I’ve been reading through Stephen King’s The Dark Tower books again recently. I remember picking them up for the first time shortly after Wolves of the Calla was released in 2003; I was working in a bookstore at the time and (don’t tell anyone!) we were allowed to “check out” books on the shelves for free so long as we returned them in undamaged condition. So I read through the first four at a pretty rapid clip before taking my time with the last three. I say “taking my time” in a relative sense, of course; I’m not sure anyone but King could manage to turn out almost 2,000 pages of fiction in under a year (!!!) if the publication dates on Wikipedia are accurate.

One can only imagine the kind of frenetic, locked-in sensibility that must’ve been going through King during the composition of these last few novels. It’s the kind of tale that you hear about every so often in fiction, or composition of art in general, where someone will bang their head against their own imagination and take aim at a frustratingly elusive muse, only to finally see the floodgates burst open, allowing them to put everything down on paper at a rate they could’ve only dreamed about before. Rilke, for instance, started his 30 pages or so of the Duino Elegies in 1912, and only managed to complete them with the sudden influx of creativity a decade later. It’s not hard to imagine King acting like one of the poor travelers who cut through Haven in The Tommyknockers and find themselves flooded with ideas and insight.

Regardless, the last three novels of the Dark Tower series feel different than the first four do. The oddball of them all is obviously still The Gunslinger, which feels like it has an almost abstract, non-narrative quality to it, as if it were some kind of fable rather than a telling of events; part of that is no doubt due to the constraint placed on the reader by observing only Roland, who is routinely conveyed as being almost devoid of anything approximating an imagination. It’s not a novel that feels compelled to explain much about what transpires, or even the world that Roland inhabits. There are simple incantations (“the world has moved on”), but few specifics.

In that sense, it still feels like a one-off novel, despite the somewhat abrupt ending; there’s little in the way of world-building or character development. Still, for its faults, it feels right, somehow. One of King’s major themes across all his work is the interaction of Ultimate Good with Ultimate Evil (which can be a bit tiring, honestly, especially in works like Under The Dome), and while his heroes often have flaws, few seem as flawed as Roland in this first novel, as he massacres an entire township and drops Jake to his death rather than give up his chase of the Man In Black.

Considering the quarter-decade that elapsed between the creation of the character and the publication of the final novel (in the continuity of the series, at least), it’s no surprise to see King attempting to flesh out his world as he continued to write/create it. It becomes clear, over time, that he considers this his most important creation, with the books acting like the axis for all of his other fiction, much like the Dark Tower itself is the axis around which all of the multiverses spin in the novels themselves. It’s a bit of an audacious move on King’s part, but in retrospect it feels inevitable, given that interest in Ultimate Evil. You can feel King drawing his threads in the early parts of Wizard And Glass, where he makes it clear that the Man In Black is really Randall Flagg, the villain of The Stand (arguably his best novel), in addition to holding any number of other personas, and when he starts bringing characters from his other fictions into Roland’s world.

Things get a bit sillier when he begins talking about the Crimson King, effectively his world’s Sauron, complete with disembodied red eyes floating in the darkness. Like Sauron, the King is kept at a remove in all of the books, never encountered or described directly, save for the very end of Book 7, where he appears as something less than an all-powerful being. There are plenty of references to him somehow being insane and imprisoned, while still retaining the power to direct events so that the Dark Tower falls, effectively either pushing the reset button on all creation or sending all of the worlds off into some enervated darkness. (It’s never clear quite what the end result of the Dark Tower’s destruction would be, only that it would be Bad.)

The King’s inclusion feels unnecessary; I kind of liked the idea of Roland’s world better when it was simply running down like a cheap car with bad shocks and no brakes. Entropy is, after all, in the physics sense, the ultimate ruination of our universe; if the theories of dark energy and our universe’s accelerated expansion are to be believed, every proton in every atom in our body will one day decay in 10^40 years, leaving behind a universe with nothing but black holes. That’s scary enough to imagine happening even if we don’t have some kind of Devil behind the scenes, pushing buttons and speeding us along the path towards disintegration. But while the Crimson King might be a bit of a stereotypical fantasy character, he at least doesn’t feel silly. That’s reserved for the inclusion of another kind of King.

There have been plenty of novelists who’ve played around with themselves as characters in their own books (or at least characters that share a name with themselves), either as some kind of post-modernist experiment intended to blur the line between fiction and reality (see Everything Is Illuminated or The Pale King, for example), or as a wink-wink-nudge-nudge breaking of the fourth wall. King’s inclusion of “Stephen King,” writer from Maine who happens to be writing Gunslinger novels when Roland and Eddie come across him, feels like neither of these, and is almost certainly the greatest weakness in the series. It feels oddly selfish.

The sheer scope of the novels, and the seepage of King’s other creations into the Dark Tower universe, already speaks to the primacy of the series in King’s view of his own legacy. King’s inclusion of himself, on the other hand, feels variably either like a reflection of the need for the author to immortalize himself in his fiction beyond merely being the name on the cover of the book, or as a kind of meta deus ex machina, a character that’s portrayed as creating the rest of the world in a sense that allows for other deus ex machinas to occur without logical explanations for them. (Not that Roland’s world is ever quite bound by anything we’d recognize as logic.) In the former case, his inclusion is prideful to the point of arrogance; in the latter, it’s a monumental cheat, and not a very necessary one at that.

I get that King probably wanted to work out some mental issues related to the aftermath of his near-death experience in 1999. I’ve never been in an accident as bad as the one that befell him, so for all I know I might want to ascribe some kind of cosmic significance to something like that myself. And there is an undeniable aspect of the postmodern to the sub-plot, but it’s a relatively blunt one; King seems to have taken the notion of intertextuality a bit literally and recursively, favoring the referencing of other texts outright (e.g. Shardik, the Harry Potter sneetches, the Wizard of Oz bit in Wizard and Glass, etc.) over merely alluding to them. Things get a fair bit creepier when he includes the real-life driver that hit him as a character, apparently under some subconscious thrall to the Crimson King, working as a tool to kill King and prevent him from finishing the novels.

It takes a fair amount of ego to imply that your death would result in the destruction of all possible universes. Of course, assuming a postmodern interpretation to King’s curveball (and the more I think about it, the more this seems to be the most profitable way to analyze things), that outcome is “literally” true (if you’ll excuse a pun!); King’s death in 1999 would’ve prevented Roland’s journey from being completed, and I suppose King invites us to imagine what would’ve happened to Roland had King (or “King”) died.

Still, literary wrangling aside, King’s inclusion of himself is one of the most bizarre detours in modern popular fiction, perhaps especially because it comes so late in the series. The ka-tet bounce back and forth between New York and Mid-World enough for us to realize that our reality is somehow important and perhaps even twinned with Roland’s, but the character of “Stephen King” feels like an embarrassingly blunt way of reinforcing that theme. (Although I am amazingly curious as to how an eventual film or television adaptation of these books would deal with this whole issue.)

But then, this is also a series that, on second reading, feels like it becomes suspiciously unmoored in the last three novels from anything resembling narrative tension. Again, those deus ex machinas start popping up with disappointing regularity, and while the characters’ ability to teleport anywhere and anywhen rarely works precisely the way they want it to, it’s still effectively the textual equivalent of an “I Win” button in most occasions, perhaps especially when Sheemie’s introduced in The Dark Tower and is able to overwrite some of Mid-World’s most basic physical laws (and there aren’t many of those) solely for the sake of convenience.

Speaking of deus ex machinas, if the King character is tough to swallow, then the Patrick Danville character is almost indefensible, and his inclusion feels like a true nuke-the-fridge type creative mistake. I completely understand that Roland’s ka-tet was destined to fall apart as he made his way to the Dark Tower; it was pretty plainly stated very early in the series that Roland would place his journey above the lives of anyone, enemy or companion. That attitude was obviously softened as the books played out, but in the end he made the trip to the Tower alone. You know, except for a character that could literally rewrite reality to overcome any obstacle that Roland might face.

Danville again seems to be a way for King to explore an author’s interaction with and control over his characters and world, given that he can simply make things appear or disappear without caring about the universe’s consistency or physical laws (such as they are). His abilities seem to rob every other character in Book 7 of their own volition, though: the problems that are encountered are not opportunities for us to discover more about Roland and his friends (e.g., would he really be willing to sacrifice (or kill) a friend, again, to reach the Dark Tower?), but are instead simple storytelling hurdles, jumped over with a few pencil strokes on Danville’s part.

I consider King and Danville to both be severely problematic characters, but at the same time, I recognize that they’re interesting problems, and their inclusion is far more bold than I would expect from a mainstream author that’s expected to hit the bestseller list every time he puts out a book. Still, even though I love a good literary experiment as much as the next guy, I think that both King and Danville weaken the series’ narrative flow considerably, with Danville’s presence being almost laughable from a storytelling perspective.

There’s a lot of brilliance in the Dark Tower series. Wizard and Glass is a fantastic work of fantasy, and Wolves of the Calla is one of the best riffs on Seven Samurai that I’ve come across. It’s a shame, then, that everything starts falling apart during the last couple of books. King had an opportunity to create a keystone of modern fantasy, but in the end I’d say that he suffered from an advanced case of reach-exceeding-his-grasp-itis.

I’ve been playing a bunch of WoW lately, but my experiences are replaying the usual cycle I go through with every expansion. I start out, level a couple of characters to the max, have a good time running dungeons, then get bored at the endgame. To its credit, Pandaria has kept me interested in my max-level characters far longer than any expansion ever has; there’s a really good variety of things to do when you hit 90.

