Let me tell you what I love about Skyrim. Let’s just get that out of the way first.

There’s currently three people in my house playing Skyrim on the same Xbox, and our approaches to the game are all entirely different. I play the game like I played Fallout 3, which is a lot, coincidentally, how I played Jagged Alliance 2. I run into a dungeon, I beat people over the head with brute force, no stealth, no magic, no subtlety, and then I pick up everything I can carry and take it to my house (or, in JA2, quadrant or city or whatever) and I store that shit. I keep one of everything and sell everything else. And I mostly wander around and do this constantly. It’s insane. I know it is. But it’s what I do and it makes me happy. I’ve barely touched the main quest… or even most of the side quests? Mostly I just walk in a direction and kill everything that moves, harvest it’s bits, and craft things.

My other (temporary) roommate, Angus, does things a little differently. He’s playing a mage, but not the kind that throws fireballs. He’s going full out in illusions and conjuring and alterations. He spawns powerful atronachs to fight for him. He makes people go crazy. He sneaks around and shoots folks with conjured bows. He only wears robes. I watched him terrify a room full of giant spiders. They all backed into corners and stood still while he pumped them full of magic arrows. He’s the archmage of the magic school or whatever. He’s barely touched the main quest. But also, he spends a lot of time trying to get himself into places he shouldn’t be able to get to.

My other roommate, Eric, is running around with a sword in one hand and fireballs in the other. He responds to dialogue in the sassiest way possible. He (mostly) plays the game solo (no followers) and is a good chunk of the way on the main quest. He doesn’t seem to be too worried about having a house or storing shit. Or even selling things. He just goes from place to place setting people on fire and seeing what he can see. Quest-based tourism.

And I think that’s what I love about Skyrim. Everyone plays it different and the game totally allows for it. I remember talking to someone about Fallout 3 and they said they wanted to play the game as an explosives expert with zero luck so things would blow up in their face all the time and result in comedy. The downside, I guess, is that I can’t imagine a situation where that would make for a fun game at all. Fallout wanted to give you options, but let me tell you, if you wanted to have high unarmed skill in fallout and go full melee, you were probably going to be very annoyed that you spent most of your time being shot at. Skyrim seems to allow for all possibilities. I read this great review over at Killscreen that basically says the same thing, only it’s about how, apparently, there are groups of white supremacists who love the ultranationalism happening in the game’s b-plot.

Anyway… I’ve had this problem for years where I’ve been sort of a backseat player. I watch my friends play games and wonder why they’re not “playing it right” (like this one time where Angus was playing Red Dead Redemption and kept trying to see if he could climb up on the roof of this building) and I start saying “you should do x”. Skyrim is the first time I’ve sat and watched people play a game where I just go “huh, this is totally different than the game I’m playing… it’s the same world, but the rules are different for everyone.” I had a friend ask me about Skyrim and what the “goal” of it was. I was sort of at a loss for a real answer. And, typically, I think we’d suggest that it means the game is sort of pointless. But, really, there are just so many goals. I felt like the best answer was “to get lost in it.”

So here I am.

That’s what I love. Complete relativity? Oh, except you can’t put it the fuck down. So that’s a problem. And sometimes enemies that seemed like they were pushovers are met at the end of a dungeon with something that’s impossibly difficult. But whatever. All the old Elder Scrolls- and Fallout-style bugs and annoyances apply. But man. So satisfying. I mostly hope it’s a great omen for Fallout 4.

Yup.

A lot of people found Assassin’s Creed to be repetitive and dull.  I see the point: There were only a handful of quest types, and the game’s structure just asked you to do X quests per chapter to unlock the actual assassination.  The quests were mostly simple and uneventful: sit down and eavesdrop on a conversation here, pickpocket a guy there, etc.

