This is quite a tricky one.
Often, having a bad plot will completely spoil a game. Usually to the point where I refuse to play the damn thing. I really enjoyed the first Star Trek: Elite Force, for example. I was quite young at the time, it's not my fault. Anyway, the sequel came out and I was quite looking forward to it, right up until the end of the opening cinematic which was so trite and badly written I couldn't bring myself to play it.
This is the case with a lot of games. Singularity is a more recent example. However, there are some good games out there with utterly dire plots. Here are a few of them:
1) Half Life 2
This one is a particular bug bear of mine. The plot here isn't exactly bad so much as it is *completely* absent. This was okay in Half Life 1 because you always had the general objective of escaping. Here, though, you're just blundering from one set piece to another with no real idea why you're doing anything or who the hell all these people bossing you around are.
2) Far Cry 2
This one would slip into the -completely absent plot- box with Half Life 2 were it not for the end. Spoiler warning. At the end of Far Cry 2, you meet up with the Jackall who explains that his overall objective was always to get the civilians out of this horrible war torn country. You spend the last act of the game helping him evacuate the civilians.
Anyone who hasn't played Far Cry 2 will think that sounds reasonable but it's important to point out that The Jackall is pretty much entirely responsible for arming the two waring factions in this nameless African state. To put it simply, the civilians wouldn't have needed to evacuate if he hadn't flooded the country with cheap, reliable firearms. This is such a pathetic attempt to tag a HAPPY ENDING on to what was gearing up to one of the most depressing games of all time that the person responsible should be slapped. In the balls. Hard.
3) Assassins Creed 2
Admittedly, AC 2 isn't a stunning game - there's far too much faffing about - but it is solid in many ways. The plot, however, isn't. At the start, your family get murdered in the standard - Trusted Family Friend Sells You Out For Power - way that even I saw coming. From there, things just disolve into a gigantic mess. Leonardo Da Vinci is your mate and makes you stuff and there's some conspiracy where people are trying to do... something... I was never really clear who the people I was assassinating had done or were planning to do but they all did the evil voice so they must have done something...
4) Assassins Creed 1
Doesn't have an ending
5) Crysis
Ditto
6) AVP
Cracked recently lamented the business practaces of Weyland-Yutani but AVP is the height of bullshit Corperations Are Evil nonsense.
Now, I'm a massive anti capitalist. I occasionally describe myself as an anarchist, although I'm well aware that anarchism can't work as a system without a series of very, very small non-interlocking comunities. Films/games bashing on about the dangers of corperations are preaching to the choir as far as I'm concerned but in AVP it just *doesnt make any damn sense*. Why have they captured the aliens? What do they hope to gain from their research? Why are they doing any of this when they have combat mechs with miniguns?
These questions are present in Alien, Aliens and the less good follow ups but they're never more inescapable than they are in AVP because there so little else going on to distract you from how shitty the plot is.
Monday, 30 August 2010
Friday, 27 August 2010
Mafia 2
Mafia came out way back in the day, at around about the same time GTA 3 came out. I loved it at the time. I found the realism really charming - I think I'm pretty much the only person who enjoyed driving under the speed limit, stopping at reds and then waiting for the cops to move out of eyeshot and gunning my engine. The plot was nicely mature as well. It's always impressive when a script manages to write about the Mafia and doesn't have the main characters come across as *total* dick heads.
So I just completed Mafia 2....
Hm.
On the one hand, I completed it, which is pretty impressive considering it's:
1) Set in the 1940's and 1950's
2) a third person cover shooter
3) an open world game
All three of those elements usually work severely against a game on their own, in my mind, when all three are present, I thought it would have spelt the kiss of death for the game.
I don't know if it was a sense of nostalgia about the first game or whether it was the fact that, once again, the main characters were generally quite likable and had decent motivation but I found myself liking it.
What did help was that it's not *exactly* an open world game. There aren't really any random subquests you can do. You can't get in a cop car and catch criminals or any of that other bollocks GTA and the like have you doing. This means that the focus of the game is very clearly on the main plot and the gameplay.
There are a few problems with it, though.
The big one is the AI. It's completely broken. Cops often couldn't see me stealing a car from across the street, enemies would occasionaly stand there and gaze lovingly at me whilst I shot their mates... At no point did I think that the enemies were in any way inteligent.
Then there's the problem of the realism... The murderous difficulty from the first game has been kept, as has the thing about keeping under the speed limit. Sadly, you can run red lights as much as you like. Most annoyingly, though, if you commit a crim in front of a cop, like killing someone, all the other cops magically know about it. In the first game, they had to get to a phone to call it in. Now, not being an expert in history, I don't know when cop cars were outfitted with radios but I suspect it wasn't the 50s. As a result, it feels pretty damn cheap.