Still, I’m a tank, and almost every activity I do in the game is targeted towards tanking or finding better tanking gear. Either I’m actually running dungeons or working on rep grinds to get more valor/unlock better gear to buy. I realize that there are a lot of people who enjoy pet battles or PVP or fishing or gaming the auction house or scenarios or whatever, and I think it’s great that Blizzard has managed to incorporate so many alternative ways of playing their game, but none of them have really wound up sticking with me the way that tanking has. My two 90’s are a prot paladin and a brewmaster monk, and I’ve been working on getting a bear druid and my old prot warrior up to the cap, as well. I do one thing in this game, and I like to think I do it well.

Obviously I’ve never been one to make clean UIs.

Which is why it’s too bad that they recently announced that there won’t be any more five-man dungeons in Mists, but at least that announcement has made me feel less guilty about cutting my WoW habit until the next expansion comes out.

I’m not sure I can adequately explain why I enjoy tanking five-mans so much. (For those who don’t play WoW, each five-person dungeon has a tank, who controls the monsters and takes as much of the damage as he possibly can, a healer, who heals everyone in the group, and three DPS, who are responsible for killing everything that you come across.) The bulk of the psychological draw is probably that it’s the ultimate position of authority in the game, in that the tank bears the brunt of the responsibility for achieving the goals of the group. You can limp along with poor DPS, and even a bad healer can be supplemented with self-heals and potions and the like, but a bad tank will often make a dungeon run uncompletable unless the rest of the group composition can compensate for that lack of skill.

I pride myself on not being a bad tank, though, and judging by the comments I get from pick-up groups, I’d wager that I’m on the upper end of the skill scale. Healers enjoy the fact that I pop cooldowns to make their job easier, and DPS appreciate that I keep the pace up and don’t waste my time in guild chat during runs. It’s an oddly parental kind of experience, in that you work with a partner (the healer) to try and get your hyperactive kids (the DPS) through a 20-minute dungeon without any of them getting burned by fire or eaten by an angry ghost.

Maybe don’t stand in that fire, y’all?

Another aspect of tanking that I enjoy is that it lets me be kind of a dick without any major repercussions. I should restate that: I can take revenge on the dicks that populate any given multiplayer game by one-upping them and immediately dropping group, forcing them to wait around for another tank to queue up, which can take a while even at max level. It’s the WoW equivalent of angrily hanging up one of those old rotary phones that hung on the wall of the house of anyone who grew up in the 80s: a forceful, emphatic, and entirely pleasing (to me) retort to bad behavior. If you want to be a dick, you can expect me to put you in the time out box.

To be clear, I don’t really mind bad players, and there are plenty of those as well. We’re talking things like melee DPS who always attack enemies from the front, despite the fact that I take more damage when they do so (thanks to the game’s odd parrying system) and that they do less damage than they would if they attacked the mob from behind. Or players who don’t stack up in the middle for the Sha of Doubt or know how to line-of-sight the group of nine mini-foes during the last fight in Stormstout Brewery, or who’ve run the Scarlet Halls a dozen times and still can’t get away from Harlan’s whirlwind attack. (Which, to be fair, kills more players by far than any other heroic attack that I can think of.)

STACK UP JUST STACK UP ON ME IT’S NOT THAT HARD

It’s easy to understand why there are so many bad players in WoW’s endgame: the leveling experience, especially via dungeons, has been made so easy that you can run most content on autopilot without any serious risk of death. The health of every monster in every dungeon between level 20 and 85 should be tripled, just to give some kind of illusion of challenge, and there definitely needs to be more opportunities to emphasize strategic thinking in dungeons before Pandaria. Maybe throw a few mobs into each dungeon that can automatically heal every nearby mob to full, forcing you to CC or target them before taking out anyone else. (The Temple Adepts in Vortex Pinnacle wind up causing wipes, just because no one ever seems to want to interrupt or attack them first.) Or put in a monster or two that can cleave attack for massive damage on anyone who isn’t tanking it, forcing melee DPS to attack from behind or die. Anything to encourage a moment of strategizing rather than blindly running from enemy to enemy for 20 minutes.

Still, if inefficient players bug me, they don’t bug me nearly as much as assholes do, and there are a number of assholes in WoW (although not as many as I would say exist in LoL/DOTA2 or console versions of Call of Duty, from what I’ve heard about those communities). Assholes in WoW are made when players both outgear the challenge in front of them and are obsessed with moving as quickly as possible through a dungeon. They’ll yell at you if you stop to compare your gear with an item that just dropped, will pull extra monsters back onto the group (which makes both the tank and the healer’s job more difficult), and generally just throw hissy-fits and try to kick people if someone needs to take a moment to do anything other than pressing relentlessly forward. True assholery is luckily fairly rare, but it does pop up once in a while.

My answer to the asshole conundrum is usually to just ask politely for them to not do whatever’s making them an asshole, and then drop from the group immediately if they cease to do it. The wait time for tanks to get into dungeons is basically instantaneous, and I’m happy to just log out while the dungeon deserter debuff wears off. I wield the power of the dungeon-drop without much discernment, and I’m sure more than a few innocent victims of it have added me to their /ignore list, but in the end, my guiding principle in gaming is to not put up with being frustrated by assholes.

Epic but stressful. 

Even for all their problems, a well-done dungeon run is really fun, although they do get repetitive after a while. But Blizzard’s new emphasis on getting everyone into Raid Finder groups is a bit off-putting to me. If a competent group in a dungeon makes for a nice little pas de cinq, LFR runs are rarely more organized than your average mosh pit, with a far greater chance of people yelling “GO GO GO” at you as a tank. LFR groups have 25 players, but only two tanks, with something like five healers and 18 DPS to round out the group. The end result of that is that your actions as a tank are significantly more important to the survival of the raid than that of any other player. (It’s not uncommon for some DPS players to simply hang back and cast a couple spells at each boss, doing the minimum required to get loot without doing so poorly that they get kicked.)

So tanking raids isn’t exactly a fun proposition for me, especially when faced with the prospect of learning new raids and tanking them for the first time. I can watch videos and read up on each encounter as much as I like, but it’s still challenging the first time, and it’s useful to sit and whisper with my fellow tank before each encounter, discussing strategies and the like. That’s actually one of the fun aspects of the LFR gig. Listening to people rage at you in raid chat for taking your time to do things right? Not so much. I haven’t enjoyed many of my half-dozen experiences in the LFR system thus far, needless to say; if I give it another whirl I’ll probably just flip off raid chat entirely.

It’s possible that LFR will eventually wind up keeping me in the game, but it’s unlikely. It’s seems more stressful than fun, I don’t think I’ve gotten a single piece of gear from any of my runs, and it generally seems to be a system designed for people to yell at tanks. It’s supposedly a way to emphasize storylines more than are actually possible in five-mans, but I can’t say that I’ve really picked up on any plotlines in LFRs beyond “standing in fire hurts and the bad guys are supposed to die.” I’m sure taking down Garrosh will be a pretty epic experience, so maybe I’ll come resub for that, but as of April 8th my subscription is expiring.

Still, as said, Blizz deserves a lot of credit for catering to an incredibly wide array of gameplay tastes in WoW. There’s something for everyone; it’s just a shame that my something is going to be given short shrift for the next 18 months until the next expansion comes out.

I was pretty worried when I saw that Dead Space 3 was going to be including co-op. I’m primarily a singleplayer gamer, and most games that have attempted to have both a strong, narrative-driven singleplayer campaign while also including co-op have usually done so…poorly. I’m largely thinking of titles where the singleplayer campaign was largely designed to have co-op from the beginning, like Resident Evil 5, leaving anyone who played the game by themselves to tag along with an AI character, often pretty stupid ones, by their sides. (I’m not aware of any games that had most of their campaign designed with single-player in mind and then had co-op tacked on at the end, but if there are any, I doubt I’d want to play them, either.)

There are plenty of other routes to take when designing a game with both singleplayer and co-op, most notably simply tacking on co-op to an open-world title (Saints Row 3, etc.), or throwing in alternative co-op modes in addition to a purely singleplayer campaign (Far Cry 3), or following the Diablo/Borderlands/Dead Island model and just boosting the difficulty of the enemies in your world based on the numbers of players participating in the fight, without any other changes to the story or cutscenes. There are compromises to each of these approaches, of course: it doesn’t make a huge amount of sense to have all four characters showing up in Dead Island cutscenes when you’re playing by yourself, for instance, but if that’s the kind of minutiae you’re going to get upset about, then you’re probably not going to have a lot of fun with many games at all.

Dead Space 3 doesn’t really take any of these paths, and thus feels like one of the best co-op games to come along yet, largely because I could barely tell that it was actually designed with co-op in mind at all while I played in singleplayer. I had heard the talk of the development team that co-op wouldn’t compromise the singleplayer experience, but that all seemed to be fancy promises - I had no idea how the Dead Space style of gameplay could incorporate both co-op and singleplayer modes without a lot of concessions and drawbacks.

