Wesley Fenlon | Not with a bang but a whimper.

I dedicate most of my gaming time these days to shooters for a number of reasons. There’s something incredibly rewarding about the skill-based competitive atmosphere of neck-and-neck multiplayer matches, and I enjoy a good game of free-for-all — but not nearly as much as I delight in team-based games, where coordination and collaboration are key to victory. Apparently, I’m not alone. Alongside the recent proliferation of first- and third-person shooters, partially spurred by the success of the Xbox and Xbox Live, more and more games have been integrating cooperative modes into their campaigns.

Co-op gameplay seems to be the new buzzword for the shooter genre, and its popularity is spreading to other corners of the medium. Games like Fable II and Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 added two-player components to their campaigns, and Capcom clearly intended Resident Evil 5 to be a cooperative experience. Each of these cases represents a traditionally single-player game series that has been adapted or expanded to support an additional person, and the game industry must have remembered that a lot of the time, playing with a friend is even better than playing alone. But what makes the recent co-op surge so interesting is that, even 16 years ago, those same elements were present in Secret of Mana, and Square’s classic manages to deliver a more rewarding cooperative experience than plenty of games published well over a decade later.

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My love for the first-person shooter genre stretches back nearly as many years as I’ve been playing video games.  It began with iD Software’s incredible Wolfenstein 3D and continued years later with Goldeneye and The World Is Not Enough on the Nintendo 64.  I certainly missed out on plenty of greats — Doom, Quake, and Marathon, just to name a few — but Goldeneye deathmatches and epic World Is Not Enough bouts of King of the Hill were enough to cement shooters as the go-to option for multiplayer funtimes.

And then came Halo and the Xbox.  Combined, the two ushered in a tidal wave of shooters for home consoles, online gaming became a viable multiplayer option from the couch instead of the computer chair, and I was utterly hooked.  Most of the shooters from this period weren’t so hot, but enough stood out and held their own that there was always something new to play, some new carnage just begging to be wreaked.  Unquestionably, it was — and is — my genre of choice.  Which brings me to the series at hand — Half-Life.  If there’s a game in the FPS stable that’s more highly regarded than Half-Life 2, it’s a narrow victory.  Deus Ex and Bioshock spring to mind, but in the Fall of 2004, Half-Life 2’s long-awaited release absolutely blew minds, balancing traditional shooting mechanics with a brand new, cutting-edge physics engine to continue the story of one seriously badass bespectacled scientist, Gordon Freeman.

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I had originally intended for this piece to be published on GameSpite, but as it’s already several weeks out of date, and I hate seeing things go to waste, I decided to post it here.

Halo. It’s a multi-million dollar franchise; once confined to the first-person shooter genre of gaming, it has since broken free from those chafing shackles to populate bookshelves, grace soda cans and slushy cups, and even make a bold venture into the burgeoning cat helmet market. And now, a year and a half after the release of Halo 3, the first game set in the Haloverse not developed by Bungie is poised to arrive on the Xbox 360: Halo Wars.

As you likely know (Halo news is hard to avoid, after all) Wars is also not a first-person shooter — rather, it’s a 360-exclusive real-time strategy game developed by Ensemble Studios, best known for their work on the magnificent Age of Empires series. The pedigree is certainly there — Ensemble knows their stuff when it comes to the strategy genre. But what about strategy on a console?  That’s a whole different beast. There are no keyboard shortcuts, no intuitive mouse controls, no unit groupings. How can a PC RTS really work on a console?

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Much has been written since the death of EGM last month. For most, the pain has subsided. Attentions have been shifted elsewhere. After all, it’s the internet, a capricious landscape of sweeping contradictions and short memories — the same group that most vocally grieved for EGM helped bring about its end. But that was January. It’s February, and by and large we’ve moved on.

But I’m always a little late to the party. It’s taken me a while to pick up on, and actually listen to, some of the post-1UP layoffs podcasts, namely the mammoth final episode of 1UP Yours and Robert Ashley’s A Life Well Wasted.  And as I listened to these podcasts, I kept feeling, again and again, that something truly special had been lost.  The tone of each podcast couldn’t vary much more radically: 1UP Yours is comprised of a rowdy group who joke, tease, laugh, drink, and find a way to squeeze interesting conversation into the mix.  A Life Well Wasted is absolutely surreal, blending short conversations with haunting music into something more powerful than the sum of its parts.  Where the two meet, where they reveal they have far more in common than their structures imply, is at their emotional core.  Every conversation held, every laugh shared, every memory revealed shows that something genuinely extraordinary has been lost.

