Rock Band 3 isn't a bad game by any standards.
It's just a end of an era of my life I'll probably, regrettably, call one of the best.
For those out of the loop, publisher Activision decreed last May the "indefinite hiatus" of the Guitar Hero franchise. After the disastrous sales of Guitar Hero 5 and Warriors of Rock, both very excellent games in their own right, the writing appeared on the walls.
While Rock Band 3's downloadable songs aren't ending anytime soon, the big game releases likely are. RB developer Harmonix, arguably the saviors of rhythm gaming in America, have said they feel the franchise has reached its inevitable conclusion by teaching you to play guitar.
In short, they're done.
While we couldn't have expected the plastic instrument bubble to last, after all what grown person wants all those toys hanging around the living room, I still quietly weep since this game marks the last, dying gasp of a fad.
Every decision and change made to Rock Band 3 isn't just a misstep, it feels akin to active attempt to sabotage their own creation. I'm reminded of the agitated musician with a one hit wonder: Detesting their creation but savvy enough to recognize their one source of revenue. Alien Ant Farm where art thou?
Let's run down the ways RB3 blew it:
You can't assign characters to a certain instrument
You can't play with 5 players.
You can't play online in any real capacity unless you know at least 60 other people who own the game.
They only created two new venue assets for the entire game. We have played the same backgrounds for over 5 years at this point what was your art team doing?!
Oh wait I know what they did: they created terrible patterns on your note highway to distract you while you have a streak going. They also spent an awful long time finding ways to completely break character animations and remove any sort of personality from your dancing marionettes.
There's no competitive modes at all.
There's no way to filter DLC from core content easily while browsing songs online. Let me tell you how much fun it is to try browsing close to 700 songs with only 10 at a time on the screen. Spolier: it's not.
They added an instrument no one cared for or cares to buy.
The Vocals engine/hit detection system was imported from the Beatles, which wasn't good to begin with. Hope you like humming or singing the complete opposite of the lead signer.
Enough of the shit train through, what are some positives?
The game can boast of a fairly solid setlist with a few heavy hitters such as Space Oddity and 20th Century Boy, but then they completely have to act like Boston hipsters and throw in The Power of Love or Rock Lobster.
You know who likes singing or playing these songs? People who hate themselves.
You can now make fat characters and unlock clothing through a fun series of challenges, an idea they experimented with in Rock Band 2. As with Rock Band 2, however, your fun with these COD-style missions will be short lived as they won't generate any new ones or incorporate any DLC going forward. Once you've bought everything up to Rock Band 3's release, you've unlocked it all.
The Pro Mode drums are a worthwhile addition to actually make drumming semi-realistic and the harmonies do much to expand the Vocals gameplay.
At the end of the day though, Harmonix phoned in the entire experience. I remember listening to a Harmonix podcast wherein a lead designer rambled on about ideas for a 7th star rating, mini-cutscenes and other small touches to the game for a splash of personality.
Shame they cut all of that and we instead got a game akin to Nirvana's self-titled best of album. It open's with a smash then leaves us with half-hearted repeats and the sinking feeling that it's over.
6/28/11
But I just couldn't tell her so
Reading about the controversial board game/museum piece "Train" has reignited a old debate within myself: the narralogical game versus the ludological game.
For those not in the know, Train is a game designed about loading passengers onto trains and making sure they reach their destination. Of course, since it's a board game, most of the pieces are fairly abstracted to yellow pegs and some box cars.
When you play it, you find out their destinations are all concentration camps. Thus, you're left to either win by going through with it or simply rage quitting from the actual, physical, game itself.
Obviously, if it gets a full release it'll be an absolute blast to pull out at a party.
Sarcasm aside, I do applaud a designer for taking authorial control to such an extreme. Hell, you can't even play this game without her present.
To a certain extent, her game is what I had proposed months before with having location based "narrative devices" that allow a group of users to generate a story. While her game has certainly stirred up the "artgames" crowd, as insufferable as they are, most gamers have already been complicit in an experience she has proposed for years.