Lastly, the plot is... a bit... meh. The broad plot is quite well done, there are a nice number of twisty bits but I felt the lack of any definite baddie... for most of the game my character was just bumbling through the game world with no real plan or ambition other than getting cash, cars and broads.
It was a fun game and given how little else is out at the moment it's probably worth an investment but... there are a good number of things wrong with it. If it'd come out six months ago, I'd have completely ignored it but it had the good fortune to come out in the anual june-november computer games drought.
So I just completed Mafia 2....
Hm.
On the one hand, I completed it, which is pretty impressive considering it's:
1) Set in the 1940's and 1950's
2) a third person cover shooter
3) an open world game
All three of those elements usually work severely against a game on their own, in my mind, when all three are present, I thought it would have spelt the kiss of death for the game.
I don't know if it was a sense of nostalgia about the first game or whether it was the fact that, once again, the main characters were generally quite likable and had decent motivation but I found myself liking it.
What did help was that it's not *exactly* an open world game. There aren't really any random subquests you can do. You can't get in a cop car and catch criminals or any of that other bollocks GTA and the like have you doing. This means that the focus of the game is very clearly on the main plot and the gameplay.
There are a few problems with it, though.
The big one is the AI. It's completely broken. Cops often couldn't see me stealing a car from across the street, enemies would occasionaly stand there and gaze lovingly at me whilst I shot their mates... At no point did I think that the enemies were in any way inteligent.
Then there's the problem of the realism... The murderous difficulty from the first game has been kept, as has the thing about keeping under the speed limit. Sadly, you can run red lights as much as you like. Most annoyingly, though, if you commit a crim in front of a cop, like killing someone, all the other cops magically know about it. In the first game, they had to get to a phone to call it in. Now, not being an expert in history, I don't know when cop cars were outfitted with radios but I suspect it wasn't the 50s. As a result, it feels pretty damn cheap.
Lastly, the plot is... a bit... meh. The broad plot is quite well done, there are a nice number of twisty bits but I felt the lack of any definite baddie... for most of the game my character was just bumbling through the game world with no real plan or ambition other than getting cash, cars and broads.
It was a fun game and given how little else is out at the moment it's probably worth an investment but... there are a good number of things wrong with it. If it'd come out six months ago, I'd have completely ignored it but it had the good fortune to come out in the anual june-november computer games drought.
Friday, 20 August 2010
Salt
I'll be very surprised if I get through this without severe plot spoilers.
I want to see some Chinese TV shows. Or films. Something.
The reason for this is... America is one of two superpowers in the world. The other is China.
We're swamped by American media, over here, and one thing pops up over and over and over again: The Superpower Victim Mentality.
To explain:
In the world today, the USA is safe. Safe safe safe safe. They get the odd act of terrorism but hey, don't we all. It's nothing compared to what they're doing to other countries throughout the world, either through military or economic means.
In the world of films, though, the USA is constantly under attack from Muslims, communists or white supremacists. The country is never more than a few explosions away from being successfully invaded by all those nasty foreigners.
Why? What are you talking about? They're foreigners, they're jealous of us. We haven't done anything to deserve the hatred of... probably half the countries on the earth.
Put simply, the USA of Hollywood sees itself as a victim. A blushing belle who does no wrong, always under threat from those BASTARDS who speak a different language.
That's why I want to watch some stuff from China. I want to know if all Superpowers have this ridiculous doublethink going on. The "Nothing can hurt us" of Bill O'Riley and the "We're seconds away from those BASTARDS bringing our country down" of the films...
As a direct result of this, we get films like Salt. Salt, and films like it, are convinced that the cold war is still going. They truly believe that Russia still intends to invade the USA. Watching Salt is like watching a film from the 2010's with a script written in the 1950s. It really is that jingoistic.
Okay, so the plot goes:
Salt is a CIA agent. A Ruskie enters her CIA office and says she's part of a Russian scheme that planted agents throughout America to blow it up. He then escapes. Salt does too, to try and find her husband. Salt then "kills" the Russian President (she actually doesn't. It's all a clever trick), finds her Russian Handler (the chap who outed her) kills him and averts a nuclear disaster almost set off by her mate at the CIA, who was also a Russian Spy.
Okay, so the one bold move this film made was having Salt actually be a Russian Spy. Everything else was tedious and predictable. The action scenes were actually pretty good but it was hard to enjoy them because the plot was so terrible.
