Hope you’ve enjoyed this short little run that dealt solely with games.  I’m moving over to my new project, which you might enjoy!

Until then, keep on gaming!

Alex.

Any pundit given the words “Western” and “Game” in 2010 would undoubtedly point towards Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption.  It has been a few years since the rather enjoyable GUN – made all the sweeter by a host of fitting actors lending their voices to characters, especially the grizzled cadences of Lance Henriksen and Hollywood’s Ugliest, Ron Perlman – and the Polish-made Call of Juarez with its swarthy, Sergio Leone-esque frontier violence.  However, just before Red Dead was ushered upon the salivating hordes, a tiny Swedish delivery made its way onto onto the PS3 and PC.  The studio was Fatshark, the publisher Paradox Interactive, the game Lead & Gold: Gangs of the Wild West.  And you know, for a fifteen dollar multiplayer-only title, it seems to outshine a lot of other triple-A online experiences.  For a whimsical little game like Lead & Gold to have dragged me away from the competitive multiplayer side of Lost Planet 2 to a certain extent, it really must have something going for it.

Lead & Gold: Gangs of the Wild West is a team and class-based third-person shooter, and though that concept sounds utterly pedestrian in this day and age, there are a few interesting additions to the established formula that make Lead & Gold feel fresh and unique. 

The four classes are Gunslinger, Blaster, Deputy and Trapper; each like any class-differentiated game offering a different set of skills and offensive capabilities.  The Gunslinger, whilst being the only class lacking a secondary weapon, wields a set of revolvers.  The Blaster is a close-quarters specialist, with a double-barrelled shotgun making short work of any opponent who steps into his radius.  The Deputy is an interesting class, offering mid to long range offensive capabilities via his repeater rifle.  Finally, the Trapper fills a sniper’s role with a scoped long-range hunting rifle.  Add to this the ability to set bear traps to snag unsuspecting enemies for an easy kill and you’ve got a near-invisible and very deadly class indeed.

So far, so normal.  The real key to Lead & Gold standing apart from the crowd is the synergy aspect.  These class-specific synergies offer nearby teammates proximity-triggered perks and efficiencies.  For example, a Gunslinger purveys the accuracy synergy, so a nearby Blaster will expect to land more shots during his time spent within the Gunslinger’s synergy radius.  A Trapper offers a synergy that increases the chance of critical hits.  It’s this mechanic that helps teams work as cohesive units, or at least gravitate towards each other and removes the prospect of lone-wolfing found within team games. 

The gameplay itself is broken up across a number of different modes, each worked nicely into the frontier setting.  Regular “shoot-out” deathmatches and conquest or control point modes aren’t the only modes in town, however.  Sabotage is reworked as “Powder Keg”, having a team defending certain installations whilst the attacking team heave barrels of gunpowder towards targets in an effort to win the match.  “Robbery” is one of the two modes that augment the traditional capture the flag concept with an attacking team breaking open a safe in order to retrieve bags of gold within and return them to a specific point on the map.  The other type is “Greed”, where both teams are charged with stealing as much gold from a neutral point on the map before time runs out. 

Whilst the modes aren’t reinventing the wheel, they’re solidly implemented and thematically work well within Lead & Gold.  Which brings me to the mechanics of movement and shooting.

The PS3/PSN version of Lead & Gold features an expected set of basic control features.  Dual stick movement and looking, R1 and L1 for shooting and iron-sights respectively.  Tapping R2 triggers a roll in whatever direction you’re holding the left analog stick, while holding R2 allows your character to sprint.  L2 is used in conjunction with R1 to deploy special abilities.  The Blaster can ready a fizzing stick of dynamite with a held L2 and hurl it with a tap of R1.  The Trapper can lay those aforementioned bear traps in the same manner.  Weapon switching occurs at the press of Triangle, with reload being bound to Square.  Jump is fixed to X and O is used for interacting with objects, such as reviving a mortally-wounded teammate or picking up a bag of gold. 

The shooting feels balanced and responsive.  There’s a great sense of depth of field and vision when your weapon is raised to the shoulder, with focus slowly seeping out from the blur – a nice touch and certainly goes a long way to immerse the player.  Each weapon feels unique and rightly offers a player the chance to become proficient at certain types of engagements, with the firearms offering a splendid balance between rate of fire, reload and individual quirks.  The Deputy’s repeater rifle requires reloading one bullet at a time, rather than, say, a revolver’s quick-loader of slamming six fresh rounds into the cylinder at once.  If you find yourself in a close-quarters fight – something the Deputy can really only handle adequately with his secondary pistol – with a repeater on an empty chamber, a reload might only find you with one bullet slotted before you need to fire it.  I find the Deputy a brilliant class to play as, with this quandary of reloading keeping me in a support role with most encounters.  I don’t want to be caught shoving the first bullet into my repeater, having to fire it at an opponent and being left with an empty rifle once more!  It’s a good balance, and this balance extends to all weapons in the game.

I love the visual design of Lead & Gold.  It’s a bright, clean, whimsical game with stylised characters and a loveable Western locale stereotype.  The game is certainly a palate cleanser for those feeling burdened by next-gen browns and greys.  The golden oranges of a dusty township to the green pastures of a river-ridden valley, every level is a gorgeous frontier fairytale. 

Whilst looking forward to certain first-person shooters like Brink, I share the venerable D. M. Scheer’s views on third-person action games simply being, for lack of a better word, better!  His long and detailed experience with games like Starwars Battlefront and Day One Studios’ Mech Assault series has given him much in the way of credentials when it comes to third-person shooters and I’m inclined to side myself with his predilection and tag it highly on my preference list.  With Lead & Gold, it’s that lovely tangibility of seeing your character leap, roll and react to every input of the controls that I find more immersive than most first-person shooters (with the exception of Mirror’s Edge and Farcry 2).  The character designs themselves are stylised caricatures of what frontier heroes should be, with the appropriate dress and stance never spoiled by over-rendering or tasteless additions.  The term “spartan” can be applied to Lead & Gold without it sounding pejorative.  It’s a clean and crisp exercise in visual restraint that leads us to truly believe in less being, indeed, more.

So, is Lead & Gold: Gangs of the Wild West a testament to smaller multiplayer games being able to run with the big boys?  I think so.  The game does fall in a strange gray area between indie development and, say, what Monolith’s free-to-play F.E.A.R. Combat online module is, but regardless Fatshark have done a fantastic job.  The PC version supports dedicated servers, so those with a hankering to find or host a game with a premium ping shouldn’t have any worries.  The PS3 version has a nice little community, and while it should be bigger, there are always games running.  The Xbox 360 version should be out a short time after this is uploaded. 

For 15USD, you’re getting a hell of a deal with Lead & Gold: Gangs of the Wild West.  A smart, competent and brisk little third-person shooter with tasteful design and a swathe of game modes and maps.

I like to think of each racing game I dip into as their own beast.  An unspoken narrative of player getting to know a set of unique physics and working the weight and response of their avatar – in this case, a car, bike, anti-gravity vehicle, etc. – into an-ever increasing positive interaction.  The simplification of such a genre seems miserly, as with any genre, the fun stems from more than just basic tenets.  Stripping down a game like Blur to its naked components does somewhat of a disservice, but at the same time, showcases what makes it so damn amazing.  Let me explain.

Blur is, at its heart, an automotive combat game.  Whether it is racing around an exotic track or roaring across an arena, there will always be blood.  Or, in Blur’s case, an exciting mix of fire and neon.  One thing needs to be said about the game from the outset – this is not a sim.  This is not even a quasi-sim, ala Bizarre Creations’ popular Project Gotham franchise.  Blur is a heavier, slightly stickier Burnout.  Blur might even be described as the rave-bound wild-child cousin of the Need For Speed series, at least from a physics perspective.  There are no jet-powered bobsled powerslides like those within Ridge Racer.  Unlike the sideways jabs in Burnout to slam an opponent off the road, sideswiping a car in Blur feels like two speeding machines of steel and aluminium colliding. 