Take, for instance, every single player game released ever. As much as she'll try and push the heavy-handed idea of her games being true personality tests, all games ultimately require you to sacrifice the control of yourself in order to abide by their rules.
Now if she had made a game with the ability to generate win conditions dynamically via an in game mechanic, I might start listening.
For those not in the know, Train is a game designed about loading passengers onto trains and making sure they reach their destination. Of course, since it's a board game, most of the pieces are fairly abstracted to yellow pegs and some box cars.
When you play it, you find out their destinations are all concentration camps. Thus, you're left to either win by going through with it or simply rage quitting from the actual, physical, game itself.
Obviously, if it gets a full release it'll be an absolute blast to pull out at a party.
Sarcasm aside, I do applaud a designer for taking authorial control to such an extreme. Hell, you can't even play this game without her present.
To a certain extent, her game is what I had proposed months before with having location based "narrative devices" that allow a group of users to generate a story. While her game has certainly stirred up the "artgames" crowd, as insufferable as they are, most gamers have already been complicit in an experience she has proposed for years.
Take, for instance, every single player game released ever. As much as she'll try and push the heavy-handed idea of her games being true personality tests, all games ultimately require you to sacrifice the control of yourself in order to abide by their rules.
Now if she had made a game with the ability to generate win conditions dynamically via an in game mechanic, I might start listening.
3/18/11
I'm going to fade away.
While I did write a "semi-serious" review of Call of Duty: Black Ops a few months back, I think it's important enough to write up a second article on Treyarch anti-military and masculinity-subversing FPS.
After all, they've just pull the greatest stunt in the history of video games. They've shown well over a billion people the fact that all members of the military are actually just scared children looking for an identity of their own. I can't help but love the company for it.
As I write this, Black Ops has currently pulled in more money and sales than any entertainment product ever made. While all sorts of numbers have flown aboout for that that means in terms of profits, the long tail effect of the CoD gameplay formula and brand means we're going to be be playing a whole lot of semi-realistic first person shooters which boil down to overglorified versions of tag that let you pretend to be an "all American hero".
Pushing aside my own cynicism, Treyarch have actually proven themselves the masters of a cynical disposition and created a game that active insults their userbase as much as celebrates it.
To break it down, lets look at the ad campaign and how it ties into both the single and multiplayer modes.
Starting with a rather humorous, if controversial in every single non-white nation, ad featuring z-grade comedians, some basketball players and a bunch of "omg girlzzzz", Activision positioned this hyperviolent shooter as a game for the whole family with their ad department championing the slogan "a solider in all of us" as a shadowed special ops trooper, looking slightly haggard, gazes back at us.
If there's one thing I've learned form reading about video game developers and interacting with them, it's that they do not understand complex narratives or media messages beyond whatever sci-fi or fantasy pulp they read in the supermarket last weekend.
I have no doubt Treyarch themselves signed off on the campaign and simply issued it as a "hell yeah shit blows up lets look manly" kind of advertisement, but I want to assume they actually had a subtle sense of subterfuge at work here.
See, Black Ops single player plot- which I doubt the majority of players ever thought about beyond 5 seconds after the closing credits- involves an American GI becoming a sleeper Russian agent after a brainwashing from an overly macho ex-USSR commander.
It isn't much of a leap to note the "solider inside" of our protagonist is actually a hyperviolent that secondary characters spend much of the game attempting to stop.
Of course, much like the USA's own wartime fantasies, the nuclear holocaust our hero unleashes through his own stupidity and hubris is contained through his grit, pluck and moxie.
A load of horse shit, yes, but a darker plotline than any CoD game has had the gall to toy with before.
In the past, Call of Duty always created storylines with clear good guys and bad guys. Even CoD4 with its celebrated "deep" moment where a US platoon dies in a nuclear blast still made sure to hammer home it wasn't the dumb meatheaded Marines who sealed his fade but a wily Arab complete with dark sunglasses and a golden pistol.