What I found really enjoyable were the actual assassinations, where (if you wanted to) you got to piece together the scraps of info you’d been collecting to plan your approach and escape route.  You didn’t really need to do this, you could pretty much just cut your way in and out, though.  And that’s what most people wanted to do, hence the complaints about the dull information gathering.  I enjoyed roaming the city, and enjoyed making my best effort at getting in and out of an assassination quickly and cleanly.  (This made one of the later missions more memorable, when the whole assassination turns out to be a trap.  On the one hand, this is forcing failure upon you via the script.  On the other hand, it really did catch me off guard and ruin all my careful planning resulting in me having to improvise, which was very much “in character.”)

I briefly attempted an approach to the game I’d seen promoted by some random forum user online.  The theory went that, based on early footage, the game was not “supposed” to have so many player aids and GUI elements to lead you to each clue so rapidly and easily.  The game left in the option to disable almost all of these elements.  The idea was to play the game with no GUI aids and waypoints.  So when your assassin boss orders you to hit the streets and look for someone important to eavesdrop on, you actually do have to just search around for someone appropriate instead of just beelining to the waypoints.  Climbing up the viewpoints and using eagle vision became practical instead of a thing that you just had to do.

This made the game kind of way cooler in a way, but at the end of the day even I didn’t have the patience to play through the whole thing that way, and I’m kind of stupid about these sort of things sometimes.  What really matters though is that nobody else on the planet thought this would be a good idea.  Everyone was fine with just beelining from mission to mission, they just wanted the missions to be more varied and involve stabbing dudes way more often.  Thus, Assassin’s Creed II.

AC2 improved on the original in pretty much every way.  Except the mission structure, as far as I’m concerned, since it turned into this boring old same-as-every-open-world-game go to the waypoint, watch the cutscene, go to the next waypoint, etc. But still, the overall experience was much smoother and pleased a lot more people.  This was rapidly followed by Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood which is effectively Assassin’s Creed 3 but titled like a spinoff so that they don’t run out of numbers at the pace that they release these games.  Going in, I and many others sort of assumed that it was going to be cranked out, uninspired, money grabbing filler material.  I certainly thought so when I purchased it, but the inclusion of the multiplayer took some of the sting out of it.  The big surprise was that they single player was just as much of any improvement over AC2 as AC2 was over AC1.

By this point, I am sold on the series and had no worries at all for Revelations.  Yeah… just a little preview: turns out that Revelations is everything everybody feared AC:B to be — filler.

In the best cases, you win whether you are a paying user or not.  If you are a freeloader like I usually am, you get a good game at a bargain price.  Even if you are a paying customer, there is a boost in that the masses of free people usually ensure a vibrant user population.  Since we’re talking about online multiplayer games more or less exclusively, this is an important feature; these games live or die based on having a critical mass of population.  Without the free-to-play model a lot of these games would basically be dead in the water.  This is especially true of MMOs who would otherwise have to compete with World of Whatchamacallit on a feature-by-feature basis.  It’s also true of the following little gem of a game: World of Tanks.

When I first heard the title of World of Tanks I imagined some crazy Pixar-developped World of Warcraft clone, with little cartoon tanks handing each other quests and loot and such.  What the game is, in fact, is actually a remarkably simple yet not simplistic team combat game.  Essentially, it is Counterstrike with tanks.

A match is no more than 15 minutes long.  Teams of tanks spawn at opposite ends of the map.  The objective is to kill the enemy team or capture their base.  There are no respawns, so when you’re out you’re out, but if you’re killed you don’t need to stay until the end of the match to collect any rewards.

My SU-76 inexplicably teams up with American and German tanks to do battle over flags. Not to mention that it mysteriously drives itself.

It plays like a slow motion version of your typical shooter.  Instead of bunny hopping around maps, you slowly trundle across them.  Taking a shot is a careful, deliberate decision, and reload times are lengthy.  Armor thickness and facing make a difference.  Long range fights can be a cat and mouse game of hiding and sniping, while close range duels are often a mind game of determining exactly what your advantage is at the moment (armor, speed, positioning, backup) and pressing it effectively.  I recently tried the Battlefield 3 beta which just made me feel old as I died over and over again without even really knowing from where or why.  This game is a bit more my pace these days.