To my surprise, though, they appear to have simply made two games, with Isaac’s journey in singleplayer feeling not at all weighed down by the inclusion of co-op. Isaac isn’t constantly and awkwardly running into Carver as he plays (in singleplayer, he appears as any other NPC, but pops up relatively rarely), and he never has to wait for Carver to perform any actions in order for Isaac to proceed. There are plenty of times when I was reminded that the game also included co-op (all benches have two activation nodes, the unlock puzzle was intended for two players, the shuttles have two seats), but I honestly didn’t feel that the inclusion of co-op restricted my ability to enjoy singleplayer at all, whereas it certainly did in, e.g. Resident Evil 5, the most similar game to attempt something like this that I can think of.

Um, I had a thousand rounds of ammo, and you used them all on one zombie?

Most of the time, that feeling is due to co-op being the primary focus of a game, with singleplayer coming as an afterthought. I can play singleplayer Saints Row 3 or Borderlands 2 without feeling like I’m missing out by not having someone playing alongside me, but attempting to play Resident Evil 5 was an exercise in frustration. You had to have Shiva with you as you played the story, but her AI was so bad (especially w/r/t ammo conservation) that it actually forced me to stop playing after a few chapters. Dead Space could’ve fallen into this trap fairly easily by bringing Carver along as an AI companion, but instead, they appear to have made two slightly different storylines, with two different sets of cutscenes, based on whether you were playing singleplayer or co-op. The level design is still the same throughout, but all the same, the amount of work this took must have been immense. Additional mocap, all new camera setups for the second player, a large quantity of additional voiceover…we’re talking months and months of man-hours to make this work right. (Admittedly, I haven’t really played much as Carver in co-op, so maybe I’m overstating this a bit.)

And, from the couple of hours of co-op that I’ve played, it largely does. I haven’t played the whole campaign through in co-op, but what I have gone through plays very well. It’s not perfect, of course; it still often feels like there are two people attempting to perform tasks that a single person could easily achieve, aside from high points like the shuttle ride down to the ice planet. But you still have the experience of going in with a friend into a spooky world and overcoming what’s put in front of you, which is pretty great.

Of course, that raises a point: the Dead Space universe has always seemed like it was meant to be experienced by yourself, in a dark room. DS3’s co-op mode mutes this somewhat, but not as much as the inclusion of numerous other living characters that you interact with as you play. I never felt as scared in DS3 as I did in the first or second games. Too many humans, I guess, both in terms of your companions and in the enemies that you face. I generally preferred the voices-in-your-head variant of the previous games, that still got you a bit of back-and-forth with other characters without actually making the world feel populated at all. Isaac should be a man apart, and that’s one reason DS3 feels a bit off from the previous games.

Even if it Dead Space 3 feels like a slightly attenuated version of Dead Space (and certainly some of the DLC options that Visceral’s packing in there are pretty slimy), it’s still a really fun game. Certainly the co-op implementation is one of the more unique that I’ve seen. If other series feel the need to include co-op modes in the future, I could see this being a model for something like Uncharted 4. Co-op’s always going to be easier to integrate into open-world games, but anything with levels and puzzles is going to take some shoehorning, and DS3 seems like it takes the best possible approach to the problem.

For all those faults, DS3 is still a pretty rad game, certainly the best Aliens game to come out this year, even if it isn’t called that. What’d you think of it?

I’m not going to try and call myself out as some kind of Cassandra in retrospect, but when I heard during my orientation that IGN was actively trying to sell itself, I had a pretty bad feeling about what that meant for GameSpy. We were a small fish in a big pond, and the way no one really had any idea as to when we might get a site redesign or new tools to work with was somewhat telling. (I mean, we didn’t even host our own forums….) It’s more amusing than upsetting, honestly, considering that I barely got up and running with the editor before I got laid off. Would’ve been nice to have a bit more time to get set up (and receive a few more paychecks), but if this super-silly thing I cut together about Crysis 3 is the last thing that’s ever posted on GameSpy, then at least I’ll have made a mark on the site. A stupid mark, but hey. 

It’s a shame that GameSpy looks to be shutting down; I think that’s a bit shortsighted of Ziff-Davis. It’s still a brand that people at least have fond feelings for, and I was hopeful that, given time and some support, we could turn it into some kind of prestige site beneath IGN. Think of what Grantland is to ESPN: someplace that doesn’t focus on posting news and trailers, but rather a showplace for feature content from excellent writers. Even in the state that it’s in (it obviously needs a redesign, and the publishing tools were…not good), it still brings in a decent amount of traffic. (Although, given the state of our feedback email, I think around half of it might be people looking to complain about their inability to play Flight Simulator X online. One amazing tidbit that I picked up during all this was that IGN sold the GameSpy server stuff to GLU last year, but somehow both the website and GLU were allowed to both use the same name and logo, with the expected confusion on the part of people looking to get game support.) Alas, the merger seems to have always been primarily about IGN and AskMen.com, and as for everything else: 

I can’t necessarily say that I can’t see the logic there, but still. GameSpy’s got like 15 years of history behind it. I was hoping that would count for something. 

I’ve always been a fairly frugal person, and I don’t have kids or a car or student loans to pay off, so I’m not too worried about money at the moment. (Honestly, I feel a lot worse for some of the people who have been with the company for a lot longer than I have.) And I obviously have experience with unemployment, so I’m hoping to learn from some of the mistakes that I made last time around. Maybe this time around I’ll make the effort to get back in shape, update this blog a bit more often, maybe do some volunteering, catch up on the movies from last year that I missed, etc. 

I’ll probably just wind up playing a bunch of World of Warcraft, but hey, at least I’ll have time for it. Thanks for all the tweets today, by the way. Don’t worry too much about me, though. It sucks, sure, but I’ve been through this rodeo before. Hopefully I can be the bullrider this time instead of the clown.

So it’s been like a year since I did a Ramblin’ Rorie, I think? I didn’t really do much while I was off work except for blog posts, which I’ll probably explain a bit more in-depth at some point in the future. But now that we’re going to be attempting to do more video on GameSpy, I figure I might as well restart the tradition of Ramblin’ Rories if anyone’s still interested. Leave your questions below, if you like, and I’ll try to record one within the next week or so, provided I’m not crazy busy with Crysis 3. 

I know I had another question thread for an RR a while back on this blog, so if your question from that is still relevant, feel free to just repeat it. Thanks!

This is the week where everyone you know is going to be telling you how awesome Far Cry 3 is. Had I been writing this when I started playing the game, I probably would’ve been one those people, but a week afterward, it’s slipped precariously in my esteem. The first few hours feel amazing, but after completing the storyline, I have a few quibbles that probably knocked it off my game of the year shortlist entirely. Here are a few of them, with no real storyline spoilers, just some comments on mechanics that might come into play later in the game.

The game is, if nothing else, very pretty.

It Made Me Feel Like A Baby: I get that complaining about a game’s difficulty level is kinda passé, but even so, Far Cry 3 is a pretty easy game, even on the hardest difficulty setting. Enemies don’t really do that much damage to you, body armor is very cheap, you can talent yourself to get free healing by repairing broken bones (although this does take longer than using a syringe), and you can make super-syringes that not only fully heal you but give you extra health on top of that. Plus, the signature weapons you can unlock (pretty early in the game) are ridiculously powerful: the Ripper LMG can mow down dozens of enemies from a hundred meters away without needing to be reloaded. Not everything has to be Dark Souls, but this is a game that could’ve used an extra difficulty level on top of the three that are provided. 

That’s all kind of acceptible, except for the part where the designers apparently decided to assume that no one playing FC3 has ever played an open-world game or FPS before, and designed the UI with that assumption in mind. I’ll grant them that most games have constant waypoint markers telling you where to go, although I wish that I could turn it off here if I felt like exploring. Slightly more egregious are the enemy awareness indicators that show precisely where an enemy is and whether or not he’s aware of you. These are fine for a game that encourages you to be stealthy, but it feels suspiciously like something that would ordinarily be activated with a cheat code, and makes it easy to tell where enemies are even when they’re completely out of your sight, which is not a way to make your game feel challenging. One could also complain about the enemy-tagging that effectively turns you into Superman, but that at least can be disabled in the menu. 

INTERACT WITH THE DOOR. THE DOOR THAT I’VE CLEARLY MARKED AS A WAYPOINT. IT’S RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF YOU. GO OVER AND PRESS THE BUTTON. DO IT NOW. PRESS W TO MOVE FORWARD. HERE, LET ME TELL YOU WHAT TO DO AGAIN. THIS MESSAGE WILL REPEAT EVERY FIVE SECONDS.

Most annoyingly, though, the game shuttles you from storyline mission to storyline mission without a gap in between those missions: as soon as you’re done with mission 3, you automatically get pointed towards mission 4, and so on. The game pops up a notice every two minutes saying what you need to do next to proceed in the story. Literally every 120 seconds. Want to explore the island a bit? Too bad, you’re gonna get nagged to go talk to Citra a hundred times in a row. Interested in hunting down some animals? Well, you could do that, or you could get your ass to Badtown, as the game will constantly remind you.

This is a design decision that is simply bad, and one that’s difficult to understand. I understand that games have to be accessible to gamers of all skill levels, but does anyone really not know what a yellow exclamation point on a map means at this point? Did Ubisoft think that I would just forget that there was a main storyline to the game, never check the map for quests, and wander around for hours before quitting in disgust? It’s a “feature” that is not only unnecessary, but somewhat insulting as well. (On that note, I was escaping from a collapsing cavern about ten hours into the game, when a UI note popped up reminding me which button enabled me to sprint. Ten hours in, and the game somehow assumed that I had been walking everywhere.)