In CoD7, however, our hero brings the worlds problems upon himself rather than the world bringing them to him. A notion that flies in the very face of American preconceptions.
At any rate, how does this connection connection of the ad campaign relate to the "celebrate" multiplayer feature? Through the use of the Rolling Stone's generation ending "Gimmie Shelter" charttopper.
Gimmie Shelter came out in 1969, the year the hippie and peacenik movement breathed its last dying gasps. For five years follow its release, the Vietnam war dragged on with seemingly no end before the Americans cravenly pulled out to almost no fan-fare.
The end of the war, until the sterilization of war narratives reemerged in our nations dark years under Regan, signified the end of the "hero" solider narrative.
Until Regan, our soldiers were viewed in the media and public perception as tragic victims or aggressors. Though the rise of post-modern war narratives, such as "The Things They Carried", would arrive almost a decade later bearing with them a "take no sides" approach to the conflict or its history, the American understanding of its warrior caste crumbled before its very eyes. We did, after all, just send our boys and their schoolyard friends into the killing fields with no real goal or purpose as that "horrible horrible" Europe did almost 50 years prior.
Gimmie Shelter, then, became an anthem for a dying breed of innocence on both sides of the conflict. The hippies rallied around it as their "swan song" while the GIs heard it as a final warning to their previous identities.
CoD7 multiplayer becomes a post-modern narrative akin to "The Things They Carried" through its use anachronistic weapons and factions.
Battles, though some based in vaugely historical contexts, come off as fever dreams you'd expect the drunk fellow at the VFW to tell you after a few whiskeys.
Yes, sarge, I believe that you and private Jimmy rigged up his toy RC car with a bomb to stop those damn Kong. Yes, of course.
With its fictional levels and anachronistic weapons drawn from the entire spectrum of the Cold War, CoD7 is a last testament to the American soldier boy myth we all desperately want to buy into.
The game's advertising and presentation reflect a cold reality for men, where their time as domineering warriors quietly comes to an end while simultaneously embracing the rebirth of the woman as a domineering masculine force.
By placing this gender identity struggle within the context of America's greatest defeats, Treyarch has projected the ultimate escapist fantasy for the US of A. A place where we never really won but never really lost and always, always, knew who we were and what we had to do.
It's just a shame Treyarch, like most devs, are too childlike to realize it.
After all, they've just pull the greatest stunt in the history of video games. They've shown well over a billion people the fact that all members of the military are actually just scared children looking for an identity of their own. I can't help but love the company for it.
As I write this, Black Ops has currently pulled in more money and sales than any entertainment product ever made. While all sorts of numbers have flown aboout for that that means in terms of profits, the long tail effect of the CoD gameplay formula and brand means we're going to be be playing a whole lot of semi-realistic first person shooters which boil down to overglorified versions of tag that let you pretend to be an "all American hero".
Pushing aside my own cynicism, Treyarch have actually proven themselves the masters of a cynical disposition and created a game that active insults their userbase as much as celebrates it.
To break it down, lets look at the ad campaign and how it ties into both the single and multiplayer modes.
Starting with a rather humorous, if controversial in every single non-white nation, ad featuring z-grade comedians, some basketball players and a bunch of "omg girlzzzz", Activision positioned this hyperviolent shooter as a game for the whole family with their ad department championing the slogan "a solider in all of us" as a shadowed special ops trooper, looking slightly haggard, gazes back at us.
If there's one thing I've learned form reading about video game developers and interacting with them, it's that they do not understand complex narratives or media messages beyond whatever sci-fi or fantasy pulp they read in the supermarket last weekend.
I have no doubt Treyarch themselves signed off on the campaign and simply issued it as a "hell yeah shit blows up lets look manly" kind of advertisement, but I want to assume they actually had a subtle sense of subterfuge at work here.