In a nutshell, the Blur driving engine conveys a hefty sense of arcade impact, but doesn’t overdo chassis damage to the extent of, say, Codemasters’ titles like GRID and DIRT.  Despite licensed real-world vehicles being modelled within the game, the visual damage sustained is superficial and does not affect driving.  So what separates Blur from the crowd?

Taking its cues from racing titles like Mario Kart and Crash Team Racing, Blur has been marketed as a kart racer for adults.  While I don’t completely agree with that, it gives the interested parties some sort of reference to gauge just what the hell is going on within Blur.  I might say right here that this is primarily a multiplayer game.  There is indeed a single player campaign, but people make this game.  A twenty-racer capacity for each mode after the beginner level cap of 10 is surpassed; twenty brawling, jostling, colliding, exploding human-controlled cars battling for supremacy is what Blur is.  As with all good kart games, the weapons and power-ups form the central pillar of gameplay.

You don’t stop at sideswiping or ramming.  Those vanilla antics are all very good, but Blur has an amazing roster of balanced power-ups of which three at a time can be collected.  Both in the powered-up racing and team racing mode (your traditional racing concept) and motor mash (an arena-based destruction derby-esque affair), there are defensive and offensive pick-ups littering the road.  Shield is self-explanatory, but can be augmented by perks applied to your chosen perk loadout – which I will explain shortly.  So, any attacks received from other players whilst the shield is activated might result in you automatically acquiring a random pick-up.

Other offensive power-ups are things like shunts (a lock-on missile or a dumb-fire rear-firing weapon), bolts (high-speed projectiles), barges (radial shockwave detonations), mines (actually incredibly versatile) shocks (tri-location electrification of the track) and two final power-ups in the form of nitro (an offensive weapon if used correctly) and the obvious repair.  The ability for most of these power-ups to be fired forwards or backwards speaks volumes for the nuance and skill a play can accrue through online experience.  Fending off an inbound shunt with a barge, then hitting the rear aggressor with a string of bolts is only the beginning.  Hauling around a corner thick with players, sliding and bouncing off neighbouring auto maniacs, firing mines into cars ahead and watching five other racers connect with the unfortunate recipient’s spinning wreck is all in a day’s work on the Blur tracks.

The perk system is something that many Call of Duty fans will find appealing.  Levelling up plays a big part in Blur, every single action garners “fans”, the game’s currency.  Certain fan-number milestones unlock new levels, thus new cars and perks.  There are a certain number of dedicated perk clusters – each, though, can be edited and reconfigured to include individually chosen perks.  There are perks for increased fan accruement within each race, perks for stability, for power-ups upon race commencement and for increased damage to specific weapons.  There is an addictive mix and match aspect to this system, and with each track catering to slightly different vehicles, you can certainly make a car or track work for you via these perks. 

The aesthetic of Blur is, at least for me, appealing and fresh.  Tracks themselves aren’t of the memorable calibre we’ve seen in games such as Burnout or Ridge Racer, but that’s not really the point.  The tracks and arenas are simply the canvas upon which the four-wheeled carnage is painted.  The closest living relative to Blur in regards to colour palette would be the Need For Speed Underground games, with their midnight greens and glowing iridescences.  However, unlike the forced urban cred of the Underground games, Blur taps into that glorious UK-bred raver design – grubby and forlorn locales transformed by unruly bursts of colour.  The night is seemingly eternal in this game, and all the better for it.  From the winding streets of Barcelona to the muddy grit of a Brighton beach under a constant salvo of detonating sky-rockets, the game encourages reckless abandon with its inferred directive of busting up the mundane and, well, just going for it!

The last point I will make is anecdotal, but can be applied to any game offering multiplayer.  The community makes Blur what it is.  I’ve met some incredibly friendly people in the game; from the mild-mannered forty-odd year old Texan with a terrific sense of humour and the East Coast midnight oil burners to homely Brits up for a laugh and a drive, everyone seems to understand the game isn’t so much a diehard racer, more a gaggle of unruly highway larrikins.  A collective of levellers enjoying a less-than-serious game, addictively besotted by its curious mix of shooter-esque mechanics and rapid-fire rounds of vehicular silliness. 

So, if you’re in the mood for something a little different, you could do a lot worse than picking up one of the best online experiences of 2010.  At the very least, you’ll enjoy getting lost in the crowd – better the result when you trigger a barge. 

A blog is certainly a burden at times, especially if a fellow wants to keep it fairly nonsense-free.  That’s one thing that traditional literature has over this new-fangled electronic self-publishing business – you can literally taste the rumination.  Trouble is, in the rapid-fire bitstream of the internet, if you don’t update, you fall behind.  At least, when applying the framework set by professional bloggers (formerly known as op-eds) and those tireless keyboard tappers at the #oneaday foundation, you fall behind.  Issues!

I like blathering on about games because, apart from really enjoying the hobby, I weakly justify the time spent in digital worlds via a bit of that ol’ rumination.  However, recently, the rumination has led me nowhere and since I like to couple my posts with a scribble, I get stressed when there’s an imbalance.  So, let’s pick and scrape the cradle cap from the proverbial flailing infant and use that wonderful lack of quality escape clause, the whatchabeenplayin’ defense – games I’ve been messing with for a while.

Note that I hope to expand on these in future posts.

Blur

Since the first screenshots and video were released of this racing game, I followed it with excitement and anticipation.  While it’s billed as “Mario Kart for Adults”, I’d like to think it’s more like a spiritual successor to Mashed.  High-speed carnage where the racing is second to slamming nearby opponents in railings, triggering shockwaves, firing strange bolts of energy into racers lengths ahead and more.  It features a relatively sticky driving model with a good sense of weight and speed, with a midnight neon visual design that is consistent and appealing.  I’ve not touched offline at all, as the game is all about racing nineteen other people and grappling with being assaulted by bolts, shunts, mines and other assorted weaponry whilst giving as good as one gets.  The large player count per race is what makes this game so enjoyable; the races themselves are simply high-speed brawlers with the placing – personally speaking – a distant second to just being an utter monster on the road.  The weapon list is short, but incredibly balanced.  Given the fact some weapons can be fired both backward and forward, it really opens up huge possibilities for tactics offensive and defensive.

Incredibly addictive, can be played in short bursts or long sessions.

SEGA Rally Revo

Had a few multiplayer races of this with the internet’s very own Dario Boneman, with very pleasant results.  Probably the forgotten masterpiece of the racing genre, at least this generation.  Rock solid and silky smooth framerate, exciting and unique driving engine, utterly gorgeous visuals…it’s a damning indictment of the genre’s fans that this didn’t sell like gang-busters.  Created by a hand-picked selection of developers from studios such as Criterion, Codemasters, Rockstar and Rare; if there ever was to be the ultimate racing game studio, it would have been SRS – Sega Racing Studio.  However, with the lousy commercial response, Sega Europe shut down SRS and therefore left no hope for a new, well-conceived Daytona or Virtua Racing.

Despite it being both the debut and swansong for SRS, SEGA Rally Revo is the best pure-arcade racer on the market, hands-down.  No need for crashes, no need for bombastic effects.  Just a brilliant deformable track surface, a game custom-made for the Logitech wheel, those bright blue Sega skies and fast, fun automotive frolicking.