Enemies approach under cover of darkness. Too bad I can spot them from a mile away thanks to my psychic abilities.

I’m sure that many players will be able to shrug this off, but things like this annoy me quite a bit. I couldn’t even finish the first Splinter Cell game, for instance, because it had an objective bar that would pop up every time you paused Fisher’s movement for all of three seconds. “Oh, did you forget that you were supposed to move forward and kill a dude? Let me remind you of that. Oh, you stopped. Are you confused? You’re supposed to move forward and kill that dude. Oh, you stopped again. Did you need me to remind you what you were supposed to do? Here you go. And again. And again. And again.”

Needless to say, I have peculiar problems with UIs that insist on incorporating elements that flash or pop-up, especially when you can’t disable them. (Do the LEGO games really need to flash “CONNECT CONTROLLER” at you in the corner of the screen, endlessly, if you’re playing by yourself?) Designing a default UI for a game is a challenging affair, but I take issue with UIs that display too much information rather than too little, and Far Cry 3 seems to be a particularly bad example of this trend. 

An Open World That Feels Peculiarly Empty: Not every open world can be GTA or Just Cause 2, but after you beat the main storyline of Far Cry 3, there’s little reason to boot the game up again, at least in my experience. I think the designers here overreacted a bit to the criticism of Far Cry 2’s respawning checkpoints: they’ve replaced them with outposts that are easily avoidable, but which, when conquered, completely eliminate all enemy presence and patrols from the surrounding area. Since you’re encouraged to take over these outposts to unlock new quests and collectibles, you’ll probably wind up conquering all of them as you play the game. The consequence of that is that there are basically no enemies at all for you to shoot after you get done with the main storyline. You can drive around unmolested all you like, secure in the fact that there won’t be any bullets coming your way.

This is a baffling problem for a shooter to have. Can you name another FPS that has allowed you to effectively remove all enemies from the game? Technically, there are always animals to be hunted, but doing so serves little point when you’re done with the crafting (which, by the way, you can complete as soon as you’re allowed to freely roam the north island). You can pick a fight with your Rakyat friends, but they’ll prove to be little challenge, and doing so doesn’t make much storyline sense. And there may be isolated pockets of enemies in storyline areas that you already cleared out, but I rarely found more than one or two of these guys, and I had to really look for them. Imagine playing around in the world of Saints Row, but take away every cop and rival gang member from the streets. “Oh boy, I can run over and shoot pedestrians…forever.” 

Uninspired Side Quests: Even if you don’t mind exploring the scenery, the collection of side missions that are available to you are peculiarly unimaginative, especially given the kind of world that Ubisoft has created. I mean, aren’t we all kinda tired of the old “drive this vehicle through a bunch of checkpoints!” side mission by now? The assassination and hunting missions are lazily designed at best, as they’re just normal gameplay with weapon restrictions placed on you. (And besides, most of the Wanted: Dead missions can relatively easily be accomplished by sniping everyone but the targets and then sneaking up on the commanders.) I understand that the game is more serious than Saints Row, and it’d be weird to have something like Insurance Fraud in Far Cry 3, but a little bit of inspiration would’ve helped here. 

The interaction between predators and enemies seems like it would’ve made for a good mini-game. But what do I know?

More to the point, there are a lot of systems in the game that seem like they wouldn’t been fun to include in a minigame setup, but aren’t. Why not make a game where I drop grenades on targets while hang gliding? Or use my wingsuit for some kind of Pilotwings-esque aerial maneuvering minigame? Or make me to destroy a convoy with mines and rockets? (This was always fun in Far Cry 2.) Or ask me to snipe the drivers of speeding cars, forcing as many of them to flip over as I could manage within a time limit? Or set fire to fields with a flaregun to shepherd predators into enemy camps and watch them all get eaten? Or make me man a car’s turret while an AI player drove me through enemy checkpoints?

Instead, we’re left with a bunch of minigames that are effectively, again, just normal gameplay with some extra restrictions placed on the player. And, well…Texas Hold ‘Em. This is a lineup of optional activities that would’ve felt pretty standard in 2005; at the end of a console generation that has seen many excellent open-world games, Far Cry 3 doesn’t nearly match its competition in this arena. 

In The End: This is a game that I was immensely impressed by in its first few hours, but left me nonplussed by the time I reached the end of its single-player game. (Note that I’m not commenting on the multiplayer or co-op, mostly because those game modes don’t really attract me in open-world games.) I’ll sometimes load up Saints Row 3 or Just Cause 2, just to fool around with them, but there’s little in the mechanics or optional games (or world) of Far Cry 3 that make me want to keep it installed, let alone play it after having made it through the story. It’s not all bad, of course: the shooting mechanics are great, the game itself is beautiful, and the storyline is mostly good for the 15-20 hours or so that it’ll take you to get through it.

It’s ultimately a frustrating title, though, because it feels like someone who celebrates before the end of the race: it was so close to being great, but the designers instead made some lazy choices and wound up underachieving. Maybe the mod community can eliminate some of these problems, but FC3 feels like a rental more than a purchase in its shipping form.

The opening line to Fiona Apple’s song “Anything We Want” goes: 

My cheeks were / reflecting the longest wavelength

I’m super ashamed to admit that, even as a former physics major, it took me 20-some listens to realize that she was effectively saying “I was blushing,” the longest wavelength visible to the human eye being red. Her phrasing here says a lot to me about The Idler Wheel, her most recent album: the lyrics are fun and witty, as they’ve always been, but there’s an undercurrent of sincerity to them that in retrospect I find somewhat lacking from the albums she’s put out before now. 

That’s not to say that Apple is insincere, precisely, on her previous albums. Knowing the backstory to “Sullen Girl” will cure one of any ideas along those lines. And I know from insincerity in music, trust me: I grew up with parents who were country music fans, so I’ve listened to more than my fair share of albums that consisted of love song after love song after love song, with all the passion that you’d expect of tracks that sprung from the rather mercenary Nashville songwriting industry. Apple’s albums are likewise focused almost exclusively on relationships, which can be a bit repetitive: surely she must have thoughts and feelings about something other than the men in her life and might wish to commit such thoughts to song, but never seems to do so. But her songs have always had something intense and compelling about them, even if they’ve also often exuded a faintly facile odor. They’re memorable and passionate, but often they come across as the result of a very clever person who’s simply channeling emotions into her lyrics and not crafting those lyrics for maximum impact. They sometimes seem a bit…easy.

The Idler Wheel feels like a much more complete record in that regard, emotionally, lyrically, and musically. I have no real problems with Jon Brion’s production of When The Pawn, and his recordings of Extraordinary Machine are superior to what was eventually released. There’s a weirdly enervated feeling to the studio-issued Extraordinary Machine, which is unsurprising considering that Apple had to re-record almost the entire record after her label rejected Brion’s version. That rejection is difficult to understand, even in hindsight. There’s nothing objectionable about Brion’s Extraordinary Machine (and I much prefer his version of “Not About Love” with its fantastic cello work); it’s not as if he and Apple were being so innovative with their sound that the record wouldn’t have sold. The label’s refusal to issue it is therefore really confusing, but at least we have the leaked Brion recordings to remind us of what might have been. 

But anyway: Apple’s decision to move away from Brion for this album and co-produce it herself with Charley Drayton worked out in ways that sometimes only reveal themselves after multiple listens. There’s an intimacy to the songs that seem to indicate that most of the instruments were recorded at the same time in the studio. That might sound unexceptional, but when you consider the autotuning and chopping of multiple tracks that occurs behind the scenes of most major label records, The Idler Wheel sounds refreshingly off-the-cuff. It’s well-instrumented but not to a degree that feels false or “perfect.” The AV Club’s reviewer described the sound as “sessionlike,” and that’s probably the best word to use; it’s a loose, jazzy-sounding album, and that makes it incredibly easy to sink into aurally. 

Even if you sink into the music, Apple’s songs are incredibly raw emotionally but refined lyrically, and that’s a potent mix. Take the opening of “Valentine”: 

You didn’t see my valentine, I sent it via pantomime/
While you were watching someone else, I stared at you and cut myself/
That’s all I’ll do because I’m not free/
A fugitive too dull to flee/
I’m amorous, but out of reach/
A still life drawing of a peach

I’ll be the first to admit that the reference to cutting is a bit heavy; Apple explained it in an interview as being around someone she was madly in love with, who was with someone else, and finding herself digging her fingernails into her palms so hard that she wound up bleeding. That’s a bit of a hard thing to summarize in a lyric, so we’ll permit her the exaggeration. The lines that get me are the last two, though. “I’m amorous but out of reach, a still life drawing of a peach.” There’s a bit of dissonance with the rest of the lyrics, in that she’s shifting away from being the forlorn secret admirer to being the individual who’s untouchable, and in that regard the lyric doesn’t entirely fit; if she was so enamored of this man, she certainly wouldn’t think of herself as a still-life painting. But that hardly matters considering the beauty of the lyric: she’s referring to herself as a painting, the subject of which is a long-standing symbol for female sexuality. So she’s referring to a physical object that contains a representation of a symbol of a concept. She’s unable to act on her emotions, and thus references them as something frozen on a canvas, unable to be acted upon. 

Goddamn I love those lines, is what I’m trying to say.

