Jolly Jellybean Joseph: He told us we were TRUE BELIEVERS. I was admittedly skeptical at first, but then I jumped off the edge of the building, pressed the web-swing button, and I believed.

Soon enough, I was webbing up gimps with guns, sneaking to save hostages, and throwing wisecracks at the hapless goons! JUST LIKE SPIDER-MAN.

[In Sundate, two writers kick back in their rocking chairs and wax reminiscent.]

JJ Job: I never thought I’d say this but Activision made my dreams come true with that game. It was a simpler, more innocent time.

You know, I just realized that the game’s plot was strangely similar to The Amazing Spider-Man’s placeholder conflict. Instead of turning NYC into a scaley anthropomorphic hotbed, the villainous fog would act as a go-signal for creepy symbiotic bodysnatching.  Coincidence? Most probably! But I like to think that Spider-Man: The Video Game inspired something. It sure did inspire me! To do good deeds and great power is coming on great responsibility or whatever! See? Video games can be good, too, CNN.

it’s just go fish! and that’s just grape juice and sparkling water, i swear.

JJ Joseph: I find nothing heroic at all about making any sort of connections between the TRULY amazing Spider-Man on the PS and the utter mediocrity that is the film.

The video game had you web-swinging across buildings for the first time in the history of the character’s appearance in the media. It let you beat the ever-loving piss out of Scorpion, Venom, Mysterio and Carnage. It  featured actual interactions with the rest of the Marvel universe! It had freakin’ J. Jonah Jameson!

JJ Job: That and more! More villains, more cameos (Uatu, what are you doing here?), more costumes! Oh yeah! I can’t stop using exclamation points! Help! What were your favorite digs? Mine was naturally the Amazing Bag-Man. Gussied up in a spare F4 leotard and a paper bag over his head, Spider-Man arrives at the scene of the crime.

Speaking of villains, the game had insane boss fights. Do you remember that one with the giant Mysterio? And of course, I don’t think anyone can forget that last sequence where Doc Ock/Carnage chases you through airvents. I STILL GET FLASHBACKS OH GOD HE’S RIGHT BEHIND ME

HE IS RIGHT BEHIND EVERYONE

JJ Joseph: Who didn’t have the Amazing Bag-Man as their favorite costume? Second to that would probably be the black symbiote costume because I was 13, and it was cool to be black and brooding. The extra strength and unlimited webbing it granted was a nice bonus, too! Man, that game had a crap load of bonus content, and just like everything in those simpler times, it was all free.

And yes, that memory of Monster Ock charging after me as the base was exploding was forever etched into my mind. The game actually managed to make Carnage a terrifying foe. Sure, it took him possessing the mad genius with the cybernetic tentacles that could bend steel, but props to Neversoft anyway for coming up with the idea!

JJ Job: Neversoft being in charge of originality is something I cannot wrap my mind around. You’d think after success of Spider-Man, they’d continue the franchise. I wouldn’t have minded seeing Spider-Man 2: World Tour! Or Spider-Man 2: Metallica or Some Other Defunct Band Like Soul Asylum. No wait, I would mind. Because those are terrible ideas.

the official sequel had Electro as the big bad; Amazing Spider-Man 2 will also feature Electro as the main villain. TOO MANY COINCIDENCES IF YOU ASK ME

JJ Joseph: They did make a sequel! Spider-Man: Enter Electro, which managed to turn a C-list villain with the dumbest costume ever into an actual powerhouse threat. He finally got it into his star-shaped head that his powers of electricity could be amped up to the point of elemental godhood.

Facing him as the last boss fight in his living lightning form atop the twin towers of the World Trade Center (edited at the last minute to be some no-name pair of buildings after 9/11) was pretty epic actually.I didn’t find it as COMPELLING as this first game, but it retained most of the fun parts to have made it worth my while!And hey, Neversoft created the single best extreme sports game in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, so they ain’t too bad!

JJ Job: Did Neversoft do that? Wasn’t that Vicarious Visions? I remember because I did not like that game. At all. And I tend to remember what I don’t like. Like okra. I know okra because I hate it with the hatred of a million exploding galaxies.

But I concede on the epicness of that final boss battle. It was pretty hard, wasn’t it? It was such a difficult and trying time. For all Americans. Never forget 9/11.

Have you played any of the more recent Spider-Man video games? I just could not be bothered. Web of Shadows? Web of Sha-blows. Friend or Foe? Friend or Go. Away. Shattered Dimensions? Shattered Attention… Span?

do any of those games have a fishbowl-head pin-up? i don’t think so

JJ Joseph: A cursory check of Wikipedia says you are absolutely right, and my brain has officially been colored by those damned rose-tinted nostalgia goggles. Haven’t played any other Spider-Man video game ever since, except for screwing around with Shattered Dimensions on my girlfriend’s PS3. It was pretty bland. They just don’t make ‘em like they used to.