Has any publication ever fostered the sort of love EGM did?  Over the course of its 20 year lifespan, how many people grew up reading this magazine cover to cover, absorbing every word, regardless of the game it pertained to?  And how many of them thought, “This is what I want.  This is what I want to do with my life.”  And how many of them actually did it?  It is, perhaps, the highest praise a publication could ever receive — its own fans were the very ones who grew up to give it new life and propel it forward for a new generation of readers.  And that new generation felt the exact same thing.  I should know; I’m one of them.  I can see the very stories recounted in A Life Well Wasted echoed in my own life — the worst games ever made list, featured in issue #150, attained a mythical status among my group of friends, and the mere mention of Custer’s Revenge even today would likely call forth a smirk.  I could probably still name most of the games on that list, and actually having played E.T. made it that much cooler.  It also led me to experience the horror that is Nigh Trap in all its hilarious, campy glory.

The crew of 1UP Yours discussed the fact that many fans felt as if they got to know each podcaster over the course of the show, but that really knowing them wouldn’t be possible given the nature of something like a podcast.  True, it’s not a reflection of real life.  It’s impossible to really know someone through such a detached medium.  But by so thoroughly communicating their own friendship on the show, they managed to pull in listeners, building a sense of powerful community and friendship, inviting us into their conversation, even if we couldn’t be there.  The entire institution was easy to take for granted, but now that it’s gone, I feel like there’s a gap — on the internet, on the newsstand, and in the daily lives of those who felt a special connection with people they’d never met but hoped to one day work beside.

We’re worse off for the loss.

I finished off Advance Wars: Days of Ruin on Monday, and my thoughts on the game have been simmering since then.  As a strategy game, it’s perfectly enjoyable, and it sits at a much more even keel than its predecessor thanks to the stripping away of radically powerful CO abilities.  Even so, Days of Ruin wasn’t nearly as fun as Dual Strike or Black Hole Rising.  The gameplay wasn’t the problem — it was the story, the presentation, the world.  Each stage was followed by a painfully bland, cliche piece of exposition that relied on a stale plotline that seems to pop up far too frequently in Japanese pop culture (and the US is likely no less guilty, but I can’t think of any glaring examples off the top of my head).

The plot is simple: against overwhelming odds, a young leader saves the world thanks to a limitless supply of hope and enthusiasm.  A mysterious girl is in there, somewhere, and is likely the key to his faith in humanity.  The villain is spineless and completely self-centered; as it turns out, he’s merely the pawn of someone so unbelievably evil he’d murder puppies for kicks and giggles.

I don’t understand how anyone could develop a game with such a predictable, uninspired story.  Are the writers simply incompetent, or is this somehow appealing to a certain group of people?  Maybe they don’t quite get what it is that separates their tripe from the simple plots of games that are actually great.  It is hard to define, but I think the distinction between appealing adventure and shallow, annoying drudgery comes from energy.

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Fallout 3 is vast, engaging, and will offer a significantly unique experience to every single person who picks up a controller and explores the wastes of post-apocalyptic America. It’s not easy to capture the essence of a broken world, but Fallout 3’s depiction of an utterly devastated United States demonstrates Bethesda’s attention to minutia in a vision that feels more than a little similar to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

Like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Fallout 3’s incredible sense of freedom is one of its main attractors, and there are plenty of quirky, cool, and fun locations to discover, most of which offer a lot more than the endlessly dull caves of Tamriel. Unfortunately, the scale of Fallout 3’s world and the freedom such an expansive environment offers is also the very thing that highlights the game’s greatest flaws: as good as it is, it could be so much better. A few things, especially, let me down, and made me wish that I’d had the foresight to purchase the PC version and augment Bethesda’s noble attempt with the incessant tinkering of the mod community.

What was Fallout 3 lacking? What should’ve been better? Let’s make a list.

1. Level Progression, aka “The level cap is TWENTY?”

If it feels like Bethesda dropped the ball with anything in Fallout 3, it’s the level progression. In Oblivion, we ran free like the wild gazelles of the Savannah, unshackled by the damning constraints of a nonsensical level cap. In this case, a few things are wrong with the low limit.

Leveling is surprisingly easy, making the cap of 20 easily obtainable well before the majority of the game has been experienced.  That leaves us wandering the wastes with lacking skills that need and deserve our tender loving care. Sure, there are skill books to be found, but maxing out each skill shouldn’t be an arduous hunt for Grognak the Barbarian. Every level should have taken longer to reach, requiring significantly more experience and offering more skill points to distribute as a result. Or they could have been less beneficial but stretched into the expanses of the glorious 40s.