You have a garage with a handful of spaces available to store your tanks.  As you play matches, you earn XP for each tank and coins.  XP is used to unlock tanks and their modules, and coins are used to buy tanks and the modules for fitting.  You must also spend coins on your ammunition and to repair tanks after they take damage.  The tanks themselves are roughly WW2 era, with choices from the USA, Russia, and Germany, and with more on the way.

There are light, medium and heavy tanks, tank destroyers (low mobility, often fragile, but big guns and good camouflage) and artillery (indirect fire weapons).  The tanks have different values for armor, often depending on the facing, and guns and ammunition differ in the amount of damage they do and the likelihood of penetrating armor in order to do any damage at all.  You can upgrade your weapon, as well as your turret, engines, etc.  You can even upgrade your radio, which affects at what range spotted enemies will show up on your minimap.

Looking down the barrel as I perch slightly hull down on the crest of a hill overlooking a bridge, shortly after scoring a kill on a tank out in the open.

So the question is:  Where along the F2p exploitative-vs.-bargain axis does this game lie?  I think it strikes a fair enough balance for most people, up to a point, but that is only as true as your patience for unlocking doodads allows.  Allow me to explain.

You start with 3 very basic, free tanks.  When you play a match, depending on your effectiveness and whether your team wins, you earn a certain amount of XP, and a certain amount of silver.  You spend XP to research modules and tanks of a higher tier (from 1 to 10), and you spend the silver to buy the actual modules and tanks.  You also spend silver to buy your ammunition as you use it up, and you spend silver to repair your tank if it was damaged or destroyed in a match.  This is all well and good, but as you unlock higher tiered tanks, the costs to equip and repair your tanks do not scale at the same rate that the rewards do.  You get to the point where it takes ages to save up enough money to buy the next tier of tank you want, and at the very highest levels you will often pay more money to repair your tank and refill its ammunition than you are likely to earn from the match, unless you do very well.

Enter the revenue stream for World of Tanks: gold.  You pay real money to get gold coins, and gold can be used to accelerate your progress in a variety of ways.  The simplest is to buy silver with it.  There’s also a way to sort-of-kind-of “buy” XP but it’s a long story that’s not worth getting into here.  You can also buy “premium” tanks that are only obtainable in this way, tend to be pretty solid (though none are overpowering), and get a bonus to the cash they earn.  And you can also, effectively, subscribe to the game like an MMO, which also gives you a multiplier on rewards.  Any or all of these things are kind-of-sort-of “required” to get anywhere in the higher tiers unless you are still 15-year-old-me and have nothing better to do all day than grind matches over and over.

My M3 Stuart peeks around the corner in a more urban environment. It actually helps to keep your hull's facing angled like that since a shot that hits "square on" is more likely to penetrate.

I’ve played this since the North American open beta.  Back then, everyone got a weekly “allowance” of gold that I basically used to keep up a permanent premium subscription, and I got pretty deep into the tech tree.  When it launched and I had to make do without the free gold, it was quite noticeable how much more slowly the progression is.  I did eventually buy a premium tank, during a sale, just ’cause whatever.  And of course, enough of those “just ’cause whatevers” out there is exactly what is making them their money.  Nowadays I dust the game off once or twice during the week for a match or two, but it’s still a solid and fun game at lower tiers.  Plus, it means that I’m often more experienced than the competition which does have its advantages.

The other problem I have heard on forums here and there is that for the very serious players who are into the whole “Clan Wars” system, you are basically forced into need a full suite of Tier 10 tanks, and that most teams basically have settled into optimum builds, and that things get very static and expensive and such.  Of course, apparently if you do well in clan wars you actually win gold, so uh I guess that makes things cheaper?  Anyway, I don’t know and I will never play often enough to care.  And if you are like me in that respect, tier 3 gives plenty of variety and excitement for 10 minute bursts, and nobody is going to bother spending cash on the in-game boosts like gold ammunition and such because why would you do that and even if you did, shit, OK go ahead and spend a nickel on every shot that you missed me with as I circle around the building and blast through your rear armor to detonate your ammo rack.