JJ Job: Or maybe we just had a higher tolerance for stilted gameplay back then. I’ll try that game out again and see if it still makes me feel good. And if it doesn’t–I will fight someone. EEL NATS was a code that unlocked everything, I just remembered. And it’s STAN LEE backwards! Stan Lee, you flimsy man, you got me again.

~

Spider-Man Fun Fact: This. Everything about this.

Yeah, you read the title right. It’s true. Resident Evil 4 is the greatest video game of all time.

It’s greater than Final Fantasy VII, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and Super Mario Bros. 3. It’s even greater than Portal, Bioshock, the entire Mass Effect trilogy trilogy, both Batman: Arkham games and all the Call of Duties combined.

I love the Metal Gear Solid series, but yes, Resident Evil 4 is even greater than Metal Gear Solid 1, 2, or 3.

Resident Evil 4 is the best game ever.

How can I come to such a conclusion with this much confidence?

because of this guy

First of all, it looks great. Even for a game first released eight years ago, it holds up pretty well. I played the PlayStation 2 port, and even though its graphics were scaled down from the Gamecube, it still portrayed a visually immersive world. Dead trees with black branches crack the sky, grime-covered facades masking abandoned houses, bed sheets caked with dried blood, skulls lining cobweb-lined closets; the stench of death is everywhere, and that’s just the first third of the game.

The character models look even better. Rookie cop turned-hero-turned-bodyguard-turned-ACTION STAR Leon Kennedy has those boyish good looks with a hint of world weariness in the bags under his eyes. Lord Saddler was a pioneer in OLD MAN FACES. Every plaga you encounter in their corrupted hosts and in their true tentacle alien form are shockingly grotesque.

And of course, there’s the “bitch in the red dress”.

Resident Evil 4 is also the most beautiful game ever.

Compare that to LEGOS, GREEN BLOCKS, NEON NIGHTMARES, MELTY FACES and GRAY EVERYWHERE, Resident Evil 4 is the clear winner.

Speaking of characters, each one is just brimming with LIFE. Leon dispenses SICK BURNS deadpan just as much as he blows the heads off of ganados. Ashley rightfully shouts at you every time you try looking up her skirt (not that  I would know from actual in-game experience). Salazar, the little shit, talks down on you with his smug pale foppish dwarf ass. Luis Sera wins you over with his suave Latino charm and the powerful pistol he packs in his pants if you know what I’m saying. 

It is also the most handsome game ever.

The dialogue between various members of the cast and most especially Leon’s unforgettable one-liners, strike that perfect level of camp without getting cringe-worthy.

Even the enemies you face are bursting with personality!

Those poor Plagas-controlled villagers scream out some of the most colorful language when you’re rampaging through their quiet creepy backwater town. Inside Spanish Warwick Davis’ castle, you get to meet the Los Illuminados–scythe-wielding, fire arrow-shooting, goat skull-wearing, pale-as-fuck freaks that fill the halls with eerie chants of “morir es vivir”.

And those are just the generics you’ll be mowing down!

You’ve also got to deal with blind armor-clad dual-clawed garradors (or as I’d like to call them, gimp Wolverines) that go berserk at the drop of a dime. There are LOTR reject trolls that are somehow even uglier, carrying a nasty surprise in their backs.  There are flying insectoids that wall-crawl and can turn invisible. There are slow moving charred black corpse-like  that hiss and twitch eerily as they inch closer towards you, regenerating entire body parts after you shoot them off.

and then there’s this sack-wearing, chainsaw-revving, bullet-eating, psycho motherfucker who also happens to be a doctor

Facing each one of these enemies in a narrow hallway or within groups of distracting mooks is the height of tension.

No wait, the height of tension is when you’re getting chased down by Saddler’s pet abomination in a locked cage with a timer ticking away till the entire structure falls. No wait, that’s when you’re getting relentlessly pursued by Salazar’s nigh-invulnerable right hand in tight corridors. No wait, that’s when you’re getting hounded by the Los Illuminados and Plagas-controlled living armors in the dark when you’re playing as freakin’ Ashley. 

Yep, all this time you get to be the badass special agent already fearing for your life fighting all sorts of monstrosities in between nerve-wracking, quiet eeriness and fist-pumping, epic instances. Suddenly, the game puts you in the shoes of the proverbial damsel in distress with nary a gun or a knife in hand. For the very first time, you feel absolutely vulnerable. For a short time, the action horror game becomes survival horror again.

pitch black hallways with ominous suits of armor looming over you? what could possibly go wrong

That’s not to say that the core gameplay is lackin, not at all. It’s fantastic. This bit where you have to play as Ashley just served as a great interlude that helped highlight the sheer awesomeness of flooring ganados with a shotgun blasts, slicing up their faces with well-timed knife attacks, roundhouse kicking them as they wince in pain, and German suplexing their candy asses, leaving a pool of blood where their heads used to be.