Lost Planet 2

I’ve written a few things on Lost Planet 2 over the last few posts, but the madness continues.  Both co-op and competitive continue to provide wonderful fun…though moments of sheer frustration at my own ineptitude against some of Japan’s Lost Planet veterans pepper the otherwise exciting experience.  Can there please be a Vital Suit-centric game, Capcom?  Can you please take the true stars of the franchise and give them their own game?  A Steel Lancers Arena International/Mech Assault/Heavy Gear-esque robot feast for all to enjoy.  Either way, continues to impress, even on the second run through the main campaign.

Frozen Synapse

On the PC front, it continues to reign supreme as the best damn multiplayer strategy I’ve had in a long, long time.  I’ve already written about this one, so I best leave it here on the proviso that if you’re looking for a killer indie title with superb gameplay…and you’re someone who enjoys all the tactical nitty-gritty of close-quarter urban combat…you’ should grab a pre-order and jump into the beta ASAP.

Joe Danger

Here’s a little winner from the PSN store, a gem of puzzle racer with a prestigious developer background.  Turns out the four guys behind this clever little trick-based side-scrolling motorbike game worked on things like Burnout, Geometry Wars Galaxies, SEGA Superstars Tennis and Black, so the studio has some design chops plus more.

Joe Danger is a mash-up of Excite Bike, Unirally, Trials HD and Mario.  Or maybe Sonic would be more appropriate.  In any case, it’s all fun and has a great progression system where a level’s multiple goals can be accomplished at your leisure – all at once, or perhaps one achieved to unlock the next level, only to come back at a later date to finish off the prior level’s goals.

It feels wonderful, the controls are simple yet elegant and the visual design is bright and bouncy.  It takes but a minute to get fully accustomed to the lenient physics and simplistic driving model, only then to realise how terrifically versatile these systems are.  You’ll be chaining together stunts, boosting through the air, bouncing off spring-pads, leaping over shark tanks and buses all the while collecting coins and stars.  Very refreshing game.

Lead & Gold: Gangs of the Wild West

This curiously addictive little third-person shooter is one of the new wave of incredibly cheap PSN titles offering multiplayer-only experiences.  It’s not as well-rounded or expansive as Warhawk, but falls into a more Team Fortress 2-esque experience.  There’s four distinct classes to choose from, each with their own synergies.  These synergies help to differentiate Lead & Gold from its contemporaries via encouraging closer team proximity.  If you’re within close proximity to a team mate, their synergy positively affects your stats.  For example, the gunslinger purveys an accuracy synergy, so any nearby team mates have a greater chance at hitting their enemies with critical shots.

It’s a beautiful, fluid and whimsical game.  Cleverly or misguidedly dropping just before Red Dead Redemption, the Western theme within is earnest and well-crafted.  Token wild west maps range from intricate ranches to the winding caverns of a gold mine, from spaghetti western main-streets to settlements in the mountains.  Those classic sound effects are assembled, with bullet ricochets and the thin sharp crack of old repeater rifles.

Once I hopefully sink a few more games in of Lead & Gold, I’ll try and expand upon it.  Otherwise, well worth checking out and surprisingly, the PS3 community isn’t dead after a few months.  A good sign!

I’ll sign it off here and hopefully the ability to write with vigour on individual topics will return post-haste.  In the coming months, I’m very much looking forward to Front Mission Evolved, Blacklight: Tango Down (another serious entry in the low-price download-only multiplayer set), Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days and RUSE.  The end of the year should bring high-speed joy with Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit by Criterion and Gran Turismo 5.

You couldn’t find a more polarising title thus far in 2010 than Lost Planet 2.  Polarising is perhaps the wrong word, as it infers camps on either side to be of a somewhat balanced population.  No, the hate is profoundly excessive on Capcom’s bug-busting, mech-piloting, oversized weapon-shooting extravaganza, with a small but determined group of fans backed up by the nation of Japan.  Admittedly though, when it comes to Western audience members wanting to discuss and delight at what Lost Planet 2 is all about, they would be remiss not to search hard for fellow fans, lest they be forced to study Japanese.  However, it’s curious that Lost Planet 2 is getting the reception it is – and I don’t think it’s simply due to being released a week before Rockstar’s cowboy opus, Red Dead Redemption.

I think it’s because Lost Planet 2 doesn’t hold you hand at all.  There are remains little in the way of direction – no constant voice in your character’s headset telling you where to go or how to take down the next foe.  An emphasis on animation coupled with incredibly knockback and a slower recovery phase is aggravating players who aren’t used to the slower, more deliberate pace of Lost Planet.  This isn’t the bounce and boom of Warhawk, nor the bullet-ridden meatiness of Gears of War.  Playing co-op with Tristan ‘Dutch’ Damen, we commented on the differences between grappling hooks in games – specifically comparing the rather rigid, short-ranged and anchor location-specific grapple in Lost Planet 2 to the immense range and versatility surrounding Just Cause 2’s version and how gamers much come up feeling short-changed when moving from the latter to the former.  In short, direct comparisons between Western-developed third-person action games and Lost Planet will always lead to surface-value imbalance that doesn’t fall in Capcom’s favour. 

But during the co-op with Dutch, we found ourselves having a grand old time.  There were Bad Company moments, such as having Dutch back his damaged VS up so I could do some repairs.  Frantic moments of keeping control points activated under attack from a horde of Jungle Pirates.  We sloshed through thick foliage and rushing streams into canyons infested with the indigenous Akrid bugs.  Grenades were hurled, those infamous Lost Planet grenades with their comically large blast-radiuses.  Oversized weapons were heaved around and magazines were emptied, accompanying sound effects cementing just how ahead of the game Capcom are in their mechanical and weapon sound design.  Admittedly, we had set the co-op mode to easy – following our previous attempt on normal ending in absolute slaughter – but the experience was tremendously fun whilst retaining a fair portion of that classic Lost Planet difficulty.

The wonderful animation within Lost Planet 2 has been used against it as some form of player retardation, of wresting control from the player and delivering cheap deaths to a large extent.  Despite the vivid telegraphing of attacks capable of delivering knockback (such as Akrid swipes), reviewers and players alike seem to find this a horrible inclusion and want a quick, easy return to the fight after being belted across the landscape by a raging bug or detonation effect. 

Lost Planet is, to paraphrase Capcom community manager Seth Killian, the Streetfighter of shooters.  You can play it at a basic level or you can learn the moves and develop strategies.  The rolling mechanic is a case in point and negates a lot of reviewer and player discontent:  the first half of the rolling animation makes you invulnerable to bullets, explosions and knockback, but the second half doesn’t – you may end up staggering and stunned or you may end up dead.  So, with this in mind, I’ve been more observant in the competitive multiplayer modes to see how the predominantly Japanese players work these invincibility frames into their movement with all the finesse and dedication of a seasoned fighting game veteran.  You can see for yourself how much the movement has been analysed by fans in this particular youtube video.

The original Lost Planet was touted as Japan’s answer to Halo.  A noble, almost Sisyphean task, but it’s interesting to compare the two franchises.  They both feature rich alien landscapes populated by interesting aliens.  They’re both rather colourful franchises, with little to none of the brown-grey “next-gen filter” effect we see in a lot of action games.  Lost Planet 2 is an especially colourful game – and while it does feature an episode set in a sprawling, treacherous desert, the browns and sandy tones are gorgeous.  Both series have a distinct feel in their respective physics settings and offer a slight larger way to go about things in terms of level design.  However, where Halo reaches out and guides a player into the intricacies and nuances of its gameplay options, Lost Planet 2 especially backhands the player with little remorse for doing so. 