So, Facebook games.  As I mentioned in the comments I am now reading yet don’t remember writing below, I’m “That Guy Who Isn’t On Facebook”.  There are various reasons why.  It’s not quite entirely old mannish reactionary iconoclasm, but there are probably elements of that.  In any case, the only thing that had me tempted to sign up is when I found out that Sid Meier was working on a Civilization game for it.  But by the time it arrived I kind of didn’t care anymore and it appears that neither did anyone else so that’s that.

I did end up on Google+, though.  Why?  Basically because I already had a Google profile and use iGoogle and Gmail and Google Reader and Google Documents and Google basically owns my soul at this point and I’ll be the first against the wall when Google Skynet achieves sentience.  I have no friends, though, so there isn’t much activity on it.  But, a propos to this blog, it has games now!  I finally get to see what everyone’s been talking about.  Specifically, I tried the Dragon Age one and something called Edgeworld.

Yeah, so these games are garbage.

Dragon Age Legends especially.  DAL is a game where you click on an icon to start a fight.  During a fight, you click on a dude to hit them.  Or you can click one of many different abilities to hit them a bit harder than normal.  After you’ve clicked for a while, the game tells you you aren’t allowed to click anymore for now.  Of course, you have the option of paying money or spamming your friends in order to get the right to click a bit more.  I was playing more interesting flash games on Newgrounds a decade ago.

There’s not even like any story to go along with this, or at least not much in the week or two I’ve tried this.  And there’s pretty much nothing to this game but little flash animations and text so it’s not like it would be hard to add a bunch of crappy generic fantasy crap to smooth things over between clicking sessions.  It looked kind of like this would be the case to begin with?  But it never went anywhere.  It was just “walk down this road and kill monsters.  Now you’re in the new zone!  Kill more monsters.”

Edgeworld is less offensive.  It’s basically your Ikarium clone only with a tower defense element.  It’s still super slow and boring and ultimately meaningless and vaguely disquieting to the soul, but at least there’s a there there.

Anyway, all I heard when this Dragon Age thing came out was that it was the game that proved that Facebook games can be worth playing.  It advertises itself on its official webpage as “the first real game on Facebook.”  After seeing how utterly banal it actually is, ugh.  I dare not even look at whatever Cityfarmtown is for fear of losing hope for the youth of today.  I may sound a little hyperbolic about this, but I really did start to get offended at some point.

It’s like this: when someone makes a game and puts it in a box and tries to sell it to me for 60 bucks, there’s sort of an implicit contract negotiation going on.  On the one hand, I’m expecting the game maker to be pouring their heart and soul into making the best darned game there can be, and I’ll reward them with my 60 dollars.  On the other hand, they kind of just want my 60 dollars and will do basically the minimum required effort to get it.  So in this situation, they kind of have two ways to get my money: make a game good enough that I’ll have no qualms paying them, or they can make an OK or bad game and trick me into buying it via marketing and such.

The latter happens occasionally, of course, but really the former is the most sustainable approach in the long run and that’s generally how companies behave, successfully or no.  When I try one of these “social” games, however, I feel like I am not a customer but a natural resource, and the game makers are not trying to sell something to me but trying to extract something from me.  Namely, cash, or advertising via “sharing” (and everyone learned in kindergarten that sharing is awesome so why wouldn’t you do it?)  They give you a bunch of things to click on, and dribble out little dings, in such a blatant attempt to drill that Pavlovian association in your brain that releases endorphins when you click and it goes ding, and then you want to give it money so that you can click it more often because then maybe it will ding again.

I sat there clicking on the 100th monster on Dragon Age Legends, and then it dropped enough cash for me to build a storehouse in my castle, and I realized what it felt like to be that guy sitting all day long in front of the convenience store video poker machine.