The rest of the songs on the album are similarly dour, by and large, but with a zest to them that prevent them from being outright depressing. I think that part of this is that they all feel biographical in some way; Apple doesn’t go to great pains to make the experiences of the characters singing them (assuming they’re not all based on her personal experience) universal. What’s more is that, while Apple’s always been pretty frank in her songs about her undesirability as a lover (listen to “Fast As You Can” again: “Oh darling it’s so sweet, you think you know how crazy I am”), The Idler Wheel goes deep into that territory, bringing out a self-loathing that would be repellent if it didn’t feel so real. I mean, here are lyrics from a few of the songs: 

I can see a door there/
Shut it and forget my number/
Because I’m hard, too hard to know

And:

How can I ask anyone to love me/
When all I do is beg to be left alone

And:

You were such a super guy/
till the second you get a whiff of me

Granted these are out of context, but the album as a whole is a testament to the frustrations that go along with the search for love, especially considering that Apple is pretty forthcoming about her own undesirability as a romantic partner. In other hands that might be difficult to countenance; by any reasonable standard Apple is an attractive woman. But of course romance is about more than looks, and while men often refer to women who don’t stand up to their notions of propriety as being “crazy,” Apple has claimed that label for her own in the past, and with The Idler Wheel she seems to engage with it whole-heartedly. Her previous albums balanced bitterness with optimism, but The Idler Wheel pushes the dial far in the direction of disillusionment. 

It’s telling, then, that the last two songs on the album are recognizably upbeat about the romantic possibilities in front of the singer. I’m curious as to how the tracklist was ultimately decided; the placing of “Anything We Want” and “Hot Knife” at the end of the record feels completely intentional, in that someone probably decided that you can’t pack an album full of downer songs and not give the listener at least a bit of hope. Regardless, “Anything We Want” is a completely lovely song, which continues the lyrics I quoted above with: 

My fan was folded up and grazing my forehead/
And I kept/
Touching my neck/
To guide your eye to where I wanted you to kiss me when we find some time alone

It’s around here that I’m obligated to remind you that reading these lyrics is a poor substitute for listening to them. Get the album and listen to it, or look up the tracks on YouTube, I guess. It’s an amazing piece of work, with the words above being almost unbearably sweet when sung. One of the album’s more thrilling moments comes on “Daredevil,” when Apple lets loose with: 

Seek me out!
Look at, look at, look at, look at me!
I’m all the fishes in the sea!

Those aren’t words that Apple “sings” so much as they’re some kind of primordial utterance, an invocation. It’s by far my favorite moment on the album, but there are a lot of moments in the running. Apple seems to be aware that the tiny hooks in a song are sometimes what gives it a memorable force; I always think of the wonderful little trill on the “for” lyric at around 2:47 into “Fast As You Can” as one of those moments that could’ve been played straight but instead was imbued with a perfectly weird sing-songy interpretation that sticks out at you. The Idler Wheel is less showy than Apple’s previous records, but there are still beats that just make you fucking smile, with the weird trio of harpsichord notes at 1:30 into “Periphery” being oddly wonderful. 

The “seek me out” lyrics sounds great on the record, but seeing her perform the lines live was…well. Her live performance as a whole is a great recursive reinforcement to the passion and weirdness behind the lyrics; Apple is unabashedly emotional on stage, bringing everything that lurks underneath an interpretation of the songs to the forefront, in both her mannerisms and her singing. She’s well worth seeing on tour if you’re lucky enough to be among an audience with any degree of empathy for the feeling behind the words of her songs. It’s funny, though, in that my experience at her concert was the inverse of so many shows I go to: I wanted her to play more of her new stuff and less of her old stuff. 

Apple’s always been someone I’ve appreciated, but with The Idler Wheel she finally seems to be reaching the kind of lyrical space that her earlier albums have implied that she’s capable of. I’m not a music freak, by any means; I’m lucky if I really like three or four albums a year, and I only bother to listen to maybe a dozen with any amount of focused attention. It takes a while for music to grab me, and albums can either do so lyrically or musically, with lyrics (and a lyricist’s ability to channel some kind of universally recognized emotion) usually being what makes me dig deep into an album. So I hope you believe me when I say that I haven’t heard anything like The Idler Wheel in a long time. I tend to over-listen to albums that I like and get sick of them, but after a few dozen plays, The Idler Wheel still manages to hit me in a place that most albums don’t; despite the fact that it’s treading on well-worn ground, Apple seems to have mined a different vein than any other musician in recent memory. 

Hey, 

I’m still applying for jobs, and more often than not I’m asked for writing samples. I’m curious if you guys have any favorites of mine from Screened or anywhere else that you’d recommend throwing in there? I’m naturally too much of a self-critic to really be able to pick out good things that I’ve written, so if anything sticks out to you, feel free to leave a comment below, or send me a Tweet. Thanks. 

Here are some thoughts/ideas as to how Gearbox could spice up (like the Spice Girls LOL) the incoming DLC for Borderlands 2: 

• How about a mission where you’re forced to find a bunch of ECHO recorders that each contain a piece of a song? Except - get this - it’s a parody of the Gotye hit “Somebody That I Used To Know.” Wacky, huh?!
• You embark on a series of quests that will ultimately pit you against a slightly pudgy Asian boss. And when you finally get to fight him, his intro cutscene features him doing the Gangnam Style dance! Would that be crazy or what???
• Or maybe you could be stranded on an island after your spaceship crashes, and you have to bring together a diverse and bickering group of NPCs before a big monster that’s made out of smoke gets you all! And then, when you defeat it, you get nothing. 
• GET THIS: there could be an NPC that resembles a certain young male pop star! Only his name would be - wait for it - “Justin Beaver!” WHOAAAAAAAAA blew your mind there didn’t I! But not as much as you’re gonna blow Beaver’s mind, because you wind up shooting him in the head! ROFLCOPTERS!
• It’d be funny if maybe some of the bandits yelled “USE THE FORCE, LUKE!” when they die because it was in Star Wars!

And then your character farts. 

Borderlands 2 is fun, but it’s fun in pretty much the exact same way that Borderlands 1 was. That’s, for the most part, fine: BL was a good time, even if it was a notably shitty port on the PC. BL2 doesn’t mess with that success at all, and feels notably “safe” as a result, without much notable in the way of innovations. Again, though, that’s fine; sometimes it’s better to be conservative rather than risky, especially when you’re dealing with the sequel to a surprise hit. All I know is that I have a bit of carpel tunnel setting in, and my left middle finger hurts when I try to press down on the W key now. Good signs. 

phat loooooooooooooooots

A few thoughts, both good and bad: 

• The new game+ (or True Vault Hunter mode, if you insist) is notably better than the NG+ in Borderlands 1. BL1 featured pretty much the same enemies levelled up to match your level, but as soon as you enter BL2’s NG+, you’re going to be finding new varieties of enemies, such as armored psychos and poisonous bullywags. And utilizing elemental attacks seems much more important than in the base game, where I basically never used shock or slag and rarely used fire or explosives; corrosive weapons, on the other hand, were in constant use due to the many loaders you encounter. I find myself using elements much more often in NG+, although I suppose arguably the base difficulty should’ve been tuned in the same way. Anyway, I find myself much more cognizant of danger in NG+ mode, which makes it feel like I have more at stake in playing well. (But holy hell could Mad Mike use some fine-tuning in NG+ mode.)
• That said, one of the annoying aspects of the first BL was repeated here, which was disappointing: it’s very easy to outlevel content if you do all of the sidequests that are given to you. When I play an RPG, I’ll always try to burn through as many side quests as possible before moving on with the main storyline. So it was a little annoying to get a dozen or so of them around level 20, level up to 24 or so, and then go back to a level 20 story mission and find myself effectively turning a magnifying glass on a bunch of ant-like enemies for the next few hours. I know that scaling is one of the more controversial topics in RPGs, but perhaps a bit of low-impact upscaling when needed during story missions would’ve made them feel more challenging. Or, alternately, simply space out the side missions a bit better. 
• On the other hand, it was nice to see that enemies in the world would level up after you complete major story chains. The bandit technicals in the Dust, for instance, will eventually start gaining levels and new abilities as you get further along in the story, making for some nice surprises when you go back to areas that you think you should be able to easily cruise through. 
• The humor of the game didn’t impress me overmuch, although I know there are plenty of people who found it amusing enough. I can’t slag on it too hard; it’s certainly better than, say, Duke Nukem Forever, even if I’m not sure that I ever laughed out loud during my playthrough. I suppose I find its brand of attitude-first humor annoyingly unsubtle when absorbed in large doses, and the number of pop-culture references similarly become wearying after a while. Plus it’s a bit of a weird disconnect to be in this world that’s constantly under threat of destruction at the hands of a madman and to have most of the characters involved treat their situation as the opportunity to crack wise and do a standup routine. That notion feels appropriate in Portal, say, where you’re dealing with crazy robots, but the humans of the world feel like they’d be more believable if they had the more somber attitude of the NPCs in Half-Life 2, say; there were opportunities for those characters to be funny, but they never came across as unconcerned with the fate of their world. I have no real recommendations for improvement here, or at least none that I would seriously expect to be implemented. In the end, lightheartedness is probably a better fit for the game than Diablo III’s solemnity or the politicking of Deus Ex, but it could still be toned down a bit to probably good effect. 
• The PC port is leaps and bounds better than that of the first game, which felt like it was assembled at the last possible moment by the person on the team who least cared about it. I mean, this was a game where people could hack certain attributes of their characters through editing text files, which would then overwrite your own character’s attributes in the same manner if you happened to join a game they hosted; it stored your gamespy username and password in a plain text file in its directory, even. It was shoddy, but they’ve fixed pretty much everything that was wrong with it in BL2, which has boatloads of options for tweaking, looks great even on my three-year-old desktop, has a much-requested FOV slider, and (praise the lord) no longer has GameSpy, a service that seemed archaic even when BL1 launched, as a matchmaking service. While it’s not perfect (there was apparently a way to edit a text file to get 255 Golden Keys for yourself), it’s an impressive port nonetheless. 
• The ability that the Commando gets to add a nuke to his turret is goddamn amazing. 
• Single-player loot distribution is a bit wonky. I’ve only seen one legendary item in 40 levels (dropped by the end boss), and haven’t seen a single E-tech weapon outside of the quest that Zed gives you. 