The bosses are huge and incredibly resilient to a newcomer.  Circle-strafing is rarely an option, with those previously mentioned telegraphed attacks large in reach and devastating on impact.  The average enemy within the single or co-op campaign wields incredibly firepower and has the propensity for overwhelming a player with constant barrages.  Any sort of attack has a stun effect – another nail in the coffin according to certain reviewers – which means a player cannot return fire.  However, with the premium placed on movement, it’s better to get out of Dodge than try to take the rounds and force back a volley.  The shifting of instinctive responses honed in Western action games need to be slightly augmented when jumping into Lost Planet 2.  It’s generally not a case of Monitor-Merrimac’ing each other until one overcomes the other.  There is, of course, the exception when dealing with Vital Suits. 

For me, the Vital Suit mechs are the stars of Lost Planet 2.  I’ve stated it before, but they are the high point of thoughtful digital design.  Hydraulics and roll-cages, generators and hinges, a sense of weight and impact; Capcom are winners in my book for producing such brilliant virtual toys to mess about it.  If they had simply made a game based around VS combat, a Japanese take on the Mech Assault games if you will, then I would be thrilled.  But as it stands, the combined arms gameplay of Lost Planet 2 is what makes it special.  It doesn’t have that pick-up-and-play aspect of a full vehicle load-out on Halo’s Blood Gulch (incidentally, one of my most treasured of all multiplayer experiences), but it certainly has that level of flexibility.  Finding those oversized weapons and attaching them to idle VSs to create an offensive capability to your liking is wonderful.  Shotguns and rifles the length of cars, rocket pods with the incendiary and illumination capabilities of a Chinese firework plant, shields and pile-drivers; the VS armoury is a thing to gawk at.  But it doesn’t stop there, because certain VSs can transform and combine.  The Cakti can roll around on its caterpillar tracks, much like a self-propelled gun.  At the press of a button, however, it can transform into a quadruped battle tank with greater mobility.  I’ll leave it there on the suits, lest this turn into a complete VS love-in.  A youtube link to a few VSs from the original Lost Planet will show you the wonderful sense of functionality Capcom have crafted with these machines.

Lost Planet 2 did cop a lot of flak for not offering a thicker layer of story.  The gameplay is broken down into episodes that feature different playable factions.  We never learn individual names and their justification is seemingly thin.  I waver in my views on game narrative.  Homeworld still remains my favourite game narrative – a feat in itself considering the genre it belongs to isn’t known for narrative prowess – but outside of that, I don’t hold much up and dare not expect anything worth much to appear in my gaming experiences.  I think Lost Planet 2 is one of those games where the set narrative is secondary to the player’s own.  The game difficulty with co-op leads to those breathless victories that arrive with the clips empty and health wavering around two percent, with nothing left but the glorious tales of what occurred.  Those moments where you and your friends first see an aircraft carrier-sized sandworm begin to consume the very train you’re riding, followed by the nervous and frantic battle to fend off said worm become the narrative.  Much like what the sandbox genre is good at, the tired old term of “emergent gameplay” is not so applicable as the new term “emergent narrative”.  You’re using the machined gameplay to carve out your own sequence of events and all the details therein.  I don’t see that as lazy on Capcom’s part, I see it as bold.

With their Monster Hunter experience, Capcom seem to have enjoyed reinvigorating territory that once belonged to Phantasy Star Online, ala  small party-based action questing.  Lost Planet 2 is, as far as I’m concerned, the prototypical party-based action game.  It has levelling, it has item equipping, it has player abilities.  The missions are challenging and more often than not, require team-work (Red Eye, the Episode 3 Chapter 3 Akrid boss is a prime example).  Whilst there are no classes per se, weapon preferences and skills form in unspoken player-driven specifications.  If you’re good with a shotgun, your friend will appreciate you clearing a path so he can move in with the sniper rifle to taken on enemies up ahead.  It’s probably the fact reviewers didn’t have an opportunity to enjoy the co-op when they were tasked with giving Lost Planet 2 the once-over that it received the reception it did.

But only the ignoble rest solely on the words of the so-called experts.  Lost Planet 2 is a lot more exciting than people have let on.  It’s nuanced and technical, bold and beautiful, difficult and endearing.  The game has a visual style found nowhere else and deserves to be explored.  I apologise if this reads like a smothering hard-sell, but I hate to see creativity not get its dues.  Lost Planet 2 is a brilliant social experience and should be enjoyed by any discerning action gamer.

A quick scrap from the blotter.  It’s all been a bit hectic over the last week or so – an additional place of employment to add to the schedule, new and exciting tutoring opportunities, further steps towards a personally-penned job regime and trying to finish off preparations for my Japanese language class presentation on the ins and outs of a traditional Japanese wedding. 

So, a little under the gun as it were, but slowly developing some new posts bit by bit – hopefully ready for publishing by next week, so please bear with the delay.  However, I’ve been managing to get scraps of gaming in here and there.  So, a slapdash report and I’ll leave it there.

Lost Planet 2

Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful yet utterly misunderstood by the majority of reviewers and denigrated for marching to the beat of its own drum.  There’s a lot going with that game that many people don’t realise – such as how much like a quest-based quasi-action RPG it really can be in co-op.  Take for example this quote from the official NeoGAF Lost Planet 2 thread:

“Started the 5-3 trick with a friend with charging the gun, basically the host of the game uses the T-eng transfer to pump 2,500 into a fully charged Cannon blast so that your friend can get 30K EXP in about 10 mins. This is what we’ve been doing:

1. Activate Battle Post right in front of both players.
2. Both charge to 6,000 Energy
3. Friend ( non host ) boards the Cannon
4. Friend charges the Cannon to "ready to fire"
5. Friend shoots 2,500 Energy into Cannon
6. Level 3 Beam to roast 3/4 wings and Cannon in 1-shot.
7. Repeat steps 4 – 6 two more times to take down all helicopters and 2nd Cannon.

With "Superstar" ability equipped the person in the Cannon will get ~ 30K EXP and the host will get ~ 4K so if you alternate between 2 people (more would mean rotation between 3 or 4 and less EXP overall) and you can get ~ 17K a run or 100K an hour…”

While the context of that is fairly incomprehensible, you can plainly see there’s a lot more to think about and experiment with that what the game is given credit for.  Player levelling and grinding all wrapped up in a unique world with oversized weaponry and thrilling mechanical and biological architecture.  As a solo game, it cops a lot of flak – but I’m enjoying it.  As a co-op game, it’s brilliant.  As a team-based multiplayer game, it’s fantastic.  The caveat is, it’s not your average third-person shooter.  I hope to touch on why in a future post.

Motorstorm Pacific Rift

What can be said about Pacific Rift apart from it being exactly what an offroad arcade experience should be.  I’ve often said to my dear comrade-in-creativity DM Scheer that I wish I could find my version of his Game Of All-Time – that title that, no matter what, could and would entertain until proton decay and the whole damn tent collapses.  In his case, it’s Paradox’s Hearts of Iron grand strategy series.  I’m slowly coming to the realisation that I might be narrowing it down too much for a sloppy, undisciplined mess of a man such as myself; the real answer to my hitherto questing is the genre itself!  Cheating?  Maybe.  But so far, the games I can always go back to are racing ones.  I’ll keep that musing for another time, but Motorstorm Pacific Rift is thunderously nourishing for all sorts of vehicle versus nature antics. 

Warhawk

With Sony recently trademarking the title “Starhawk”, I thought it best to revel in the excitement via some of that wonderful light-hearted action found only in Incognito’s PS3 masterpiece.  Some very fond memories of split-screen online multiplayer were had over the 2009/2010 New Year period with DM Scheer via this trusty companion.  Hopeless at the flying – though respect the flyboys that carve like surgeons through the air – the ground-based fighting is where you’ll find me.

I’ll leave it at that and hopefully be back ASAP with something worth reading. 