The incentives of a game maker to make a “good” game versus an “addictive” game change based on the business model in place.  It’s kind of an interesting topic these days, what with all of these social games taking off (though by now, possibly sputtering out) but also with the rise of “Free to play” games.  The past year or so I’ve actually dabbled quite a bit in “F2P”, which largely fall into the same soul-sucking trap described above, but there are some notable exceptions I’ve been quite happy with.  I’ll go into those later.

So I don’t want to get rid of the blog because I think that Angus and Nathan and I have a lot to say about games and maybe some of it isn’t pointless or uninteresting. That’s a hunch.

I’d like to talk about the following in the next little while:

• Red Dead Redemption is amazing.
• I want more Xbox Live Arcade games.
• Shared reviews from Every Game Ever.
• Zynga

That last one is interesting because for the first time in the 2 plus years I’ve watched people blow their time on Farmville and I’ve sat around smugly insisting that they’re wasting their stupid time, I’m starting to get curious about their latest game, Frontierville. There’s got to be something about it that people want. I want to try it out. Maybe. I just hate the idea. We’ll see, I guess. But I’ll write about it. Right now I don’t know any serious gamers who play it because they all think they’re better than it (as a brief aside, core gamers are assholes. Complete Assholes. Maybe it’s just the ones who are vocal on the internet, but fuck you guys). But I was on the WoW treadmill for about 5 months on two separate occasions and from what I can tell there isn’t a whole lot of difference other than graphically.

So anyway… hopefully I’ll write these things soon. Hopefully. And hopefully also Nathan will start posting again. He said he’d stop until Angus or I wrote something. So here we are.

Oh yeah, and I thought it would be at least entertaining to mention that I traded in Final Fantasy XIII so I could get Transformers: War for Cybertron. It was about 400% more fun than Final Fantasy XIII, which was a pile of horrible story-telling and questionable game-play.

Try to remember that games should be fun to play. That is the point after all.

- M

As I think I’ve mentioned, Deadly Premonition is kind of a clunky game to play. Here are the lessons I learned that make the game a lot easy to stomach, moment to moment. A lot of these are actually mentioned in the surprisingly in-depth and lengthy manual (at least for this day and age.) Others are mild spoilers in terms of quest rewards, but trust me you’ll probably want to know them in advance unless you’re just going to get everything anyway. Anyway, here they are:

1. The start button skips cut scenes. More importantly, it also skips annoying transitional scenes like getting in and out of your car. It also skips that oh-so-PS1-era rotating-3D-model of the item you just picked up.
2. The B button scrolls the annoyingly slow text to a more sensible speed. If you don’t care what a text box says, the start button also skips them.
3. The door opening animation takes forever and can’t be skipped. Running through a door (using the B button) makes you look crazy in normal social situations but is way faster.
4. Melee weapons are only good for two or three swipes against a zombie, but can smash many boxes before breaking. Boxes take forever to shoot apart.
5. Smash all the crates you can. There are occasionally chase sequences that are way harder if those crates are still sitting around getting in the way.
6. Aiming is annoying as all hell. The left-trigger auto-locks onto the center of zombies. This is good for the bend-over-backwards zombies but for the others you want to aim at their heads since it kills them faster and makes them drop their weapons. So just give the left trigger a quick squeeze to lock on, then aim up a bit. This makes the combat pretty trivial to survive for the most part.
7. Marked on the map are various bones. At the earliest opportunity, you are going to want to collect them all. The gravekeeper wants them back to be buried, but before you give them to him, pay a visit to the character who always has his dog with him. The dog will take the bones away from you, but you can get them back from his dog house. In addition assuming you had all of the bones, you’ll get an infinite-ammo revolver. Finally give the bones to the gravekeeper to get an infinite-ammo flamethrower. These weapons will be sufficient to complete the game, including the final bosses.
8. Additionally, after a while Keith Ingram at the Milk Barn will sell you a “Spiritual Map” that leads to a pretty easy combat arena. Completing this gets you an infinite-ammo SMG that isn’t entirely necessary if you have the revolver but is occasionally handy for crowds.
9. The wall crawler zombie is the most annoying enemy in the history of videogames. Use the flamethrower, wait for it to charge toward you, run past and turn around and shoot. Repeat 8 million fucking times. Trivially easy, annoying as hell.
10. You can usually get a free lunch at the police station. Once per episode this will come with an amusing cut scene, so don’t miss it.
11. Many side quests can only be triggered during rainy days when everyone stays home. Most importantly, George’s second quest is like this.
12. Do George’s second quest: it unlocks a fast-travel item.
13. If you can’t get to a Trading Card on the map that is near one of the car races, you have to complete the race first to unlock the card.
14. You can get Trading Cards and other infinite ammo weapons by replaying combat stages (just revisit the site and look for the glowy circle.)
15. You only get one save file, but when loading your game you can replay earlier chapters. When you replay a chapter you can’t save the game, but if you complete the chapter any side quests, collectibles, or whatever that you’ve earned will apply to your main save. So if you missed something, you can go back for it, you just might have to replay an entire chapter in one sitting to do so.
16. Just play on Easy difficulty. The combat isn’t fun no matter how hard it is, and the 3 achievements for completing on easy/normal/hard do not stack so if you hypothetically want all 3 you have to play the game 3 times no matter what.