Borderlands 2 logic: guy pays you 765 bucks to collect a nine dollar debt. 

It was great to see the game pre-sold for less than retail on the PC. On Steam you could buy copies for 41 bucks if you bought a four-pack with friends, which made it an easy pickup, even with the trepidations caused by the first PC port. Now that I’ve gone through in single-player once, I’ll probably unhide myself on Steam and let people join me, so if you see me online, feel free to hop in!

A quick note: I wrote a Beginner’s Guide to Guild Wars 2 for GamesRadar last week/weekend, which is why I wasn’t posting much. (On top of being generally under the weather.) Me being me, I wound up writing way too much about it, so it’s being split into three different sections and posting over the end of the week. The first section is about the races, which probably won’t be super helpful if you’re already in the game, but check back for more posts today and tomorrow, I think.  Hopefully you’ll enjoy it, and feel free to check it out if you like! It was the first bit of freelance I’ve done since the old job, and the first game guide-ish thing I’ve written in four or five years, so it was interesting to work on. There might be more where that came from if the freelance fairy smiles upon yours truly.

Anyway, I’ve had plenty of time to play the game over the last month, between the (many) stress tests that ArenaNet ran and the head-start launch weekend, so I thought I’d put down some impressions. Obviously, this being an MMO (and a surprisingly full-featured one, considering the lack of a subscription model), so it’s a bit premature to call this a “review,” but I’ve had plenty of time to fiddle around with all of the basic mechanics, so I doubt my opinions of the game will change very much on the road to max-level. (The main caveat is that I haven’t tried out the dungeon feature yet, which I’m looking forward to; I hear they’re pretty tough.) Unfortunately, as of this moment, I’m a victim of the password reset feature being down; I changed my password to an extra-long one, but forgot to save it in Keepass, so I’m locked out of the game until they reopen the password reset. 

That’s a shame, because this feels like the first MMO I’ve tried in a long time that actually competes with WoW on a sense of world size and relative innovation. (Note that I didn’t try Secret World, which I heard good things about.) GW2 feels iterative rather than revolutionary, but those iterations are almost uniformly positive, to the point where I constantly found myself asking “why didn’t anyone think of this before?” (I’m sure that someone’s going to point out that the features I really like are in another MMO someplace, but they’re new to me, so be gentle.)

Perhaps the most obvious of those is the way the game emphasizes emergent cooperative gameplay by getting rid of the long-standing MMO staples of monster-tagging and resource disappearance. In WoW, for example, the first player to tag or hit a monster will be the only one to get credit for the kill and be able to loot the body, unless they’re in a party with other people. In GW2, all kills are shared between everyone who managed to land a blow on an enemy; even if I walk up to the end of your epic fight and send a single arrow into the body of the minotaur you’re tackling, I still get full experience and the privelege of looting. (OBAMA SOCIALISM GOOGLE RON PAUL, etc.)

Holy mackeral can you fight with a lot of people. 

It’s entirely possible that this might wind up being exploitable in some instances (although the downwards level scaling in PVE eliminates the worst opportunities for this), but for the most part, it’s a wonderful change of pace, since you no longer have to worry about waiting around for a quest monster to spawn or recruiting a bunch of people to help you with a group quest. Since anyone can participate in a group event and get credit for it, it’s an entirely common occurance to see dozens of players coming together to take down a particularly tough objective. As a result, the developers felt free to make many of the tougher world bosses pretty damn tough, with some of them taking a few minutes of constant fire from what’s effectively a raid group to take down. (There is a bit of an imbalance between ranged classes and melee classes here, as it feels as though the ranged attackers have a much easier time staying alive.)

That’s a great change of pace from the usual “I gotta get mine” attitude of your general MMO player. Since it costs neither you nor the other player anything to help them out, and is instead almost always beneficial (leaving aside the chance of death), I find myself assisting almost everyone I see. (As an aside, I think the XP rewards for assisting a fallen player back to their feet should be boosted, as it’s often a pretty risky thing to pull off. Heck, throw some karma in there as well; it’s thematically pretty appropriate. Although, again: exploitable if people wish to take advantage of it.) I wouldn’t necessarily say that I feel any great cameraderie with the mostly anonymous players that I fight alongside (there are too many of them to really get a feel for anyone’s identity as you quest, and people often seem to take different routes through the content), but it’s usually more fun to feel like you’re a part of a living world rather than a lone adventurer off in the wilderness by yourself.

The other reason that that feeling exists is because ArenaNet did away with consumable material nodes. Again, in games like WoW and TOR, a collectible node (for ore or plants or what have you) is first-come-first-serve, with the first person to reach the node and tag it gaining all of the rewards, while anyone else who was fighting through a group of mobs to get there left with their hands in their pockets. Not so in GW2, where everyone can collect from a node; if someone else mines an ore vein before you get there, it’ll still be available on your map when you reach the location. That eliminates one of the more frustrating experiences in WoW, where you’d see an ore vein on your minimap and make a beeline, only to see someone else scooting away as the ore vanishes in front of your eyes. (I am curious if multi-botting farmers dominate the economy as time goes on; if you can net together five warriors, you’ll be getting five times the resources in the same amount of time. I assume Arenanet will take an anti-multiboxing stance for that reason alone.)

Yay! Stuff!

Those two major changes seem to have allowed the developers to pack many more players into one server instance than in any other game I can ever recall, WoW included; at times it feels like I’m on a Japanese subway platform at rush hour. Granted, it is launch week, and the player base will ebb over time (although the game should avoid the first-month player exodus due to the lack of subscriptions), but the world feels chock-full of players, all of which are fighting towards the same goals as you. That is almost always a positive thing, as you never need to spend time plaintively beseeching guildmates to help you with a tough quest; just wait around and someone will surely come along who needs it as well.

The drawback, so far, is a somewhat ironic lack of a community feeling to the game. Part of the charm of TOR and WoW is precisely the fact that it often made more sense to team up with other players in parties, which in turn made it easier to learn their names, chat with them, see what other quests they had to do that you might share with them, and so on. I’ve managed around 50 cumulative levels across my four characters in GW2, and I’ve only been in a party twice, and only one of those was strictly necessary. That makes the game world feel like a true massively-multiplayer experience, but one in which you’re often just a cog in a great adventuring machine. That’s not necessarily always a bad thing, though (and there’s always guild chat to keep you entertained), and to me the benefits far outweigh the negatives.

The list of features that I love could go on and on, but I’d be remiss not to call out the “deposit all collectibles” feature in the inventory, which makes gathering crafting items a painless proposition, and the way the game encourages exploration by giving you a bevy of things to do in every corner of the map. It’s a game that just feels extremely well thought-out from a design standpoint, and technically it’s performed almost flawlessly as well, with a few hiccups here and there. (Get that auction house up already!)

My main concern for the rest of my time in Tyria is actually varying up the gameplay experience as I climb towards 80. You can unlock all of the weapon skills available to your character fairly early on, and after that the only customization that you can really do are change up your utility skills and invest in traits. Trait bonuses are mostly passive, as far as I can tell, and many of the utility skills have lengthy cooldowns, meaning that they don’t really make a huge difference in the blow-by-blow of combat. All of which means that most fights see me using the same two or three skills (not including my autoattack) repeatedly until something dies. You can change weapons, of course, and even switch them in the middle of combat, but I rarely find myself doing so, as I generally go with a combination of a strong single-target weapon and one that’s better at AOE fighting, and those elements rarely seem to mix all that much in any given fight.

So far, it looks like the Giant Bomb guilds have chosen the right server to play on. 

In other words, I worry a bit about the game getting boring after the thousandth skirmish, and I sometimes wish the utility skills were a bit flashier or could be used more often. Even the class special skills sometimes feel underwhelming; the warrior’s special is basically just an extra, more powerful attack, and the thief’s stealing ability feels frustratingly random. They sometimes feel as though they were designed for flavor rather than for fun (and they’re all thematically pretty spot-on), which is defensible, but I’d rather have a good balance of the two.

Anyway, as I write I keep thinking of things I want to laud in Guild Wars 2. The game, again, isn’t a revolution in MMO design, but it does a lot of things better than any MMO that’s come before, and really feels like the first one that I’ve played that can stand up against WoW in the long run. I’d still give WoW the edge in overall fun factor, simply because I like the combat mechanics better (given that you can bind and use dozens of actions in combat, rather than the limited options available to you in GW2), but we’ll see what the future holds. For now, it’s easily recommendable as a purchase, especially without the monthly fee structure.

What do you guys think of GW2 so far? It seems to have gotten more buzz than any PC game in recent memory, so I’m curious to hear your thoughts. 