To use a term coined by the venerable DM “Schwerpunkt” Scheer, this might fall into the Facebook Status Narcissism category.  This post has the propensity to dawdle, dither and dally in the recesses of my own personal bank of inspiration triggers and creative cogs, thus I will cautiously try to keep a tight reign on argument and example.  This is as personal as it’s going to get around here, so without further ado – onwards.

Given any opportunity, I will pick up a pen, pencil or quill and nut out some bizarre mechanical design of fantastical proportions.  My childhood was spent in the company of a pencil and reams of dot matrix printer paper, the concertina pages taking the form of medieval manuscript, hundreds of tiny drawings meshing into each other to form roads of intricate, juvenile streams of consciousness.  This continued on throughout my schooling, with my educational record going down the gurgler in the face a rising pile of sketchbooks, loose-leaf paper, subject notebooks containing scribbles rather than the subject and anything else I could put pen to.

What did it get me?  Well, for someone who never had nor wanted professional direction in terms of art, teaching himself everything he knows, I ended up with an unquenchable thirst to expand my pictorial understanding of everything at the expense of not developing any real strategies for learning the “proper” way.  Academically, you’ll find sitting in the corner, adorned with a conical hat.  However, give me a pencil and I’m confident I’ll come up with something you’ll like and enjoy. 

So, without coming across as just another gaming blog clown with a soapbox and an inflated sense of self, I’ll illustrate via two examples and let this be a celebration of design and of a rich source of visual wonderment I delve deep into for inspiration.

Lost Planet Series – Vital Suits

Say what you will about Japanese game design, their mastery and finesse with intricate mechanics and their world class heavy machinery bleeds through into a lot of aesthetic design, none more so than in Lost Planet.  Each of the franchise’s incredible Vital Suit exo-skeletons are brilliantly conceived – with a superb stylisation of realism. 

Take for example the GAH-41BSL Baylid.  I am in love with this design.  In standby mode, the overhead rollcage hangs to the front of the biped, with the cockpit entry via twin foot bars on the rear of the machine.  The pilot sits astride the powerplant with feet fed into the leg components at a crooked angle.  Activation pulls the rollcage back over the cockpit to enclose the pilot.  It isn’t fanciful or over the top, simply desirably functional!  Weight distribution looks right, with a good level of clearance balancing a lower centre of gravity, and the wonderful emphasis on articulated joints and bearings goes a long way from the usual fare we find in games.  It was interesting reading what Lost Planet Art Director Takahiro Kawano had to say when quizzed on how he designed the vital suits, suggesting that instead of taking the usual Japanese tack of huge Gundam-esque robots, he looked at things like forklifts to draw inspiration from.    It also helped that he is, to quote Lost Planet Director Kenji Oguro, a huge tank nerd. 

Driving the Baylid around is a breathtaking experience, provided you’re a mechanical fetishist.  The machine lumbers with the appropriate motion and reaction in its hydraulics and frame.  The design is utterly utilitarian, possibly the most utilitarian we’ve seen since Kow Yokoyama’s Maschinen Krieger model line – and even then, the Vital Suits of Kawano have the bonus of being able to be throttled around. 

I love the Vital Suits because of their stylised functionality.  They are not far removed from what might be, taking the place of upright combat tractors and eschewing the skyscraper-sized anthropomorphisms we associate with Japanese pop culture.  They move in rugged, jerking motions, every footfall met with the appropriate force-feedback and sense of weight.  Their closest Western counterpart is Dreampod 9’s Heavy Gear franchise, or perhaps those fleeting artistic impressions of the powered suits in Heinlein’s Starship Troopers or Haldeman’s The Forever War.  In fact, the Hardballer Vital Suit is perhaps the closest I’ve seen to what Haldeman’s suits should or could be, give or take a few details.

But I digress.  For me, Lost Planet 2 ranks highly as one of the most gorgeous games for mechanical design.  From the small-yet-intricate battle armour to the waspish Osprey VTOL suit, the game showcases that few do it better than the Japanese when it comes to imaginative machinery – be it far-fetched or close to home.

Yager – Aerial Vehicles

This is possibly my favourite original Xbox game, by way of design.  Within this slower-paced aerial dogfighting game are some of the greatest capital ship designs I’ve ever laid eyes on – and that’s coming from someone who used to spend hours in the library as a kid pouring over their collection of Terran Trade Authority books. 

The main vehicle in the game is the Sagittarius, a sleek and elegant craft.  It has the usual requisite traits of flaps undulating upon manoeuvring, however features a wonderful split chassis that slides parts of the superstructure into different positions upon activating its hover mode.  I marvelled at the smooth reconfiguration the craft dropped in and out of during this transition, hanging over the tasteful environment with all manner of boats and aircraft zooming about.

But the aforementioned capital ships are the real stars of the show.  I’ve enjoyed the finest of the space dogfighters – the Freespace games, Starlancer and Freelancer, even those odd Eastern European games – but Yager will always return as having the best, but by no means the biggest. 

Think of these things as low-altitude hovering aircraft carriers or cargo ships, adorned with rows of open decks, thrusters, conning towers and arrays.  The scale is appropriate, the superstructures complex and feature local area damage and more importantly, they feel unique up against ships like Freespace’s GTD Galatea.  There’s not much more that can be said about them, but a lot of space dogfighters should take these behemoths in considering when designing capital ships.  They’re truly gorgeous.

The other vehicles are as interesting, with glider-like delta-winged fighters wheeling around, strange quadruped walkers loping over the landscape far below, junky drones running along designated flightpaths, as well as very interesting architectural experimentation with a lot of ground-based installations.  Yager is worth digging out if you can find it, on PC or Xbox.  If you’re a fan of capital ships, it’s particularly interesting and thought-provoking.

These are only two from a swathe of visually interesting titles.  I could rattle on about the differentiating suspension in Red Faction Guerrilla’s motorpool, the intricacies of the Killzone 2 exo (most exciting frame in terms of visible locomotion and gyroscopics I’ve seen from the West in a long time!) or the varying aerodynamic feedback found within that stunning PS2 title Dropship: United Peace Force for hours and hours, but in the hope to keep it short and sharp, I shall conclude with a few thoughts.

The biggest motivator for me in playing games and seeing what the art department came up within whatever title is to scoop up inspiration to use in my scribbling.  Much like the venerable DM Scheer plays Hearts of Iron to steer the course of history and utilise his profound knowledge of the 20th century, I want to be given catalysts to figure out new and exciting mechanical puzzles.  I want to set myself engineering tasks of how to break an infantryman’s fall at speed from a height of 30 metres using nothing more than pressurised canisters, impact stocks and valves.  I’ve the added benefit of working for my father-in-laws’ construction company, so mixing up some real-world application of machinery in form of multi-ton Komatsus and Hitachis with the Vital Suits in Lost Planet gives me a huge dollop of applicable movement and logic to work with.

Indeed, collaboration between myself and DM Scheer has led to some great work on the fly in regards to creative scribbling.  Unlike a lot of blogs that contain endless diatribes of what they think they’ll do or what should be done, our work on Orbital Shipyards has spanned nearly three years and has offered us both the freedom to test ideas and notions far beyond what a lot of blogs simply are.  Scheer attacks from an academic angle, steeped in hard science and edged with a finely honed writing style, I supply the hardware.  Games become my research tool, my construction site experience the controlled experiment.  It’s interesting to note, neither of us would probably look towards games for narrative bliss or find any compelling ludological artistry capable of standing up to scrutiny.  Sure, we might be entertained – but there are far greater stories out there in the traditional sense to enjoy.  Scheer finds supreme delight in Hearts of Iron not because of some pre-existing story, but in the systems he can manipulate and forge his own strategic path at a much grander scale than most games can accommodate.  Myself?