Spoilers are always a threat with me, mainly since I kind of obsessively read up on games while I am playing them. Some games I don’t really care about spoilers, but others (like Deadly Premonition) are full of twists and turns that I don’t want revealed. That can be difficult to avoid, however, but I’m actually pretty good about it when I really want to be.

It took me something like 6 or 7 years to finally get around to seeing The Sixth Sense. I don’t know how I managed to go that long without someone spoiling The Twist for me. Unfortunately, that was not good enough. Just knowing that there even was a Twist made all the pieces click together in the first 20 minutes and pretty much ruined the rest of the movie.

On the other hand, now that I’ve been watching Twin Peaks, I am really impressed by the collective Internet that Laura Palmer’s killer had never been spoiled to me over the past twenty years, and it remained a mystery to me all the way up to the episode where it was revealed.

Even this T-Shirt design didn't spoil Twin Peaks for me.

Deadly Premonition is a game that you should really avoid spoiling. Unfortunately, it is not enough to just avoid plot discussions online. The game itself tries to spoil its own plot at every other turn.

Admittedly, some of this “spoiling” is actually just good foreshadowing. Foreshadowing is one of those basic literary techniques that gets taught in the ninth grade yet 90% of video games ignore. Deadly Premonition has a ton of foreshadowing, clues, and cryptic predictions (that were even more apparent after my false-start.) For the most part, these don’t really count as spoilers though. There are so many blatant clues that are so obvious that you have to dismiss them as red herrings, until you get to the point where there have been so many red herrings that what you originally thought were red herrings suddenly become plausible again, until the whole mess becomes a mobius strip of contradictory clues that keep you guessing. Call it “shotgun foreshadowing.”

These hints and clues actually make the game awesome. Some are as obvious as York’s crazy cryptic dream twins, others are rewards buried in side quests, and some are hiding in plain sight for the entire game. These all lead to that awesome “how did I miss that?” feeling when revealed, and if you puzzle things out beforehand you feel clever and rewarded when the reveal comes.

Lester Freamon would like to remind you that all the pieces matter.

No, where Deadly Premonition really spoils things for you is in the little easter eggs here and there.

One major thing to watch out for are the trading cards you collect. There is one for each character, and naturally you will occasionally browse through your collection and read the descriptions for each one. These descriptions will usually be innocuous. “Joe Shmoe. An accoutant with an eye for detail.” (Totally made up example.) Then you’ll go fishing and pull up some other card of a character you’ve met and talked to a few times and is very much alive. Read their card, and you get something like, “Jane Bloe. Killed by Joe Shmoe after burying her treasure under the big oak tree in Central Park.” Thanks, game.

