the only game that has failed to emulate Half-Life's potent blend of storytelling and encounter design. Playing Duke Nukem Forever, you can start to understand why Broussard and company were never able to finish. Their standards are evident in certain scenes, which makes their failure to meet those standards elsewhere even more glaring.

Oh well. I am still glad that this chapter of gaming history has been closed. If nothing else, maybe Duke Nukem Forever clears the decks for a better Duke in the future.

inFamous 2

Above: Betty Draper's weaselly brother IS Cole McGrath.

My review of inFamous 2 is up at thephoenix.com. This is one of those games that makes me question reality, because I haven't read one bad word about it, and I could barely stand to play it. Remember when I talked about how great Outland felt in my hands? inFamous 2 is the opposite. Nothing about this game feels right to me.

I don't like the way Cole McGrath moves, not on the ground or in the air. I don't appreciate the way he clings to objects automatically. I don't understand why the crosshair seems a touch off from where my shots end up. I resent not being able to lock the camera on to bigger enemies, who are able to fire devastating ordinance at me as I stumble into walls, looking for a safe place to hide but inexplicably grabbing a window ledge instead. Playing inFamous 2 feels like having a long, drawn-out argument with my controller.

I would estimate that my inFamous 2 experience broke down like this:

• 10% failing to run in a straight line
• 20% climbing something I didn't mean to climb
• 5% failing to to climb something I meant to climb
• 10% not damaging the enemy in my crosshairs
• 5% getting killed all of a sudden for no reason
  
• 10% doing unfun story missions
• 20% doing unfun side missions
• 20% looking for blast shards

That last 20% was definitely compelling, and it kept me playing longer than I would have expected, given how much fun I wasn't having, which is why I mentioned it in the review. But I want to take a second to talk about the missions. They are terrible. They may bridge cutscenes, but they don't advance the story in and of themselves, and many fail to contain an identifiable beginning, middle, and end. One of the mission objectives was literally to run a couple of blocks. I hadn't even seen what I was supposed to see and suddenly the debriefing screen came up. Then several of the game's unlikable characters had a conversation while I went to get something to drink.

The side missions are even worse, because I felt a junkie-like compulsion to keep completing them. I don't even mean the major side missions, which are often superior to the story missions and which earn you a nice chunk of XP. I mean the little events that pop up frequently as you traverse the map, which affect your karma meter. I foiled so many damn muggings, each one consisting of two immobile bad guys standing next to one immobile victim, all three waiting for me to show up before they started doing anything. Maybe I'd have had more fun if I'd been playing as Evil Cole, and taken random opportunities to murder buskers (really!).

Worst of all, by far, is the -- wait for it -- user-generated content. I've seen some people mention the inclusion of "UGC" as a way to extend the game's lifespan indefinitely, which they say as though it is something desirable. Of course every user-created mission that I played was terrible. That's to be expected. What surprised me was that, in the several days following the launch of inFamous 2, all of the UGC that you could play was provided by Sucker Punch themselves, presumably to set an example. And even that was terrible!

Not terrible in the way that the rest of the game is terrible -- terrible in all new ways. One of these missions had a bug that made it impossible to finish. I thought I had done something wrong, so I played it again, carefully, and the same thing happened. Then a third time. Then I wondered what the hell I was doing with my life. Not playing inFamous 2 anymore, that's for sure.

Outland

Above: Out is in.

My review of Outland is up at thephoenix.com. I'm always late to the party with my reviews, since I rarely get advance copies, but in this case it seemed even later than usual. The version I played, on Xbox Live Arcade, has been out since April 27. But in this case, Sony's loss is my gain. Thanks to the PlayStation Network outage, Outland will be out next Tuesday for PSN -- which makes this review timely as hell. PSN owners, if you want the short version: thumbs up!

Blessedly, I don't have too much to add to what I said in the review. I just thought this game felt great in my hands. So if the levels seem sparsely populated at times, that's all the better because it is such a joy to move through the space. Then, when you hit the frequent difficulty spikes, you at least feel equipped to get past them with enough honest effort. It's not one of those games whose sole purpose is to keep tricking you into getting killed -- ahem, ahem.

It is a strange transition sometimes between the Metroidvania stuff and the bullet hell stuff, and while a lot of positive reviews of Outland have called them two great tastes that taste great together, I don't know if I'd go that far. It's more like two great tastes that taste great near each other. Only during the boss battles do the two modes of play really seem integrated, and even then the only exploration you're doing is probing for weaknesses. No matter. Both are expertly executed.