In the end, and despite my respect for those who champion and crusade in the name of game narrative, I will always forgive a game any story deficit if it provides interesting design – especially titles offering machinery to toy around with.  I’m probably the fellow George Kokoris and Pete Davison scowl at, because when it comes to anything mechanical, it doesn’t matter who’s talking at me…I’ll be over on the other side of the hangar, checking out the undercarriage of that dropship.  Words shmerds, this thing has double stabilised skids!

By now, I should have been given my own show on the Jesus network, what with all the evangelising being committed.  To flog that analogy like racehorse mince, I’ll just say from the outset that if you’ve got a hankering for strategy, a soft spot for the independent game development scene and have *not* pre-ordered Frozen Synapse, then you’re an irredeemable sinner and nothing will save you from gagging over the buffet at Satan’s table.  He’s serving  cold seafood extender, which is a feat in itself – considering the real estate – but your sin is great indeed.  What else is great is Frozen Synapse.  Why is this introduction so tortured?  Let me explain my giddiness.

We are deep within the darkest reaches of British bedroom developer country with Frozen Synapse.  Across these rain swept lands lurk the likes of Introversion, Positech Games and Mode7 Games – the makers of Frozen Synapse.  There’s a possibility you might have heard of Mode7’s previous title Determinance, a strange and awkward flying version of Gunz: The Duel meets Die By The Sword.  In any case, they’re back with – no hyperbole – the personal indie game of the year, and it’s only in its beta phase.  With a core team of three, this new creation is set to become quite an online sensation.  But what is all the fuss about and why should you care?

Frozen Synapse is a turn-based squad-centric tactical combat simulator.  Sound dry?  Far from it.  In fact, I am willing to say that if you like the idea of squad-based first-person shooters but hate the community or dislike the notion of massive time investments to stay ahead of the fourteen-year olds, this is the game for you.  If you snub your nose and snort at first-person shooters in general from your ivory tower of self-styled superiority, this is the game for you.  Of course, if you love a deep and enjoyable strategy game that doesn’t take more than fifteen minutes to play, then I shouldn’t have to sell it much more than saying “it is damn good”.  But why try to channel enthusiasm onto action gamers, you ask?  If it’s a strategy game, you say, the bearded men of this world will take good care of it.  The justification for why I’m doing so is tucked up inside the gameplay.

Much like the wonderful Rainbow Six and to a lesser extent, the SWAT games of yore, half the fun was found in the setup; drawing up plans for your men to follow, pre-ordering doors to be kicked in, rooms to be swept and enemies to be subdued or dropped.  Granted, it was pretty complex at times, especially when dealing with multiple floors.  Frozen Synapse takes this very premise and drops it into simplistic-though-destructible arenas, wherein players duke it out using the excellent simultaneous turn system.  What we have here is a concentrated strain of X-Com, Combat Mission, Jagged Alliance, Counterstrike, Flotilla, Laser Squad Nemesis, the aforementioned Rainbow Six and SWAT; and while those names might not mean a lot to some people, once played, you can see influence and inspiration – as well as experience wonderment and incredulity of it having taken this long for a game like Frozen Synapse to be made.

Controlling a squad is incredibly simple, intuitive and incredibly flexible.  Selecting a squad-member, you assign movement waypoints and actions within the limit of five seconds blocks.  Five blocks equal a game, which forces players to be mobile and inventive and, by design, somewhat negates camping.  Select a squad member, mark their direction and movement via a very simply line method, assign their combat options, confirm your move and await your opponent to do the same.

That’s where the joy of Frozen Synapse’s multiplayer comes from – everything is at your pace.  You can create five seconds’ worth of tactical movement so complex it would make the Spetznaz cry; running different turn scenarios as many times as you want – using the opponent squad’s last known positions to anticipate where and what your opponent may program.  Alternatively, you can play the waiting game and hole up your troops, seeking that perfect ambush.  Once you have planned your movements, it’s a case of priming – or finalising – the move.  Your turn is submitted to the Mode7 Games servers and matched against your opponent’s.  Once both turns are submitted and calculated, the outcome is returned and you watch your plan unfold in simulated real-time against your opponent.

It’s the best damn PBEM (Play By EMail) game out there at this very moment.  The simultaneous move mechanic means you’re constantly assessing your squad’s movement and actions against a foe who just might strike anywhere, which sounds incredibly tense.  It certainly is, but paradoxically, it’s a very relaxed game to play – a game that in turns last no more than thirty seconds can last for days, players submitting said turns when they want.  The asymmetrical turn submission system works wonders and means you can engage in any number of games across all timezones.

And I’ve only touched upon the Dark Elimination mode!  There’s offline battles against the AI, puzzle modes, defending locations, the works.  You can choose to play Light Elimination, where you can see your opponent at all times – not just at their last known location.

To quote Kieron Gillen of Rock, Paper, Shotgun in his recent preview of Frozen Synapse, this could be the Indie circuit’s answer to Starcraft 2 – a comment he strongly advised against being taken out of context.  I offer that whilst they are two very different games, Starcraft 2 and Frozen Synapse are re-energising deeper strategy gaming for mass appeal, much like tower defense.  An ease of interface means anyone can play and understand the mechanics with minimal time investment.  Another comparison is via gamers  discovering and honing specific tactics to create higher-level manoeuvres, evolving and ensuring a consistent competitive scene.  I would go so far as to argue Frozen Synapse has a bigger chance of resonating with primarily action-oriented gamers than Starcraft, based on the premise, flow and cross-pollination of gameplay tenets – especially those versed in the classic era Rainbow Six, Counterstrike or SWAT games.  Big call, but it just might be the case.

I will not write much more because you should really see it in action.  It’s the smartest, most enjoyable game I’ve played in a long time.  I’ve got a number of games running at any one time, played over the space of a few days.  It makes the perfect browser companion.  Check your mail and twitter, work out the next turn, upload and you’re done.

If you pre-order, you get two licenses.  This gets you and a friend into the beta immediately with a copy each of the full commercial title upon release later this year.

Frozen Synapse.  I’m in love.

I was not expecting to feel the way I do about Far Cry 2.  There were no preconceptions of despair; of choice; of being a vulture descending upon the rotting carcass of a wartorn country.  Some people hate this game.  While I understand why many do, I am proclaiming my love for it in its entirety.  It’s not perfect, and there are many things I hope for in the announced Far Cry 3, but Far Cry 2 is perhaps one of the greatest misunderstood titles of this generation.  It’s acknowledged as good by many, though really good by very few.  Let me try and convey how this title is moving me in ways I never thought a first-person shooter would.

It was, at first, the incidental NPC dialogue that made me consider there was something a little different about Far Cry 2.  I was hearing rough, callous conversations in an Afrikaans twinge; mercenaries trading stories and eyeing me with their weapons slung as I walked through the miserable collection of corrugated iron and sun-baked masonry of Pala, the initial town you find yourself in.  It was civil war, a digital reimagining of Angola, of Burundi and Rwanda, of the Liberian civil wars.  Maybe that’s why this game made a bigger impact on me than I expected.  The news footage I can remember throughout the Nineties during the height of many African crises seem to echo in the chaos found within Far Cry 2.  It doesn’t seem to trivialise those desperate images of the aforementioned hotspots, whereas I find the modern military shooters seem to skip an important sense of experiential atmosphere – despite an emphasis on extreme detail and the imagined frenetic pace of combat. 

Far Cry 2 is the first game in a long time where my imagination is set free to roam alongside a powerful in-game physicality.  Across the sweeping fifty kilometre square game world, I have room to realise my intention and time to consider my actions.  I have dealt with the two warring factions of this central African nation; becoming that carrion-bird manoeuvring onto yet another conflict for fortune.  I have made friends, rescued them, watched them die.  I have delivered forged documents to desperate civilians in exchange for smatterings of anti-malarial drugs, and battled the disease.  I have had to bear the consequences of my decisions between aiding friends or civilians.  I have committed regicide.  And, I have been spared and saved by the man I must eventually kill. 