See, Black Ops single player plot- which I doubt the majority of players ever thought about beyond 5 seconds after the closing credits- involves an American GI becoming a sleeper Russian agent after a brainwashing from an overly macho ex-USSR commander.
It isn't much of a leap to note the "solider inside" of our protagonist is actually a hyperviolent that secondary characters spend much of the game attempting to stop.
Of course, much like the USA's own wartime fantasies, the nuclear holocaust our hero unleashes through his own stupidity and hubris is contained through his grit, pluck and moxie.
A load of horse shit, yes, but a darker plotline than any CoD game has had the gall to toy with before.
In the past, Call of Duty always created storylines with clear good guys and bad guys. Even CoD4 with its celebrated "deep" moment where a US platoon dies in a nuclear blast still made sure to hammer home it wasn't the dumb meatheaded Marines who sealed his fade but a wily Arab complete with dark sunglasses and a golden pistol.
In CoD7, however, our hero brings the worlds problems upon himself rather than the world bringing them to him. A notion that flies in the very face of American preconceptions.
At any rate, how does this connection connection of the ad campaign relate to the "celebrate" multiplayer feature? Through the use of the Rolling Stone's generation ending "Gimmie Shelter" charttopper.
Gimmie Shelter came out in 1969, the year the hippie and peacenik movement breathed its last dying gasps. For five years follow its release, the Vietnam war dragged on with seemingly no end before the Americans cravenly pulled out to almost no fan-fare.
The end of the war, until the sterilization of war narratives reemerged in our nations dark years under Regan, signified the end of the "hero" solider narrative.
Until Regan, our soldiers were viewed in the media and public perception as tragic victims or aggressors. Though the rise of post-modern war narratives, such as "The Things They Carried", would arrive almost a decade later bearing with them a "take no sides" approach to the conflict or its history, the American understanding of its warrior caste crumbled before its very eyes. We did, after all, just send our boys and their schoolyard friends into the killing fields with no real goal or purpose as that "horrible horrible" Europe did almost 50 years prior.
Gimmie Shelter, then, became an anthem for a dying breed of innocence on both sides of the conflict. The hippies rallied around it as their "swan song" while the GIs heard it as a final warning to their previous identities.
CoD7 multiplayer becomes a post-modern narrative akin to "The Things They Carried" through its use anachronistic weapons and factions.
Battles, though some based in vaugely historical contexts, come off as fever dreams you'd expect the drunk fellow at the VFW to tell you after a few whiskeys.
Yes, sarge, I believe that you and private Jimmy rigged up his toy RC car with a bomb to stop those damn Kong. Yes, of course.
With its fictional levels and anachronistic weapons drawn from the entire spectrum of the Cold War, CoD7 is a last testament to the American soldier boy myth we all desperately want to buy into.
The game's advertising and presentation reflect a cold reality for men, where their time as domineering warriors quietly comes to an end while simultaneously embracing the rebirth of the woman as a domineering masculine force.
By placing this gender identity struggle within the context of America's greatest defeats, Treyarch has projected the ultimate escapist fantasy for the US of A. A place where we never really won but never really lost and always, always, knew who we were and what we had to do.
It's just a shame Treyarch, like most devs, are too childlike to realize it.
1/10/11
Gosh how they weigh me down
I'm going to throw a Molotov of an opinion into the internet echo chamber and say what every professional critic would get crucified over.
I think Bioshock 2 is a better experience and game than the original Bioshock was and the forthcoming Bioshock Infinite will be.
There, I threw it out there with more being verbs than necessary.
To support my claims, I must note Bioshock 2 serves as an interesting companion piece for 2009's FEAR 2.
In my FEAR 2 analysis, I noted that entire plot revolved around coping with a teen pregnancy. Now, in Bioshock 2, we find 2k Marin studios exploring the concept of fatherhood through the eyes of my, admittedly still childish, generation and the rapidly aging baby boomer population.
As with all my game examinations, spoilers follow below.
