played the two chronicles of riddick games,
escape from butcher bay, and
assault on dark athena. like pretty much any sensible person i really dislike movie games with a passion, but these were pretty different. stuff worked, the story had a surprising degree of color and polish, and the way they used the location was unusually well thought-out and effective. admittedly it was a really good opportunity to make a stealth game, but it's kinda rare that decent starting point ideas actually turn into a better games. along the way somebody usually fucks it up with something idiotic, but that never really happened here. really the only gripe i have is that the ending of the second one(both of them, actually, but more notably the second one) was brief to the point of it being kinda ineffective. they had a good idea there, and it was an interesting ten seconds i guess, but i think i wanted more. but i guess that's saying something that i actually WANTED MORE from a vin diesel-themed movie tie-in videogame.
what's strange is that i hear that vin diesel was kinda meddlesome on the project and oversaw a lot of it, but the end result was there so i'm left to assume that this was a good thing. vin diesel really hasn't done a whole lot for me in his movies, and i actually really disliked pitch black when i saw it, so i naturally come to conclusions about how low expectations need to be to even turn on a videogame. what makes for a poor, uninteresting movie can make for an engaging and worthwhile game experience. probably the moral of this story is that videogames are corrupting our intellectual consciousness, but i don't
really think i needed to tell anybody this.
although, on the other hand, i think this game probably makes a strong counter-argument for the potential for the sheer act of world exploration and immersion to be a worthwhile creative aesthetic in itself(assuming it's thoughtful or provocative in a way i guess). this really isn't anything fantastically new in games, the idea of the world almost being a character in the narrative(sometimes literally a character[silent ][/silent]), but how many films have really done this? certainly a good number, i think tarkovsky's stalker comes to mind to such a degree that i don't think anything is worth really mentioning(ok lynch too, but on his best day lynch cannot really compare to tarkovsky), but i think that this isn't something that can easily be conveyed in most films given the logical constraints of it. anyway, i think people do kinda overlook the necessity of effective location usage for games, to the point where the narrative is kinda irrevocably tied to things in the location rather than just some arbitrary battleground for whatever whim the game designers had that morning. i don't even really think this is a matter of level design, really, as hitman blood money(probably the best example of level design i've seen) usually has fairly useless location choice, choosing things that are cool and nice to look at but otherwise rather inconsequential in how the narrative physically works. i guess i mean interactive experiences where there is something distinct to be gained from the way the narrative works with location.
i don't know, part of me feels like this is me kinda rediscovering the wheel or something with this post, but i think i'm realizing how much i legitimately appreciate it when i get the distinct feeling that i am where i am in a game for a reason. like it's not just some randomly selected location, this was on purpose. i don't know, i feel like this is more along the lines of what game storytelling should intrinsically be, when possible, given how much more you can do with such a design approach like that in games compared to anything else(short of literal architecture).
oddly enough, the game i followed up this with was that new game on xbox arcade
i am alive. this game is pretty much exactly what i felt like i wanted next after playing riddick, something that embraced its location and tried to do something interesting and unique. as anybody can see from reading into this game for five minutes they have a lot of really excellent ideas here. they take this really realistic stance on practically everything in it. bullets are phenomenally scarce(i believe i've had five bullets total after two hours), the player character gets realistically exhausted doing basic tasks, and all enemy combatants approach death with realistic fear rather than the kamikaze approach literally every other game ever has employed. while i legitimately appreciate that there's somebody out there in the industry kinda aiming to break down what a game is and refine it into something a little less fundamentally brainless, the game actually manages rather often to be unpleasantly lacking in basic entertainment value or any particularly redeeming traits.
it's rare that i find a game that i actually think this, but it's like that the pure pretension of the game legitimately obscures any worthwhile experience you can have with this. the game not so inadvertently goes to steps to prompt you to adhere to some sort of moral code rather than senselessly murdering literally everyone in sight, physically designing the battle system around this, yet there is really no other residual effect of this internal narrative anywhere in the story, the game going so far as to kinda pat you on the back when you stab a couple hoodlums through the chest with your machete(and the main character proudly calling himself a good guy while walking through the pile of bodies he's accumulated). it's like they met halfway here i guess, where the fact that enemies are afraid of you does not legitimately mean you can avoid any combat scenario through peaceful means, it basically means that employing fear becomes a battle tactic, a factor which more or less undermines the positive merits of what they were trying to do to begin with. plus, combat in the game is legitimately not terribly enjoyable and the lack of fundamental choices in what otherwise could have been an interesting system makes it rather unrewarding. VATS from fallout is ridiculous and cartoony, but i'd begrudgingly take it any day of the week over something pretentious, unpleasant, and lacking in basic functionality.
then there's the climbing. you climb goddamn everywhere in the game, and while there is a pretty interesting exhaustion/stamina meter at work, you get immediately struck by how completely unrealistic it is that this guy has the guts and ability to climb to the absolute apex of literally every structure he comes across. it feels almost stupid that they have these distinctly realism-based elements at play here when the guy is otherwise an expert marksman and one of those superhuman mountain climbers. not an issue in itself, it just, again, undermines the obvious attempts at realism they had here by following the stereotype that you're playing as a person who happens to be supremely gifted rather than a convincing human being. this in itself isn't really some major issue i've taken outside of superficial whining, but i just don't find this shit fun. the level design of the buildings you have to climb gets repetitive and at times senselessly and unconvincingly complex, requiring literally a trial and failure system, made infinitely worse by a profoundly unforgiving checkpoint/save/continue system.
then there's the way this game looks. it's not a bad game graphically i guess, but it's actually hard to tell. part of the game's story is that there are duststorms all the time, meaning that visibility is poor at all points in the game. i get having some visual theme like this, but in doing so it makes a lot of what you're looking at rather unintelligible. i guess i'm kinda shallow and i always look at the shit that's in the distance in games like this, but you actually can't do that at all here, as all you can see in the background is usually some shady outline of some crumbled building, visibly only vaguely behind the clouds of dust. i can understand from some narrative/aesthetic point of view having the player focus on their immediate surroundings, but i find it to be a rather unappealing and inappropriate aesthetic for a game honestly trying to depict a post-apocalyptic world. again, it obscures what i could be getting out of the game. the end result kinda makes it feel less real, which is a shame as it's not an intrinsically bad idea they had here.
i actually didn't set down to write this goddamn much about this game, but i guess i really didn't like it and wish i saved those microsoft points for something at least a little more rewarding. outside of some vague thought of a job well done, there's no payoff in this game. the story is tragically poor, and you can tell that whoever actually wrote it actually didn't speak english, and was later translated sloppily by someone without a great grasp of it, as there are a wide variety of awkward syntactic errors in the subtitles, most of which were actually corrected by the voice acting itself. i've seen that before in games, but it's usually once or twice, not EVERY GODDAMN BLOCK OF TEXT. although, in all fairness, the problem isn't really that it's an uninspired translation, it's just that the story is lame and there's very little payoff of any kind throughout the game. i don't care, and they took no steps to correct this.
i can see why they marketed this as a sub-budget title and just threw it on xbla; it's an interesting but ultimately unrewarding and frustrating experiment. the game is some bastard child of silent hill and fallout, but it probably needed to be a bit more like fallout in the narrative department, and a bit more like silent hill in the atmosphere department, for the experiment to really work.
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