The goal in Far Cry 2 is to retrieve information on an arms dealer profiting from the civil war, arming the local militias and measuring bloodshed in diamonds.  Once ascertained, this elusive, enigmatic arms dealer known as The Jackal must be taken out to prevent further conflict.  It’s a simple premise, but not one to be underestimated as the story pivots and shifts across the wild terrain and changing political environment.  You find missions sprawled across the two large sections of the game, the first in the North being Leboa-Sako followed by Bowa-Seko in the south.  You are a deniable asset to both factions, a dispensable dog of war paid in diamonds.  It does have an undercurrent of Edward Zwick’s brilliant film Blood Diamond, especially in regards to currency of conflict diamonds, but the human factor – both honest and conniving – is on display for those who impart their own intrigue and player-generated determination. 

Here’s where a lot of people seems to find issue with the game.  Far Cry 2 has a heavier reliance on player-generated motivation for a contiguous experience than most sandbox games or shooters that have come before it.  The real-world setting in this game has a far greater propensity for non-combat tangibility than the settings found within the modern military shooter.  We have downtime with landscape traversal.  We have time to appreciate the difference in ambiance the constant day-night cycle and weather patterns provides on the environment and our interactions.  I remember reading a lot of Wilbur Smith as a younger fellow, and his dynastic Courtney family novels purvey that sense of untamed desolation found within Far Cry 2; the balance of vast, romantic vistas and freedom with the seemingly incurable instability and tragedy in a post-Colonial Africa.  Perhaps where my imagination kicks in more is where the game falls down for others. 

We see little of the civilian population; outside of those brief encounters with the last few fleeing families awaiting travel documents to cross the border and escape the spiralling situation, they remain spoken of but rarely spotted.  Some complained of this, wishing to have seen more of the local population for a greater sense of a ‘lived-in’ countryside.  I agree with that sentiment, hoping for it to be addressed in Far Cry 3 – if Ubisoft Montreal does decide to return to the African continent for the third instalment – but if I were to justify this choice in the second Far Cry, I would do suggest it as a direct emphasis of metaphor.

What do I mean by that?  What Far Cry 2 highlights is the dirty end of internationalism – somewhat pejorative terminology for tied trade and incentivised continuation of conflict for gain.  The civil war in the game is constructed of parts that, sadly, matter the most to the wrong people, with the civilian population either enlisted to either faction or on the wrong end of a gun.  The usual details of Africa-centric conflicts are inferred or referenced: genocide, refugees, amputations.  So whilst Far Cry 2 is for the most part devoid of the casualties, it certain is not lacking in the causal factor.  We have 32 Battalion-esque private military contractors operating for both factions.  Leathery, hard-bitten Afrikaaner and Rhodesian mercenaries operating checkpoints; the rivers and roads patrolled by hired guns.  Warlords order strategic strikes against valuable targets and cripple supply lines.  Medicine and aid is used as bargaining chips or intentional collateral to rot oppositional support.  What is most striking are the foreign operatives who seem to take advantage of the inherent bureaucracy of a failing state and conduct insidious, self-motivated campaigns of extending the bloodshed as long as possible to maximise power and profit. 

The motivation of the Warlord may mirror that of the foreign operative, but it is in their interest to end conflict to stabilise power at some point.  In Far Cry 2, and undoubtedly in reality, it is readily apparent that these foreign operatives have a vested interest in keeping the warring factions inter-feuding to devour the spoils of this resource-rich, infrastructure-poor country.  I think what captures the contemptible nuance of these men is the mentioned physicality of Far Cry 2.  Your character doesn’t just work as a vehicle for player interaction – your character genuinely interacts.  It sounds minor, but there is a brilliant sense of bodily movement and action-reaction at play here.  You reach out and take manila folders, you look down and grasp door knobs.  The minimap is an actual map and GPS that you hold in your hands.  When you gun jams, you punch at the breech or struggle the locked cocking level open.  You crouch to grasp the weapons of slain foe.  Every movement has purpose and a rugged finesse.

Such a pronounced sense of movement translates into much more emphasis on the act of progression to such a degree that, instead of simply doing missions in a game, I feel like I’m forging something far greater.  Meeting these Warlords and foreigners means something much more than what I’ve experienced prior to this game.  I feel a sense of disgust when they mention their ends are justified, the means being my job of unsavoury flavour.  This is compounded and enforced by the fact getting to specific points on the map to take such missions are perilous journeys indeed.

I mentioned the downtime during landscape traversal as a sort of unsolicited time for reflection.  Many Far Cry 2 detractors mentioned this is as a negative aspect, however I cannot agree.  Across the varied terrain; the winding river networks, the thick jungles, the open grasslands, the deserts and hilly outcrops, I found myself considering my actions and plans.  I approached checkpoints with caution, parking my jeep in the shrubs and scouting ahead on foot.  If and when the enemy spotted me, their frantic back-and-forth in English and Afrikaans added this wonderful element few games could match.  I’ve experienced some of the most genuinely exciting firefights in Far Cry 2, aided by some stunning AI and the environment being a dangerous playground to hide in and flank through.  I’ve tracked arms convoys through the tussocks on the velt, planting IEDs on the roads ahead.  I’ve detonated those IEDs and seen lorries gutted with such force, burning wreckage lands far from the dirt tracks.  With such explosions comes the unofficial star of the game.

Fire.  I’ve never quite seen anything quite like this in a game.  Depending on wind conditions, weather and location, fire can be your best friend or a deadly hindrance.  It can devour huge areas of grassland in the right conditions, moving like a flickering virus across the velt and engulfing shrub and tree alike.  If the wind is in your favour, you can send a blaze in the direction of a checkpoint or outpost to send the sentries scattering.  A jeep you’re cowering behind might explode under gunfire and the thick vegetation becomes a wave of crackling, burning death.  A gunfight that ends in scattered bodies, car wrecks and a roaring inferno does not rest lightly on the conscience, and neither should it.

I fear I’ve become too verbose in describing what Far Cry 2 has been for me thus far.  But as I stand in-game at the crackled, gravelly edge of a bush landing strip at dusk and watch the massive sun drop towards the golden sub-Saharan horizon, I cannot but help think more people need to try or retry the Far Cry 2 experience.  From the sad poignancy of my melee weapon being a cheap, brutal machete – knowing quite well that, in the real Africa, more in the way of genocide  has happened at the edge of this barbaric instrument than any firearm – to the thrumming whirl of my motorboat as I direct it around the next river bend, this curious game offers more than it lets on to the quick-fix audience of today.

You just need to give it  heartbreaking context and permit yourself to question and think a little more than one might when sitting down to play a game.

The audacity of Japanese gaming luminary Hideo Kojima with this product placement business, the internet cried!  Despite much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, I find the whole affair a lot more exciting than anything else.  After all, while the usual suspects are still looking up Roger Ebert’s address in the White Pages and speaking to people on the inside of the free-range hen industry, people should hold off on the ranting indignation for a number of reasons. 

Sure, the idea that Capcom’s Monster Hunter, Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed, Frito-Lay’s Doritos, PepsiCo’s Pepsi and Mountain Dew, Unilever’s Axe body sprays, Sony’s Walkman, the clothing retailer Uniqlo, magazines such as Jump, Dengeki and Weekly Famitsu,  plus Hori gaming accessories all making an appearance in Metal Gear Solid: Peacewalker is startling, bordering on gratuitous.  Trying to find an equal that competes with that amount of product cross-pollination is fruitless.  And yes, we’ve had our fair share of hammer-delicate sponsorship deals in the past; who could forget Pepsiman or MacDonald’s Global Gladiators?!  But can we say that brand placement pioneering is, in itself, worthy of more than derision?