Syndicate’s a pretty weird experience, but a generally pleasurable one. I’m never one to get all up in arms about FPS reboots of beloved PC classics (mostly because I know that there’s approximately zero chance of a top-down Fallout or Syndicate getting made by a major publisher today), but I do at least demand some kind of fidelity to the source material. I have really fond personal memories of the older games, and even some mildly professional ones: the first game I ever wrote walkthroughs for was Syndicate Wars, posting them on the old Bullfrog messageboards wayyy back when. So I like Syndicate. I like the world especially, even if it is an astoundingly amoral one, perhaps because it’s a world and an amorality that I find, if not likely, then at least plausible. 

I sure hope Rosario Dawson bought herself something nice with her VA salary.

That amorality is somewhat muted in the new Syndicate: it freely allows you to gun down civilians, but only rarely gives you any civilians to actually kill, and often ensures that they’re already dead by the time you encounter them. That’s a reprehensible sentence, of course, with its implication that Syndicate would be better if only there were more innocents to kill, but it’s interesting to see how they toned down that aspect of the series, perhaps after the backlash to Modern Warfare 2’s infamous airport level. I’m not going to argue that the original games were solely about wholesale slaughter of innocent civilians, but certainly they made the point that the civilian population in no way were intended to stand between you and your goal of fucking up a rival megacorp. 

To be fair, I guess Syndicate 2012 attempts to broach this subject by making it clear that there’s no repercussions to your executing innocents, and by showing Merit’s joyful little cleansing of the passenger train, as well as by illustrating civilians getting gunned down by your rival corporations. Still, the game attempts to make a fairly clunky attempt at moralizing late in the game, when your (completely silent) character is finally shown in the third-person viewpoint, illustrating his face as he pummels down a man that had been on the verge of killing you moments before. Cut to you looking down at your blood-soaked hands as you presumably can’t believe what you’ve been compelled to do. As drama, it’s a moment that feels wholly unearned considering the events leading up to it, especially since the game glosses over almost all of the motivations of its lead character (and especially if you’ve made a habit of shooting civilians yourself), making the “what have I done?” reveal feel extremely forced. Imagine if a Half-Life game had featured Gordon Freeman bludgeoning another character to death with his crowbar, then pulling back into a third-person view as he curses god, fists to the sky. It wouldn’t work there (it really wouldn’t work there, actually), and it doesn’t work here, either. Either respect the silent protagonist/strict-first-person viewpoint aesthetic, or don’t; you can’t betray that at the very end of your game and expect people not to laugh at you. 

Civilians don’t matter. 

Mechanically, though, I really enjoyed Syndicate, even if the amount of buttons that you’re required to press simultaneously during combat made me reach for my controller rather than use the mouse and keyboard. The various hacking powers you get are useful and enjoyable to pound out during combat, although the fact that you only have three of them seems to indicate that there may have been a decent amount of material cut from the game. It’s a game that feels like it’s had some editing done to it somewhere in between the conception of its story and the beta phase of development: it doesn’t feel like anything has been hacked out of it, but it still feels as though there were a few missions cut from the game, probably from the latter half of it. It’s a game that seems content to walk at a normal pace as you get started, only to eventually start sprinting towards the finish line before you really get a feel for what’s going on behind the scenes of the story. The game is only five hours long, after all; perhaps that indicates that there was a lot of manpower dedicated to the co-op play, but it still feels like a campaign with a lacuna. It feels as though there should’ve been some optional hacking abilities that you could substitute for the three that are available to you, and the way that you can only access perhaps a third or half of the upgrade slots also makes me think that the game was originally intended to be longer. 

That said, it’s a good-looking and relatively bug-free experience on PC, and I can’t argue with the six dollars that I paid for it. It’s also nice that Starbreeze wasn’t afraid to make the game actually challenging; even on normal difficulty I found myself dying to regular enemies with some regularity, and the boss fights were an exercise in trial-and-error before you figured out their patterns. (I guess some critics took issue with this, but I’ve always liked puzzle bosses that require you try new things and interact with the environment.) The original Syndicate games were really hard, with American Revolt being perhaps the hardest PC game I can ever recall playing (never even got close to finishing it, in fact), so it was interesting to see them take a bit of a hard line and force players to think tactically to get past the waves of enemies, rather than simply forging ahead. Most modern games I can play through without dying at all on the default difficulties, so Syndicate was a welcome refresher in that sense. 

I was promised that our hacking cyber-future would include Angelina Jolie. 

Syndicate didn’t do well, reportedly only selling 150,000 copies worldwide, so it’s not surprising to see it so heavily discounted so quickly. It also probably suffered from being released in the wake of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, a game which touched on most of the same points as Syndicate, but did so with a better combat system and story and characters, etc., etc. There’s room for more than one cyber-dystopia in gaming, and the Syndicate franchise deserves credit for being among the most pessimistic of them, so it’s a shame that this is probably the last game in the series. 

I really liked The Intouchables as I was watching it; it took me a while to realize precisely why I shouldn’t like it. Knowing that you shouldn’t like something is a bit different than actually not liking something, of course, and getting from point A to point B is sometimes interrupted by complicating factors. 

We’re always laughing, you and me!

To wit: The Intouchables is the latest in a long, long line of films featuring people complacently living their comfortable but boring lives until someone from the other comes along and befriends them, shocks them, knocks them out of their comfort zone, shows them that life isn’t all just about silk pillows and fur coats, and maybe, just maybe, teaches them how to love again. It’s hardly a rarity in the movie biz, where you can define a member of “the other” as being just about anyone. A hispanic maid teaches a senate candidate how to really love. A movie star can only find real affection with a humble London bookseller. A group of New Yorkers are taught that the big city lifestyle is nothing compared to good old-fashioned down-home living. A human and a Drac are stranded on a remote planet and learn to overcome their differences. Etc, etc. 

Anyway, it’s far from an uncommon plot device, and The Intouchables, for all its fairly astounding success (it grossed almost $400 million worldwide before it even appeared on American shores), plays it more or less down the party line, offering little in the way of surprise, but offering up a fair amount of heart in exchange. As a quick summation, a rich quadriplegic Parisian (Philippe, played wonderfully as always by Francois Cluzet (of Tell No One, still my favorite thriller of the last decade or so)) is on the market for a new live-in chaffeur/butler/valet, and decides to hire, on the opposition of pretty much everyone in his household, a young African man (Driss, played by Omar Sy, who won the equivalent of a French Oscar for his performance) with few qualifications but a remarkable lack of pity.

It’s that lack of pity that Philippe is apparently attracted to in Driss, in that he doesn’t want to be treated like a fragile doll that’ll be broken if handled wrongly. It’s a relationship that is understandably rocky, with Driss barely comprehending the high-class lifestyle that Philippe is accustomed (affecting shock at the amount of money he’s willing to pay for modern art, etc.), and Philippe never quite relating to Driss’ attitude, brought straight from the Parisian streets. It’s a testy relationship that mellows out over time, thanks to Driss’ unaffected attitude and, well, his willingness to share marijuana with Philippe. It evolves into a friendship, of course, but an uneasy one, with each side never quite knowing what to think about the other. Or, perhaps, each side thinks they know what to make of the other half, only to find themselves confounded again and again, Philippe by Driss’ oddly savvy worldview, and Driss by Philippe’s fight to overcome his physical boundaries. 

Yep, still laughing!

It’s a sweet movie, with a lot of laughter and enjoyment to be found, which is why it’s mildly disappointing that it all feels so…standard. My main issue with the film is that none of the challenges these characters face wind up feeling like challenges at all; they mostly come across as plot impediments, to be written away as soon as their appearance becomes an impedence to the overall good-natured feeling of the film. To wit (and some spoilers ensue): Driss feels that Philippe’s daughter is disrespectful, and that she needs a “talking to”; Philippe duly delivers a stern speech to his daughter, whose behavior is never again a problem. That same daughter is later lovelorn over the betrayal of affection of her erstwhile boyfriend; upon learning of this, Driss threatens him with bodily harm, at which point the boyfriend begins showing up with baked goods every day at her house and promises to be good. Perhaps most laughable, Driss’ brother is caught up in what is implied to be a gang of drug dealers; Driss gives them all a stern stare-down, and they drive off, never to be seen again. The Wire, this ain’t. 

All of those examples speak to a relatively laid-back feel for The Intouchables; this isn’t a movie that is all that concerned with challenging an audience, but rather one that wants to make you feel right uplifted by the power of a will zum Leben, as Schopenhauer would put it: the desire for a man to live. Philippe has few reasons to continue his existence, as a particularly morbid conversation between he and Driss make clear: Driss opines that he would put a gun in his mouth were he in the quadriplegic shoes of Philippe, to which Philippe replies that such an action would be particularly difficult, considering that he can’t move his hands. But the back-and-forth between the two men is the film’s strongest aspect, and it wisely keeps them at the forefront of the “action,” so to speak. 

Regardless of the scattered plotting, The Intouchables relies on the sheer likeness of its cast and the willingness of an audience to follow them on a journey that we know is going to be enjoyable. It’s a film that treads dangerously close to Hollywood predictability (as opposed to a more French ambiguity), and perhaps even engages in it forwardly at moments. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t entirely enjoyable, and funny, and moving. It’s just a shame that it wasn’t more rigorously plotted to avoid some of the weaknesses in the script. And yes, I know it was based on a real story, although I’m sure enough liberties were taken with the real stories that a few more could’ve been added to accomodate a more strenuous screenwriting process. 