In Bioshock 2, players assume the role of a prototype mechanical monster known as "Subject Delta". As both a knowledge hold over from the previous game, and something newcomers pick up on rather quickly through countless radio transmissions, Delta's one of an underwater metropolis' security forces known as a "Big Daddy".
Bioshock, in a move to complete divorce it from any sort of real world locales, takes place in an city called Rapture somewhere under the sea. Created by an amoral capitalist as a place where the strong survive and the weak would perish, Rapture quickly fell apart during a massive civil war, which players discovered their part of in the previous title, over a new wonder-drug harvested from dead called Adam.
To get more Adam, the brilliant capitalists have created a new child workforce of preteen girls called "Little Sisters". These girls, locked in a constant high by Adam as players discovered by the player, are eventually harvested through their own Adam.
The games, nor the original developers at Irrational Games, never fully explain why they chose little girls exclusively as the plighted group rather than little boys or a mix of the two. Probably because the insinuation of molestation and murder you get while attempting to murder them for Adam would sit well with the ESRB, despite the developers cop-outs with a "red out" screen. So murder of girls is a-ok, just don't touch boys. Thanks for the morality lesson Irrational.
Nevertheless, the duty of the "Big Daddy" system lies in protecting these little girls through a maximum application of lethal force when needed.
You, arising from a decade long coma, find your city in ruins and the girl you swore to protect nowhere to be seen.
Due to the fact you're a horrible abomination of science in the face of God, you ignore the fact that so many years have lapsed a sent of on a quest to find the little girl you once held so dear.
You soon discover that your little girl who you're seeking to reunite with is actually the daughter of a noteworthy capitalist's political enemy, a socialist known as Sophia Lamb.
Mocking your every gun-toting attempt to stop her at first, the messiest metaphorical custody battle north of the Mason-Dixon line, Lamb eventually falls into a complete despair upon discovering that her own teen daughter would prefer to see you succeed. Based upon your interactions with other characters throughout the game, the final moments of your life with your former "Little Sister" determine how she reacts to her birth mother.
The climax of the game, then, isn't so much your escape from the city of Rapture but a final moment of "separation anxiety" between a man and his daughter. She realizes, over the course of your merry misadventure, that the two of you are both sins of science that cannot, and will not, function together in the real world.
Nevertheless, she figures, your spirit- and the last memories off Rapture itself- can live on through her above ground.
Unlike the previous game, which hamfistedly touched upon issues of "free will" through a false sense of player agency, Bioshock 2 asks players to assume a father role under the worst of circumstances.
As a father, you cannot- and must not- break the bonds of love and protection to your children. More importantly, however, you must learn of the final sacrifice in self for the child.
Throughout the game you'll constantly save, or destroy, other lost Little Sisters along the way but must always fight against the mysterious "Big Sisters" hell-bent on stopping you from doing either such thing to the girls.
These creatures, fast, agile and basicly unknowable to the player double as the representation of your daughter's own progression into puberty. As a father, your fights with the big sisters become your own struggles with accepting your fading control upon your daughter and her decisions.
At the end of the story, when you realize that you're actually a reharvested man from the world above, you and your little lost Lamb come to a conclusion that necessitates your demise: Your unholy bond can never exist outside the city that bore it but it's alright.
This effort to cope with yourself as a father when dealing with your child undoubtedly touches upon many of the parental concerns facing my aging generation.
Your children, though influence by you, are ultimately their own persons as well. Thus, no matter how hard you may fight to protect" them against what you see as "evils" in the world, their battles will ultimately fall on their shoulders alone.
So is Bioshock 2 merely the right game in the right time for my life? Probably, but that won't stop me from naming it one of the best games to come out of 2010.
I think Bioshock 2 is a better experience and game than the original Bioshock was and the forthcoming Bioshock Infinite will be.
There, I threw it out there with more being verbs than necessary.
To support my claims, I must note Bioshock 2 serves as an interesting companion piece for 2009's FEAR 2.