Anyway, I was sitting there, bored, watching this xenophobic piece of crap thinking - I wonder why I think it's bold that Salt is actually a Russian spy?-.
Then it struck me... it's because, plot wise, it doesn't make any damn sense.
The Russian plan does work, up to a point. You get sleeper agents to infiltrate the CIA then, at a point decided by their handler, get one of them to assassinate the president of Russia. It'll spark tension between the nations. I'm really not sure what Russia gets out of this other than a dead president but whatever, we'll run with it.
Where it all breaks down is... Literally any other way of activating the agent would have been preferable to what they actually did. The handler tells Salt that it's time to kill the Russian president by walking into her place of work, identifying himself by name, telling the CIA all about this secret program, telling them that his operation is going to try and kill the Russian President and fingering Salt as the one that's supposed to do it.
Here's some things he could have done instead that might have worked better:
1) Used a contact in the news services to broadcast a fake news broadcast that would trigger the agents
2) Written Salt a letter
3) Spoken to her on the phone
4) Talked to her in a Starbucks
5) Written "time to kill the Russian President, chaps" on the moon.
None of those things I've listed would have been half as damaging to his plan as what he actually did.
The film does attempt to explain this away, in the final act, where Salt's CIA mate says that he persuaded the handler to out Salt as a spy so the CIA mate would get all the glory and Salt would get all the blame. There are three problems with this:
1) It doesn't make any sense
2) Russian operatives attempting to destroy the US really aren't in it for the glory
3) The CIA mate, for some reason, doesn't kill the US president. This means that the president would be able to finger the CIA mate as the real perpetrator anyway.
So yeah, the entire premise of the film doesn't work.
I would have been able to run with this if the film had had any courage of its convictions. I was praying the entire way through for the Russians to succeed - for the nukes to go off. Why? Well it would be something not entirely predictable, which is a plus. There are several other reasons but most of them involved me wanting to jolt this stupid fucking film out of its self satisfied tone.
There's something really *nasty* about this sort of film. It's the whole race against time aspect where everything's so hopelessly predictable. The baddies have everything set up so perfectly the way their plans are foiled have to be ridiculously contrived. In this case, the nukes don't go off because the time from the CIA mate selecting the targets till the launch button being available for use is (and I wish I was kidding here) ten sodding minutes. Nothing is happening in these ten minutes, just a percentage bar of encryption, or something, creeping from 0% to 100% like some hideous parody of a windows operating system. Die Hard 4 had a similar problem.
In Salt's defense, the AV club has reviewed it and said that whilst the plot is *completely* ridiculous, the action scenes help save it. I suspect if you're an American you'll be able to stomach the jingoism a lot more than the rest of us. As for me, I wish I'd gone to see The Expendables instead...
I want to see some Chinese TV shows. Or films. Something.
The reason for this is... America is one of two superpowers in the world. The other is China.
We're swamped by American media, over here, and one thing pops up over and over and over again: The Superpower Victim Mentality.
To explain:
In the world today, the USA is safe. Safe safe safe safe. They get the odd act of terrorism but hey, don't we all. It's nothing compared to what they're doing to other countries throughout the world, either through military or economic means.
In the world of films, though, the USA is constantly under attack from Muslims, communists or white supremacists. The country is never more than a few explosions away from being successfully invaded by all those nasty foreigners.
Why? What are you talking about? They're foreigners, they're jealous of us. We haven't done anything to deserve the hatred of... probably half the countries on the earth.
Put simply, the USA of Hollywood sees itself as a victim. A blushing belle who does no wrong, always under threat from those BASTARDS who speak a different language.
That's why I want to watch some stuff from China. I want to know if all Superpowers have this ridiculous doublethink going on. The "Nothing can hurt us" of Bill O'Riley and the "We're seconds away from those BASTARDS bringing our country down" of the films...
As a direct result of this, we get films like Salt. Salt, and films like it, are convinced that the cold war is still going. They truly believe that Russia still intends to invade the USA. Watching Salt is like watching a film from the 2010's with a script written in the 1950s. It really is that jingoistic.
Okay, so the plot goes:
Salt is a CIA agent. A Ruskie enters her CIA office and says she's part of a Russian scheme that planted agents throughout America to blow it up. He then escapes. Salt does too, to try and find her husband. Salt then "kills" the Russian President (she actually doesn't. It's all a clever trick), finds her Russian Handler (the chap who outed her) kills him and averts a nuclear disaster almost set off by her mate at the CIA, who was also a Russian Spy.