When Andy Warhol took the baton from artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and popularised the pop-art movement via soup labels, the reaction was mixed to say the least.  However, what was born of the established art world meeting consumerism led to Roy Lichtenstein being considered artistic on the merits of deliberation over comic book-style iconography; to the creative chalk jiving and manufacturing of Keith Haring’s distinctive neo-tribal scrawlings.  What we got was readily-accessible art for the masses; art that was for the everyman because it dealt with reassembling post-modernity.  Is this a case of finding what you want if you look hard enough?  Not really.  At the heart of it, we have the collision of two mediums and the subsequent turbulence.

Some of us are shocked to see such denuded examples of consumerism hitting our “art” form.  The Cambell’s soup labels of the sixties are, for some, the digital interpretations of today’s in-game advertising.  It’s shocking, it’s confronting.  People decry it as corporation shilling, of destroying the purity of the medium, of bowing down and exchanging artistic credibility for currency.  I don’t agree.

Firstly, we are dealing with a fantastical, alternate Cold War scenario involving bipedal nuclear delivery systems, bee-men, super spies, hundred-year-old snipers, clones, shadow governments and all manner of hokey, fun-filled ridiculousness.  The addition of CalorieMate, in itself a slight anachronism as it was released just outside of the game’s timeline, is almost the most pedestrian insertion – considering its theoretical value of a high-energy, low weight foodstuff, perfect for field operations.  Doritos?  Well, considering they were first manufactured in 1964 under the Spanish “little pieces of gold”, it fits a hell of a lot more both in timeline and locale to have a Latin American corn chip to appear in Peacewalker than ratty old Funions. 

And Axe body spray?  Much like CalorieMate, the Axe line of body sprays were launched in 1983, so they fall just outside of the supposed timeline of the “old Metal Gear Solid”.  If I were to draw a long bow, and it will be a very, very long bow indeed, then I propose this to be a small but essential gesture towards the rugged masculinity of a spy.  Nothing more, nothing less, just a nod towards the suave sensual intellectuality of Fleming-influenced espionage and the alleged edge those foul-smelling scents give a person upon application.  I don’t see Axe or any of the items within Peacewalker as a serious threat to the experience. 

The Sony Walkman is a great addition with the usual anachronistic caveat, the age of the cassette a gorgeous retro touch.  Mountain Dew and Pepsi?  Much like Doritos, they’re a lot older than the Metal Gear franchise.  PepsiCo’s hard-fought  and often fruitless business inroads into Latin America against the giant Coca Cola conglomerate reflect the game’s tiny group of individuals taking on a much bigger and better equipped foe.  A stretch indeed, but like most high-brow games discussion these days, that kind of parallel wankery is acceptable.  

The clothing retailer Uniqlo is an easier placement, as it ties directly into the merchandising of Peacewalker.  There is a history with Uniqlo and video games in terms of special T-shirts series, so naysayers have nothing to stand on.  For me, it’s nice to see the visual favour returned.  I won’t name or justify the rest, though the hotly contested issue of Famitsu, the so-called Japanese videogame bible, is worth mentioning.

Now, apart from Famitsu being a Japan-centric and focused magazine (in itself a product of decades of strong domestic gaming being on the pulse of the population’s tastes – a discussion for another time), the big problem many people have is that Peacewalker received a top rating of 40/40/40/40 within the magazine whilst appearing in the game as a prop.  Would this automatically equate to vested interest and a quandary of integrity?  To quote Jeff Parsons, a magazine such as EGM would print an editorial explaining why they couldn’t write a review if it were a digital prop within the game.  It’s a contentious situation; one that is black and white for some, others it remains multiple shades of grey. 

I would pose that even if Famitsu was not part of the internal Peacewalker digital merchandise, the game would have still received top rating.  We’re talking one of the industry’s biggest hitters, whether you like it or not, crafting a tailor-made portable game from one of gaming’s biggest franchises.  From the trailers, Peacewalker looks like one incredibly feature-packed title with some interesting extensions, therefore I have no problem with Famitsu slinging those sort of numbers around.  Which leads to the argument for another time of what exactly do reviews mean, outside of mostly being there to verify or justify the reader’s own perceptions or ideas on a title, so let’s leave that one there.

Really, the question is how intrusive this product placement will end up being.  Screenshots have surfaced with some comedic moments of Snake happening upon a bag of Doritos and various cans of soft drink floating as objects within Metal Gear Solid have a habit of doing.  However, I’m willing to bet they’re treated with as much irreverence as most articles of pop-culture found within Kojima’s games.  There will undoubtedly be some sort of story wound through them, a discussion over the radio on what exactly Axe body spray is, what Dengeki is; the usual witticisms by air from a knowing radio operator to a scowling, growling Snake.  What makes this interesting is merchandising deals done between large companies inside a medium that, for what it’s worth, is being taken seriously as a sales platform.  That might sound offensive to the knee-jerk purist reactionaries of this world, and let’s be honest, the internet makes it easy for fingers to do the outraging, but it’s a breakthrough.

We’re seeing merchandising on a scale comparable to the film industry, and in this case, for a handheld game.  We’ve seen it in the past with all manner of tie-ins.  Starcraft energy drinks.  Quake figurines.  Nintendo paraphernalia.  But outside of in-game advertising for games from the same publisher, we’ve only touched the surface when it comes to non-game-related products being pushed in not so traditional ways.  Sure, Cool Spot was a character created specifically for 7 Up and had a platformer wrapped around him, but that was more on the back of Sonic the Hedgehog’s popularity than a trend-setting manoeuvre.  What we’ve got here is a game being a focal point for multi-national companies to insert their wares.  I’m puzzled primarily by the peanut gallery not appreciating the Capcom and Ubisoft crossovers, especially since gamers love their what-if scenarios – going by endless forum fluff.  

This isn’t a Bioware-esque “buy our other stuff” situation, this is marketing across mediums and becoming virtualised.  Indeed, that once-hot Second Life alternate reality simulator offered the chance to spend real money on entirely virtual objects from digital arms of manufacturers, but this is far more pure and, for the most part, interesting.  Much like one reads William Gibson’s post-Pattern Recognition novels – a pop-tech-culture safari through the hip brands and classic names – we shall judge Peacewalker not on its own in future years, but as an integrated piece of cross-culture.  Laugh all you want at what digital Doritos might seem like now, but the fact Kojima and co. were savvy and open enough to interlock brands, franchises and mediums; doing their part not so much to cement the yawping games/art movement but as a viable medium for communication.  This isn’t cancelling anything out, this isn’t pissing in the collective cereal of gaming snobs, this is the market doing the work gamers everywhere have wanted to happen: this is the market legitimising games.

Instead of art, I want sport.  I want those Gibsonian logos and icons plastered across my game.  I want to feel the market and mediums seep into one another like some over-zealous dripping watercolour of globalisation.  We will have our digital sponsors and the money will flow.  This shouldn’t be some stilted, ungainly PSN Home display – let’s have it in our faces.  Let us replace Feisar and AG Systems with Pennzoil and Marlboro, make those WipEout ships like anti-grav NASCAR.  I want my FPS sub-machine gun come with sponsorship from Heckler & Koch – hell, we’re almost there with the fratboys carving firearm preferences out of Modern Warfare.

Am I serious? 

God no.  Is it that big of a deal?  Of course not.  Are most of the people outraged by Peacewalker’s product placement ever going to play it?  Probably not. But while the self-styled gaming literati obsess with incredulity over opinions locked a generation back, there does indeed remain more than one road to maturation for the games industry.