Sadly, I was not able to try the co-op modes, since no one on my friends list had the game, and playing with strangers gives me heart palpitations. Given how much I liked the single-player campaign, my feeling is that the multiplayer could only be a bonus. If co-op is inferior, well, then you've still got an awesome one-player game. And if it's terrific, all the better!

All right, let's all go back to reading 8,000 identical Tweets from an E3 press conference.

L.A. Noire

Warning: This long-ass post contains major spoilers about the plot of L.A. Noire.

My review of L.A. Noire is up now at thephoenix.com. Short version: I thought that the non-interrogation stuff was generally terrible, while the interrogations were a mixed bag. That's what the review focuses on. For a much longer and more complete review that echoes my thoughts almost entirely, I recommend Tom Chick's review at Honest Gamers.

Since I didn't have much more space to devote to the story, I will do so here. Like the gameplay, the story is incredibly uneven. It's got high highs and low lows, and its most impressive storytelling feat is that sometimes those peaks and troughs occur simultaneously.

Although the details of each mystery often stay mysterious, the broad strokes are clear from the start. Of the three larger crimes that you eventually unravel, only the first -- the true identity of the Black Dahlia killer -- comes as any sort of a surprise at its conclusion. The final saga, about greedy property developers, crooked politicians, and a generous interpretation of eminent domain, is the most well-written and absorbing of the three, but it's also evident from the first five minutes of the first case what the conspiracy is.

L.A. Noire shows us things that it shouldn't. Sometimes, you happen upon collectible newspapers that trigger movie clips which further explain the mystery you're solving. This is a major misstep, giving the player far more information than they need to understand the criminal conspiracy, while giving them nothing to help with the details of their investigation. Usually, in a mystery, these things should work the other way around. You should have all the details but not understand how they fit together until the very end.

The most stunning miscalculation in this vein occurs near the end. You find a newsreel clip as part of his investigation, which turns out to be a recording of a secret meeting between the major players in which they all but explain their devious plan while cackling and twisting their mustaches. Unlike the newspapers, this isn't a semi-optional collectible. It's a crucial clue, and necessary for your advancement. This sequence doesn't just hit a false note -- it's like one of those "shreds" videos on YouTube.

In other crucial ways, L.A. Noire withholds details that it should show us. We are supposed to care when a crooked cop uses Phelps' marital infidelity to get him removed from the vice desk. By that time, you may have to stop for a minute to try to remember when you last saw Phelps' wife at all. Oh, right, it was in the first three seconds of the game, when we glimpsed her waving goodbye in a long shot as he left the house for his first day as a patrolman.

Phelps' relationship with his paramour is also underdeveloped, played so coyly that for a long time I thought that something else was going on between them. Nope. It's just that L.A. Noire -- a game which has no problem showing you naked dead women -- has no time for that aspect of its supposedly mature storytelling, not when there's yet another torpid footchase for the player to suffer through. Not that I'm saying I wanted MotionScan-powered sex scenes, necessarily, just that Cole's affair is left so ambiguous that there's no impact when it blows up in his face.

Then again, the narrative structure of the whole game is pretty weird. While investigating a series of murders with a similar M.O., it is a little strange that only Phelps suspects a serial killer, but that's a well-worn trope, especially since there is political pressure to close cases and be done with it. But it is astonishing how many bloody pipe wrenches belonging to non-murderers one can find in the course of a murder investigation.

Flashbacks, shown between cases, eventually provide the game's true dramatic throughline. We suspect from the start that Phelps is not the war hero everyone thinks he is. He says as much to anybody who will listen. So it's not surprising to learn that he earned his Silver Star during a moment of incredible cowardice on Okinawa, not bravery, and one of the game's truer observations is that, in combat, the line between heroism and gutlessness is just as thin as the one that divides living and dying.

We were prepared for this part of the story, but less so for the picture of Phelps that develops over the course of the game. For as good as he is at working cases (and, no matter how many times you fuck up an interrogation, people never stop complimenting his casework), his straight-arrow routine isn't the virtue it is supposed to be. He is obstinate, bad at working with others, and hungry for glory.

We see this develop in the flashbacks as a rivalry between Phelps and another officer candidate named Jack Kelso. Suspecting that Kelso is the superior leader, Phelps undermines him to the point that Kelso is washed out of OCS. When they meet again on Okinawa, Kelso, as a non-com, is still the more courageous Marine, and has the respect of the men which Phelps lacks. Kelso, like the rest of Phelps' unit, keeps showing up on the periphery of the Los Angeles saga, until the game throws us its biggest curveball. You spend the last few cases playing not as Phelps, but as Kelso.