Okay, so the one bold move this film made was having Salt actually be a Russian Spy. Everything else was tedious and predictable. The action scenes were actually pretty good but it was hard to enjoy them because the plot was so terrible.
Anyway, I was sitting there, bored, watching this xenophobic piece of crap thinking - I wonder why I think it's bold that Salt is actually a Russian spy?-.
Then it struck me... it's because, plot wise, it doesn't make any damn sense.
The Russian plan does work, up to a point. You get sleeper agents to infiltrate the CIA then, at a point decided by their handler, get one of them to assassinate the president of Russia. It'll spark tension between the nations. I'm really not sure what Russia gets out of this other than a dead president but whatever, we'll run with it.
Where it all breaks down is... Literally any other way of activating the agent would have been preferable to what they actually did. The handler tells Salt that it's time to kill the Russian president by walking into her place of work, identifying himself by name, telling the CIA all about this secret program, telling them that his operation is going to try and kill the Russian President and fingering Salt as the one that's supposed to do it.
Here's some things he could have done instead that might have worked better:
1) Used a contact in the news services to broadcast a fake news broadcast that would trigger the agents
2) Written Salt a letter
3) Spoken to her on the phone
4) Talked to her in a Starbucks
5) Written "time to kill the Russian President, chaps" on the moon.
None of those things I've listed would have been half as damaging to his plan as what he actually did.
The film does attempt to explain this away, in the final act, where Salt's CIA mate says that he persuaded the handler to out Salt as a spy so the CIA mate would get all the glory and Salt would get all the blame. There are three problems with this:
1) It doesn't make any sense
2) Russian operatives attempting to destroy the US really aren't in it for the glory
3) The CIA mate, for some reason, doesn't kill the US president. This means that the president would be able to finger the CIA mate as the real perpetrator anyway.
So yeah, the entire premise of the film doesn't work.
I would have been able to run with this if the film had had any courage of its convictions. I was praying the entire way through for the Russians to succeed - for the nukes to go off. Why? Well it would be something not entirely predictable, which is a plus. There are several other reasons but most of them involved me wanting to jolt this stupid fucking film out of its self satisfied tone.
There's something really *nasty* about this sort of film. It's the whole race against time aspect where everything's so hopelessly predictable. The baddies have everything set up so perfectly the way their plans are foiled have to be ridiculously contrived. In this case, the nukes don't go off because the time from the CIA mate selecting the targets till the launch button being available for use is (and I wish I was kidding here) ten sodding minutes. Nothing is happening in these ten minutes, just a percentage bar of encryption, or something, creeping from 0% to 100% like some hideous parody of a windows operating system. Die Hard 4 had a similar problem.
In Salt's defense, the AV club has reviewed it and said that whilst the plot is *completely* ridiculous, the action scenes help save it. I suspect if you're an American you'll be able to stomach the jingoism a lot more than the rest of us. As for me, I wish I'd gone to see The Expendables instead...
Tuesday, 3 August 2010
Star Wars
I recently pirated 87 gigabytes of Rifftrax because I got fed up with trying to sync the audio files I got off their site up to the films manually. Thankfully, they're sensible chaps and leave a donation button on their website precisely for people like me.
Anyway, I was watching the Rifftrack of Star Wars Episode 4: A New Hope and something struck me:
Star Wars is easily the least Sci Fi film I've ever seen that is still set in space.
I'm not even talking about the difference between soft and hardcore sci fi. I'm not enough of a sci fi geek to know the difference but I assume it's like the difference between Firefly and Battlestar Galactica.
Anyway, I'm supposed to be talking about Star Wars.
I was watching the bit where Han Solo's ship gets nabbed by the death star. Several things happen that made me go -hang on a minute-
The guys hide from the imperial soldiers by hiding under the floorboards of their ship.
They then sneak around the death star by beating up a couple of stormtroopers and stealing their uniforms.
The officers in charge don't notice because they're trying to confirm that the stormtroopers are okay over the fucking RADIO.
Now, I don't know about you, but that all stinks to high hell of a World War 2 film, to me. Switch the words "death star" for "nazi destroyer" and you're there.
This really annoys me. I don't like Star Wars, and haven't done since I re-watched eps 4 and 6 a few years ago but... I don't know. It seems that every time I re-watch bits here and there they've gotten even worse.
It just annoys me how there is no technology on this amazing battlestation. Where are the devices that allow the empire to track their stormtroopers? Where are the life sign readers? Where are the scanning devices that can detect organic objects within an object like the Millenium Falcon? Why are they still using fucking RADIO?