There are implicit spoilers in the game’s UI as well. There is a checklist of side quests in the game. Each item on the list tells you the character that gives the quest and the chapters that the quest is available. Most characters have at least one quest, and the major characters have multiple quests that are available over all chapters. If you are being a good little completionist and trying to fill this list out, you may notice that certain characters will have all of their available side quests stop being available at certain chapters. In a game where a serial killer is on the loose, what possible reason could there be for a character to abruptly stop offering side quests? Argh.

Man, I almost don’t even want to bring these last two up, so if you actually intend on playing Deadly Premonition you should stop here. But you will probably notice that the cars all have bumper-stumper style personalized license plates. If you notice that you will probably notice that they are all little jokes about the owner of the car. And if you notice that, you run the risk of some pretty big spoilers revealed via goddamned license plates.

And finally, in this game you can follow people around and see where they drive to and where they live. And you can basically stalk them to the point where you can peep in through the windows of their home and watch them cook, exercise and watch TV. But occasionally you find places where for whatever reason you can’t peep in to. Again, putting two and two together can kind of ruin things.

If you’re lucky, you don’t notice any of the above. But for a game all about its plot twists, it telegraphs the hell out of them in some really jarring ways.

If you don’t care about the mediocre graphics, and if you can tolerate some uninspired shooting mechanics, then there is nothing left standing in the way of your enjoying Deadly Premonition on the strength of its story alone.

And if you are a certain kind of weird, like me, you’ll even get a kick out of the occasionally awkward delivery. It’s pretty hard to say how much of the sort of absurd, WTF-style humour that comes out of the cut-scenes is deliberate. I’m referring to things like the hilariously inappropriate music (deliberate, I think), strange audio mix (not deliberate, but it feels like it sometimes), the creepy facial animations (can’t be, can they?), the various idle animations (I could watch Keith snap his fingers all day!)

Basically, if you can get to the end of the famous coffee scene, creepy smile and all, and any laughter you have is more of the confused and/or amazed variety instead of the mocking, this game looks awful variety, then you are good to go and should run out and get the game today.

When I wrote about the story in Final Fantasy XIII earlier, I talked about how you kind of had to shift your expectations when it came to video game stories. That still applies; I’m not trying to argue that Deadly Premonition is going to shed light on the dual nature of man. (Although… maybe?) In any case, what the story has to do (and what FF XIII failed to do) is make sense and maintain your interest on its own terms.

Deadly Premonition knows it is a video game story, by which I mean the story does not try to ignore the fundamental unreality of the game it takes place in. Video games take place, by and large, in worlds of hyper-reality. For all the efforts to improve graphics and physics, the actual rules of the game and actions the players are expected to take are downright alien.

A lot of games try to ignore this unreality in their stories. Most people just ignore this dissonance. People (myself included) mocked the absurd Tom Clancy style twists in Modern Warfare 2 but nobody seems to care that you inflict more casualties as a single individual in that game than the Canadian army as a whole has probably inflicted total in the last decade. On this very blog, Angus made a very good point about the Final Fantasy series, where the story emphasizes ecological themes and harmony with nature, but the main interaction the player has with the game is the mass killing of different animal populations for their resources.

I’m reminded of Indigo Prophecy. This is a game that kept things relatively grounded for the first part of the game. It was a story about a serial killer, with a bit of a supernatural bent, and for the first half it played out like a really good adventure game. But the demands of the Modern Video Gamer required exciting plot twists and boss fights and apocalyptic stakes, and so in the last quarter of the game the rug is pulled out from under everything, and you find out that you have been playing as a zombie all along, fighting against ancient Mayans, Stonemasons, and The Matrix. (I am not even fucking kidding. Spoilers for Indigo Prophecy above, I guess.)