In my FEAR 2 analysis, I noted that entire plot revolved around coping with a teen pregnancy. Now, in Bioshock 2, we find 2k Marin studios exploring the concept of fatherhood through the eyes of my, admittedly still childish, generation and the rapidly aging baby boomer population.
As with all my game examinations, spoilers follow below.
In Bioshock 2, players assume the role of a prototype mechanical monster known as "Subject Delta". As both a knowledge hold over from the previous game, and something newcomers pick up on rather quickly through countless radio transmissions, Delta's one of an underwater metropolis' security forces known as a "Big Daddy".
Bioshock, in a move to complete divorce it from any sort of real world locales, takes place in an city called Rapture somewhere under the sea. Created by an amoral capitalist as a place where the strong survive and the weak would perish, Rapture quickly fell apart during a massive civil war, which players discovered their part of in the previous title, over a new wonder-drug harvested from dead called Adam.
To get more Adam, the brilliant capitalists have created a new child workforce of preteen girls called "Little Sisters". These girls, locked in a constant high by Adam as players discovered by the player, are eventually harvested through their own Adam.
The games, nor the original developers at Irrational Games, never fully explain why they chose little girls exclusively as the plighted group rather than little boys or a mix of the two. Probably because the insinuation of molestation and murder you get while attempting to murder them for Adam would sit well with the ESRB, despite the developers cop-outs with a "red out" screen. So murder of girls is a-ok, just don't touch boys. Thanks for the morality lesson Irrational.
Nevertheless, the duty of the "Big Daddy" system lies in protecting these little girls through a maximum application of lethal force when needed.
You, arising from a decade long coma, find your city in ruins and the girl you swore to protect nowhere to be seen.
Due to the fact you're a horrible abomination of science in the face of God, you ignore the fact that so many years have lapsed a sent of on a quest to find the little girl you once held so dear.
You soon discover that your little girl who you're seeking to reunite with is actually the daughter of a noteworthy capitalist's political enemy, a socialist known as Sophia Lamb.
Mocking your every gun-toting attempt to stop her at first, the messiest metaphorical custody battle north of the Mason-Dixon line, Lamb eventually falls into a complete despair upon discovering that her own teen daughter would prefer to see you succeed. Based upon your interactions with other characters throughout the game, the final moments of your life with your former "Little Sister" determine how she reacts to her birth mother.
The climax of the game, then, isn't so much your escape from the city of Rapture but a final moment of "separation anxiety" between a man and his daughter. She realizes, over the course of your merry misadventure, that the two of you are both sins of science that cannot, and will not, function together in the real world.
Nevertheless, she figures, your spirit- and the last memories off Rapture itself- can live on through her above ground.
Unlike the previous game, which hamfistedly touched upon issues of "free will" through a false sense of player agency, Bioshock 2 asks players to assume a father role under the worst of circumstances.
As a father, you cannot- and must not- break the bonds of love and protection to your children. More importantly, however, you must learn of the final sacrifice in self for the child.
Throughout the game you'll constantly save, or destroy, other lost Little Sisters along the way but must always fight against the mysterious "Big Sisters" hell-bent on stopping you from doing either such thing to the girls.
These creatures, fast, agile and basicly unknowable to the player double as the representation of your daughter's own progression into puberty. As a father, your fights with the big sisters become your own struggles with accepting your fading control upon your daughter and her decisions.
At the end of the story, when you realize that you're actually a reharvested man from the world above, you and your little lost Lamb come to a conclusion that necessitates your demise: Your unholy bond can never exist outside the city that bore it but it's alright.
This effort to cope with yourself as a father when dealing with your child undoubtedly touches upon many of the parental concerns facing my aging generation.
Your children, though influence by you, are ultimately their own persons as well. Thus, no matter how hard you may fight to protect" them against what you see as "evils" in the world, their battles will ultimately fall on their shoulders alone.
So is Bioshock 2 merely the right game in the right time for my life? Probably, but that won't stop me from naming it one of the best games to come out of 2010.
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