The disappointing Dead End sign on Leveling Up Avenue also correlates to the issue of difficulty, which I think could’ve been handled better. I know there’s an option to change the difficulty in-game, but I felt like the default difficutly lacked the proper scaling to keep the game relatively challenging throughout. When I’ve reached the top eschelon of enemies and can slay them with just a few shots, something seems off. The game is so massive, yet it seems to be geared towards a criminally short play cycle that would leave far too much of the wasteland unexplored.

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I’d heard good things about Stranger’s Wrath.  The Oddworld series was genuinely well-regarded for its take on classic struggles against oppression featuring wacky characters, and Stranger’s Wrath received similar acclaim for being a standout in the crowd of shooters.  I picked it up on the cheap, only to discover that, like far too many excellent games, it’s not playable on the Xbox 360.  To the dusty shelf it went, pushed aside but not forgotten.

As part of my Winter Break Game-a-thon, I commandeered the old beefy Xbox from one of my roommates for the express purpose of playing Stranger’s Wrath.  Hopes were high, enthusiasm was piqued, sugary confections were consumed.

I wasn’t ready for what was in store.

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Yes, this blog has been neglected.  Yes, I have a good reason.  Yes, it’s teh schoolz.  Finals weren’t too bad this semester — on the scale from brutally straining to suicide-inducing, they were much closer to the former end of the scale.  In short, mad studying, sleep deprivation, and far, far too much writing about books and movies and folklore (eep!) kept me from laying hands on this blog for a good while.  And even before finals I was caught up in rather long essays and end of term projects.

But now that’s all done like Christmas turkey.  Or Christmas salmon, as i happened to experience this year.  Hrm.  But let’s backtrack a bit to the main point: the lack of updates, and how that dire and unfortunate situation will soon be remedied.  No sooner had I returned home from my last final than a friend showed up, ready to commence our delicately-planned and hotly-anticipated Christmas break gaming marathon.

Experiences with each entry in our marathon will be documented in turn, and those we didn’t get to shall, I suspect, be attacked shortly, as soon as designated family time comes to a close.  You can also look forward to a new music post highlighting a few albums of 2008 I felt were really exemplary.  It’s such a cliche it’s almost not even worth pointing out it’s a cliche, but I’ll refrain from making lots of best of lists and just say why a few albums are especially kickass.

As one of the most important aspects of any video game, level design is a fascinating concept to study.  We can chart its progression from 2D into 3D, from simple linear stages into vast, sprawling environments.  In doing so, the general trend of 3D games begins to come into focus — and in some cases, it’s not such a pretty sight.  Sometimes we have to look backwards to see how we should move forwards.

Open world games have risen in popularity steadily since the release of Grand Theft Auto III, which not only spawned several sequels, but far too many cheap knock-offs and shoddy cash-ins.  Still, the goal of these games is admirable: they are presenting you with not a level to progress through, but a world to explore.  It’s a way to accomplish a level of escapism that smaller, more constrained games can’t match, but it’s a tricky thing to pull off.  The key is being able to form an explorable world with a scope so vast that players won’t feel as though the constraints of the area are too artificial — but size must be balanced with enough memorable locations to make the world feel alive.

Ultimately, games such as Bethesda’s Oblivion and Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto IV can’t live up to both ends of the deal.  Oblivion is, even now, nearly three years after its release, a huge, beautiful game world.  But one grassy green hill looks like the next.  And the next.  The sense of exploration gets lost in the scope without delivering enough of what’s ultimately the most important thing: design.

Which, in my long-winded and roundabout way, brings us to Super Metroid.  Compared to GTA or Oblivion, Super Metroid is laughably miniscule.  It’s 2D.  It can’t compete with the miles and miles of explorable land and cityscape in Cyrodil or Liberty City.  But it just might have the best level design of any video game ever made.

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Growing up tragically deprived of video games until somewhere around the age of 10, I have the unshakable feeling that I missed out on some essential skillset that I’ll never be able to fully make up for.  Additionally, the intermittent exposure I had to gaming up to that point narrowed my enthusiasm for the genre to such a degree that I had no clue what I was missing out on.

It all started with Sonic the Hedgehog.  I don’t remember why, or how, but but my first real encounter with console gaming was the original Sonic on the Genesis.  If it had happened to be Mario, my retro gaming ineptitude might not exist as it does today.  Alas, fate caught me in its insidious web.

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