I bring Indigo Prophecy up because if I were to summarize the later portions of Deadly Premonition it would probably sound just as stupid and batshit insane as the above. And like Indigo, Deadly Premonition keeps things relatively grounded for most of the game. For the most part, it is a Twin Peaks-style murder mystery, complete with soap operatic elements, mysterious clues, wacky characters and hints of supernatural involvement. And by the end, like Indigo Prophecy, it kind of goes bananas in a very, very video game way. But where Indigo‘s climax was arbitrary, unpredictable, and bullshit given how the first half of the game presented itself, Deadly Premonition‘s “groundedness” I mention above is a complete and total illusion! It’s batshit insane from the get go, you just kind of get used to it.

Like the zombies. What the hell is with the zombies? You think the game is going to be like Silent Hill because the first thing you do is travel through an evil version of the town and kill zombies. Only nobody else in the town seems to acknowledge this. So your next thought is that all of this zombie killing must just be in York’s head, all part of his weird psychic profiling shtick. That doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, however, because the bullets you shoot and food you eat certainly disappear from your inventory, and indeed things you collect from the evil-world are useable in reality. Eventually you just throw up your hands and give up and just roll with it.

He's actually kind of a dick.

And of course there is Agent Francis York Morgan himself, and his imaginary friend Zach. Why is this FBI agent talking to himself? Does he have a little bluetooth headset or something? But no, he has a cell phone in the opening cut scene, so it’s probably not a real person. Your next thought will be that Zach is you, the player. A plausible theory, since he will ask Zach questions that you choose the answer to. But why isn’t anyone reacting to this dude talking to this mysterious Zach character. OK, he must not actually be saying it out loud. Just when you’ve convinced yourself of this, he will explicitly mention Zach in conversation with someone. When they give him a funny look, he’ll say, “Don’t ask me about Zach.” It’s personal, you see?

What happens is, you begin to take these bizarre and surrealities for granted. Why do you hop into evil-town and start killing zombies? Because it’s a video game, duh, and we have to shoot at something, right? But here’s the thing: once you’ve gotten a dozen hours or so in and forgotten that you even had questions about this stuff, and the plot starts ramping up and going in crazy directions, all of a sudden it turns out that all of this shit was actually really important. The nature and/or reality of Zach and zombie-land are fundamental plot points, and were all along. So when things go nuts at the end of the game, it doesn’t feel like a cheat, because they’ve been nuts all along and you just didn’t notice!

The game similarly switches gears and plays with expectations in other ways. As an example, at one time I had a friend visiting, and so I said “Hey, you have to see this craaazy weird game, it’s hilarious.” I just played forward a little bit to get to the next cut scene, which I assumed would be another weird, wacky quip from Agent Francis York Morgan. What I got was a very grisly, gruesome and dark scene, raising the stakes and tension of the plot. (It’s actual effectiveness was rather limited as far as gross-out horror type stuff goes, due to the limited and not-at-all-lifelike graphics.) What it did succeed in, though, was making me look like kind of a creepy psychopath. Hilarious indeed.

Most importantly, the game has an ending that, despite being crazy insane in many ways, absolutely does not cheat and does not flinch and does not chicken out of things in order to make the player feel like a winner. I cannot stress enough how very few story-focused games have the most bullshit endings that drag them down. In fact, in my head there are probably only 5-10 video game stories that I genuinely love, and they are also the only 5-10 video game stories that don’t have terrible endings.

(This is the fundamental difference between Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, as an aside.)

I’m looking back over everything I wrote above (in my lazy, not-outlined, stream of consciousness style) and realize that I probably sound kind of crazy.

I remember hanging out at Mike’s place while he was beating Metal Gear Solid 2, and the two of us were just sort of sitting stunned by how ridiculous the last sequence of cut scenes were. This is what so many Internet People were so gaga over as far as video game stories? These people are dumb, I thought.

The best way to summarize how I feel about Deadly Premonition is that I think I finally understand what it is like to be one of those people in love with Metal Gear Solid and its convoluted plot. I’m… not going to make fun of them anymore. I’m not sure I still have the right to.