All of which makes me wonder if the film might’ve suffered at the hands of Harvey Scissorhands, as Harvey Weinstein is often known with regard to his propensity to recut foreign films for American audiences. I would assume that the American audience for foreign films has become a bit too cultured for such editing hackjobs to continue, but I remain hopeful that some magisterial director’s cut will appear on the Blu-Ray, padding out some of the softer arcs in the film without weakening the main thrust of the piece. If that happens, well, this could easily be considered among my favorite films of the year. In its present state, The Intouchables is still an easy recommendation for a Blu-Ray rental, if not a trip out to the theater. There’s a lot of genuine feeling to the film…you know, if you’re into that sort of thing. 

I never got the chance to play Alan Wake on Xbox, but, now that I’ve picked it up on Steam, I’m fairly glad that I missed it. That…sounds strange, I think: I actually liked the game quite a bit, but I’m glad I waited for the PC port, since it was one of the better PC ports to come along in recent memory. It’s superlative, really; it runs beautifully on high settings and looks pretty spectacular to boot, without a single crash or glitch sticking in my memory. In truth, it’s been a pretty good few years for PC ports, but Alan Wake seems to be at the upper end of the range of quality. Borderlands probably comes in near the bottom, at least of the games that I’ve played; any game that actually forces you to open ports to play multiplayer deserves all the scorn it got, even if it was fairly fun once you fixed the FOV problems. The middle ground is filled with Skyrim-like games that are serviceable ports: relatively uncomplicated, but not doing much to take advantage of the PC platform. (While Skyrim was perfectly playable, its UI was pretty bad on the PC, and it took them quite a while to release that high-res textures pack, if I recall.)

Hmm, a wide-open area with a bunch of explosive barrels? There couldn’t be an ambush coming, could there?

Anyway, Alan Wake was fairly fun, although it’s also interesting to consider it as a piece with American Nightmare, which is an odd example of iterative gameplay in that the follow-up DLC makes some pretty drastic changes to its predecessor’s gameplay and overall style. It’s difficult to get into the minutia unless you’ve played both games, and I feel like a bit of a philistine when I say that American Nightmare feels like the kind of game that I’d much prefer to play again, given the choice. If you’ve played Alan Wake, but not American Nightmare, here are some of the basic changes: 

• Flashlight charges much more rapidly, going to full strength within a couple of seconds of being drained. The flashlight doesn’t grant any darkness-busting powers unless it’s focused this time around, but you still only need batteries in dire emergencies. 
• You can sprint for a longer duration before getting tired. Like, much longer: probably 4x the time/distance, at least. Makes a pretty large tactical difference.
• Many more weapons to choose from, especially in the handgun slot (magnum, 9mm, SMG, etc.)
• An ammo change that eliminates most ammo boxes to being either for big guns or small guns; no more separate shotgun/rifle ammo, in other words. If you find a box of small-gun ammo, it’ll fill up your SMG or Magnum or 9mm, regardless of what you’re carrying. 
• Larger maps that enable you to freely roam/explore a bit. Alan Wake did a good job of hiding its linearity with excursions to hidden chests and goodies, but my appetite for exploration was hampered by some poor checkpoint placement, meaning that I’d sometime go a minute or two to find a hidden chest, return to the path, die, and then have to do it all over again. The three maps in American Nightmare are much more free-form, even if you will sometimes go poking around without finding anything. 
• Speaking of items, you’re much more restricted in the amount of items you can carry, with a maximum of five flares/flashbangs in your pockets, and seemingly much fewer flaregun rounds to be found. Flashbangs were also greatly nerfed, in that they’ll strip away enemies’ darkness shield without killing them outright, and even the flaregun doesn’t feel like the BFG it was previously. This helps balance out the sprint/flashlight buff. 
• Many fewer cutscenes. This is a big bonus in my eyes. 

I really have no idea what kind of feedback Remedy got regarding the original Alan Wake, but I assume that most of the changes above were reactions to people’s impressions of the first game, almost all of said changes are positive, in my eyes. I liked Alan Wake well enough, when I was actually playing it, but the cutscene frequency was a bit ponderous, and they were pre-rendered, so you couldn’t skip a line in a conversation without skipping the entire thing. In American Nightmare, most conversations are in-engine, with a short initial conversation that told you the bare minimum, and optional back-and-forths that you can pursue if you really want. (It is a bit funny that all of the people you encounter are sexy ladies, regardless of whether they’re mechanics or astronomers or art festival directors, but you can forgive that when you realize that American Nightmare is suppose to literally be an episode of a television show, unlike Alan Wake, which never seemed to know what it wanted to do with its “episode” structure, aside from making it more easy to generate DLC.)

“Comic relief”

American Nightmare isn’t as strong, plot-wise, as Alan Wake, but then, I didn’t think Alan Wake was necessarily all that brilliant anyway. The actual gameplay was what occasionally spooked me out; the creepy lady in black and the rest of it didn’t really do much for me. American Nightmare also benefits greatly from a lack of Barry, Alan’s obnoxious sidekick from the original game. I railed against him on Twitter, and was roundly told by many a person that I’d like him better by the end of the game, but nope! Pretty much annoying all the way through the game. Barely standable, to the point where I debated not even finishing the game when I was subjected to the lengthy farm sequence where he’s your sidekick. That’s aside from the general over-reliance on Stephen King tropes to drive its plot. I don’t particularly care about Alan Wake’s fiction, in other words; I mostly enjoy it for the actual gameplay. After a while I even found myself skipping cutscenes outright. 

Another sticking point for me was the preponderance of manuscript pages to be found and read. There was a bit of a quandary for me here: I’m sure that the game intends for you to read the manuscript pages as you pick them up, but when they started revealing what was going to happen to people before I had actually encountered those events, I figured that it was better to just pick them up and leave them unread. (I’ve done the same thing in American Nightmare, which seems to realize that maybe the whole system was screwy to begin with, since it gives you another reason to find the pages: they unlock weapons chests with more powerful weapons in them, whether you’ve read them or not.) I don’t particularly mind supplementary info and world-building textual documents in games (you can bet I read all the newspapers and emails in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, for instance), but when a game starts explicitly spoiling events that haven’t even happened yet, that…is weird. 

My eyes are up here, Mr. Wake. 

To be fair, American Nightmare does recycle a fair amount of content, making you play through the same areas multiple times thanks to a “time loop” plot. Since the game was originally a DLC-exclusive, I can see the need to cut down on the filesize, and since you spend far more time fighting things than watching cutscenes, I don’t mind it all that much. It feels less challenging than Alan Wake did, thanks to the preponderance of ammo, but that’s not so terrible since it allows you to fight more enemies more often. 

For the $7.50 or whatever that I wound up paying for it, it’s hard not to consider Alan Wake to be a pretty damn good deal. I don’t particularly think it’s presentation or story are all that hot, but it’s easy enough to skip everything you might not care about in favor of shooting up some Taken. At the same time, you know that the folks at Remedy had to have had some bitter discussions on the changes made for American Nightmare. It’s entirely possible that the stripped-down feel to it might be a result of a much smaller budget, but in the end I hope they incorporate most of the design decisions from it into whatever Alan Wake 2 happens to become. 

It’s become apparently lately that practically all of my favorite foodstuffs incorporate melted cheese as a motif. Witness the glory of the grilled cheese sandwich! Marvel at the miraculous quesadilla! Ponder fondue! Nosh on nachos! Calculate the cost of calzone! And thrill at the omnipotent might of the king of rations, PIZZA!

I mean, I’m a cheese guy in general, but lately I’ve been reconsidering and recalculating my food intake on a number of levels, in terms of cutting down on both calories and cost. In the end, I went through one of my grilled cheese phases (which have been recurring since childhood), and now I’ve been subsisting largely on quesadillas for the past couple of weeks. They aren’t all that dissimilar, of course, with carbs and proteins and fats in various proportions. But quesadillas, which I’ve never made in any quantity before, seem to be far easier to make than grilled cheese, as they need no butter on the skillet and can safely be left alone for a couple minutes at a time with just a flip or two before they’re ready to eat. 

Pac-Man never imagined he’d see the afterlife as a quesadilla. 

I figure each quesadilla is probably around 300 calories between the tortilla and the cheese, so I’ve been trying to stick to eating one maybe every three hours or so to stick to around 2,000 calories a day. That, plus the fact that you can eat relatively easily on five dollars a day if you’re shopping at Trader Joes for the ingredients, makes it a fairly economical supply of calories. I’m not going to claim that it’s a balanced diet, but I try to make up for it with one-a-days, and even when I splurge on treats like Its-Its I’m still saving money compared to when I used to spend seven bucks on pizza three nights a week. I’d probably be able to get by on even less money if I resorted to eating nothing but Cup-o-Noodles, but I’m pretty sure I’d start sweating sodium if I did that. 

Anyway, for all you melted cheese aficianados out there, I’m curious what your favorite stuffings are. I have obviously experimented with chicken, but that bold taste isn’t enough to keep me satisfied: lately I’ve tried red peppers (makes the ‘dilla a little soggy for my taste), onions (funky), and spinach (actually pretty good!), matched with shredded four-cheese Mexican mix from Trader Jose’s. I almost always top them with salsa, but I’m willing to bend if they taste good enough on their own. What’s your favorite thing to throw into a quesadilla, should you have an opinion? I need to spice these things up before I get sick of them.