Now, a reason for this could be that it was made in the 1970's but I don't accept that. Issac Asimov wrote his I, Robot stories between 1940 and 1950, they're all much more well thought through and sci fi than this piece of crap.
Of course, Star Wars geeks (or idiots stuck in the past, as I like to call them) are keen to point out that Star Wars isn't Sci Fi, it's a Space Opera. A genre they made up to try and make Star Wars seem more important/legitimate as an art work than it is. There's no such thing as Space Opera, guys, you can't just make up genres to suit yourself.
I'm willfully ignoring the fact that Star Wars is so popular (or was, at least. It's popularity is weining slightly these days, in spite of the Internet's constant claims that it's still relevant and THE BEST THING EVARR) because it's essentially a fantasty film. Polorised good vs bad, no real complexity or morality. I just wish people would leave it alone. Yes, they were good films in the 70's and yes, they are still good childrens films now but for people who have seen a good few films? They're terrible. Just terrible.
Oh, and one more thing. Vader says:
"The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the force."
Let's just have a look at the things the force is used for in the films, shall we?
It let's Luke shoot an exhaust port with a missile.
It lets Luke sense where a droid is going to shoot him.
It lets Vader choke a man.
It lets Obi-Wan astrally project.
None of that stuff seems even a tenth as useful as the ability to destroy a planet.
Even in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed where the entire point was that this was The Most Powerful The Force Has Ever Been and it's all really overblown and over the top, the most impressive thing The Apprentice does is pull a star destroyer (which, incidentally, are very poorly named) out of orbit. That, likewise, is no-where near as impressive as the ability to destroy a planet.
Anyway, I was watching the Rifftrack of Star Wars Episode 4: A New Hope and something struck me:
Star Wars is easily the least Sci Fi film I've ever seen that is still set in space.
I'm not even talking about the difference between soft and hardcore sci fi. I'm not enough of a sci fi geek to know the difference but I assume it's like the difference between Firefly and Battlestar Galactica.
Anyway, I'm supposed to be talking about Star Wars.
I was watching the bit where Han Solo's ship gets nabbed by the death star. Several things happen that made me go -hang on a minute-
The guys hide from the imperial soldiers by hiding under the floorboards of their ship.
They then sneak around the death star by beating up a couple of stormtroopers and stealing their uniforms.
The officers in charge don't notice because they're trying to confirm that the stormtroopers are okay over the fucking RADIO.
Now, I don't know about you, but that all stinks to high hell of a World War 2 film, to me. Switch the words "death star" for "nazi destroyer" and you're there.
This really annoys me. I don't like Star Wars, and haven't done since I re-watched eps 4 and 6 a few years ago but... I don't know. It seems that every time I re-watch bits here and there they've gotten even worse.
It just annoys me how there is no technology on this amazing battlestation. Where are the devices that allow the empire to track their stormtroopers? Where are the life sign readers? Where are the scanning devices that can detect organic objects within an object like the Millenium Falcon? Why are they still using fucking RADIO?
Now, a reason for this could be that it was made in the 1970's but I don't accept that. Issac Asimov wrote his I, Robot stories between 1940 and 1950, they're all much more well thought through and sci fi than this piece of crap.
Of course, Star Wars geeks (or idiots stuck in the past, as I like to call them) are keen to point out that Star Wars isn't Sci Fi, it's a Space Opera. A genre they made up to try and make Star Wars seem more important/legitimate as an art work than it is. There's no such thing as Space Opera, guys, you can't just make up genres to suit yourself.
I'm willfully ignoring the fact that Star Wars is so popular (or was, at least. It's popularity is weining slightly these days, in spite of the Internet's constant claims that it's still relevant and THE BEST THING EVARR) because it's essentially a fantasty film. Polorised good vs bad, no real complexity or morality. I just wish people would leave it alone. Yes, they were good films in the 70's and yes, they are still good childrens films now but for people who have seen a good few films? They're terrible. Just terrible.
Oh, and one more thing. Vader says:
"The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the force."
Let's just have a look at the things the force is used for in the films, shall we?
It let's Luke shoot an exhaust port with a missile.
It lets Luke sense where a droid is going to shoot him.
It lets Vader choke a man.
It lets Obi-Wan astrally project.
None of that stuff seems even a tenth as useful as the ability to destroy a planet.
Even in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed where the entire point was that this was The Most Powerful The Force Has Ever Been and it's all really overblown and over the top, the most impressive thing The Apprentice does is pull a star destroyer (which, incidentally, are very poorly named) out of orbit. That, likewise, is no-where near as impressive as the ability to destroy a planet.
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