Frankly, Kelso is the more appealing character, and if he were to star in a sequel to L.A. Noire, I would look forward to playing it. He is more believable as a gumshoe sticking his nose where it doesn't belong. He takes more lumps in his few cases than Phelps does in the dozens before him, and keeps coming back for more. Phelps' sanctimonious act is hard to take; Kelso is more grounded.

Still, this makes sense for the story that you eventually realize L.A. Noire is trying to tell. The more we learn about Phelps' actions in the war, the more we realize how much he has to atone for. Besides his undeserved Silver Star, Phelps has something much worse on his conscience. After giving the order to a flamethrower to clear out a cave system, Phelps learns that the complex was housing not enemy soldiers, but wounded civilians. Not only is he a coward -- he has blood on his hands.

In the meantime, the suspicions that Phelps had about Kelso's superior bravery and leadership are proven, over and over again, to be correct. Why do you play as Kelso? Because he is everything that Phelps wishes he was. And he is what Phelps, ultimately, tries to emulate. In the end, Phelps sacrifices himself to save Kelso. The flood that kills him washes away his sins.

Here's the part that tripped me up. You play 90% of the game as Cole Phelps, and, at its foundation, the story is Phelps' redemption. When it finally happens, you're controlling somebody else! For better or worse, you've invested your time and energy into Phelps' character by playing this game. You've empathized with him when he's been less than the person he can be. When, for the first time in his life, shows true heroism, he does so in a cutscene, long after your connection to him has been severed. And the admirable man you're currently playing as? He's now the guy who needs to get bailed out.

Over the course of playing L.A. Noire, I got familiar with a sense of frustration and bewilderment that happened at least once per interrogation -- where I had been completely on board with the fiction, knew whether the suspect was lying, and understood exactly how to bust them, only to hear the mournful musical cue indicating that I had chosen incorrectly, instead of the chime that meant I was right.

In a sense, that's how I felt at the game's conclusion. Like I had missed something that should have been right in front of my eyes. I kept waiting for that chime. It never came.

MotorStorm: Apocalypse

Above: This dude isn't waiting until May 21 to ascend to heaven.

Naturally, when I began my review of MotorStorm: Apocalypse with a joke about Christ returning before the PlayStation Network does, I was ensuring that PSN functionality would start coming online between the time I filed the piece and the time it went to press (not to mention well before Judgment Day this Saturday). Oh well. A good line is a good line.

MotorStorm: Apocalypse is not a particularly good game. What's strange and disappointing is that the gameplay hasn't improved in any meaningful way from the first MotorStorm, which leads me to believe that, unlike what I suspected in my review of the first game, it was in fact the game that Evolution Studios intended to make.

Despite the different vehicles you can drive, and the strategies available to you on each course, success in MotorStorm is less about mastering the game mechanics and more about memorizing the racetracks. You can't tell which debris you can smash, and which will smash you. Too many blind jumps launch you directly into a wall. Generally, nothing you learned from the last race will help you in the next one.

In the review, I didn't mention the weak narrative that ties together the game's single-player mode, because, although it is terrible, and has been a source of complaints in a lot of the other reviews I've seen, it is easy to skip -- and skip it I did. But that's not because I think racing games don't need a story. Rather, racing games already have most of the elements you need for a good story.

Take Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, a game I thought about wistfully during most of the time I was playing MotorStorm. That game lacks an overarching narrative, but the stories that play out during individual races are gripping and unpredictable. You know all you need to know from the setup. You are a cop, and you need to bust the racers. Or: You are a racer, and you need to outrun the cops. In either case, the conflict is readily apparent. A racecourse gives it a shape -- a natural beginning, middle, and end.

In Hot Pursuit, the story never plays out the same way twice. I've been busted in sight of the finish line, and I've busted racers in the same place. I've taken out my quarry within seconds of starting a round, and I've chased them down over a grueling, ten-minute-long duel. These were all unique, surprising tales that I authored. No narrative framing was necessary.

MotorStorm: Apocalypse does have moments when it approaches this level. You'll be charging through a mudpit in your big rig, and see some motorcyclists zip through the air above you on an alternate route. You're chugging directly toward the finish line. They're on a more circuitous path, but a much faster surface. Who will get there first?

And then, at the moment of greatest drama, you hit some innocent looking thing on the track that looks like a cardboard box, your truck blows up, and you think, "Screw this."