The arsenal of weapons the game provides you is impressive as well, with just about every one of them being incredibly useful especially when fully upgraded and just plain fun to use. This opens up many different play styles to suit your mood. Love the feel of popping heads one after the other? Use the Blacktail or the Red9 and get to popping. Wanna keep your distance and pick off hordes? Choose either the BAR or the SAR. Just want to blow away everyone including bosses in a shot or two? Whip out your magnum and unload.

That’s not even touching the cool unlockable weapons you get upon completing certain conditions like the Chicago Typewriter, an old-school Tommy gun with infinite ammo, and the PRL 412, which is basically a laser gun that can work as a flash bang and as an instakill button.

fighting zombies with lasers? damn right, this is the best game ever

Aside from the new toys you can play with, Resident Evil 4 is chock-full of even more extra content that extends the game’s replayability for hours and hours. There’s the target range within the castle area where you can test your skills with the different guns in timed sessions. Getting high scores unlocks nifty bottle caps and earns you a good amount of pesetas.

Leon and Ashley get new digs that aren’t solely for aesthetics. By having Ashley wear the Knight outfit, the fully body plate mail makes her completely impervious to any damage, allowing you to express whatever frustrations you might have had against her with no consequences.

It also makes her way too heavy for enemies to pick up, removing any sense of danger and responsibility on your part!

Leon and Ashley; a budding romance

As for Leon’s extra costumes, he can either go retro with a RCPD outfit or go really retro with a pippin’ 20s gangster getup with a fedora he can do a neat trick with.

Then there’s the side missions, “Assignment Ada” and “Separate Ways”, letting you play as the lovely double agent Ada Wong, uncovering more dark secrets about Saddler’s nefarious plot and its connection to the rest of the Resident Evil universe. Although they’re mostly treading through the same areas Leon runs through in the main game, the contrasting perspective and the small gameplay differences such as the limited inventory and lower health traded off for faster walking speed make for a fresh experience.

If the extra five+ hours isn’t enough, you can spend days getting higher and higher scores on the action-packed “Mercenaries” mini game. The objective is simple; kill as many enemies as you can before time runs out using only the initial equipment given to you. What’s so great about it is the thrill of discovering more efficient ways of racking up consecutive kills and gaining time extensions all the while surviving the never-ending waves of bloodlusted enemies with a boss unit appearing every now and again.

And to keep it from getting monotonous, there are four levels to play in with their own distinctive layouts and sets of enemies to deal with, including the infamous Super Salvador that leaps towers in a single bound and carries a smoking dual-bladed chainsaw. I would’ve been content with that, but Capcom really made the most out out by allowing players to use four other characters besides Leon.

read: “5 Awesome Ways to Be a Badass”

There’s the femme fatale Ada Wong, the muscle-bound maniac Jack Krauser, Umbrella operative and neck-snapper extraordinaire HUNK, and the master manipulator himself, Albert Wesker. Each one brings a unique offense and demands different strategies to suit their strengths. Ada is nimble but vulnerable, offsetting it with a balanced inventory. Krauser relies on his lethal bows and Plagas-enhancedblade arm. HUNK flies through enemies with his special TMP and incredibly quick melee finisher. Wesker is power personified.

To think Capcom crammed this much content into a single game without charging extra (unless you happen to be the sucker who bought it on the Gamecube LOL). And contrast that to how it’s already expected of them today to lock content already on the disc of their games, asking you to shell out more cash to access it.

To further show the stroke of genius Capcom had when it came out with Resident Evil 4, they actually revolutionized the action genre with RE4′s smooth over-the-shoulder third person shooting mechanics. This gameplay feature has since become the standard for a lot of AAA action games such as the Gears of War and Mass Effect franchises. Its clever use of QTEs kept players on their toes even during cutscenes, and added a lot more tension to already frenetic battles, also popularizing its use in other mainstream titles.

They could get tiresome though, considering you’d usually die and have to go through the same sequence until you got it right. But RE4 wouldn’t be the best game ever if it it didn’t manage to turn a flaw into an entertaining bonus of gruesome deaths!

All the effort put into the game is also evident in the little touches.

You’ve got all these crows nesting in the gnarled trees; dispersing whenever shots are fired, congregating on corpses, and even dropping pesetas, jewelry, ammunition, and grenades when they’re killed.

Trinkets and treasures are scattered throughout all the areas, requiring a keen eye and a willingness to explore to discover. Indiscriminately break boxes to get goodies, and you might just get a SNAKE TO YOUR FACE. Roaming chickens in the village lay eggs, which you can either consume for health, or chuck at enemies to give them one more reason to stick a pitchfork in your gut.

Enemies react accordingly to how you engage them. They block their faces or duck when you aim for their heads, and they sidestep if you take a second too long before pulling the trigger. If you’re a good distance away and they’re carrying axes, get ready to dodge whirling blades of steel.

THIS GIRL IS ON FIRE

Shoot their hands, and they either drop their weapons, accidentally set themselves on fire if they’re carrying torches, or blow themselves up if they’ve got a lit stick of dynamite. Shoot their legs, and they fall to their knees or faceplant when they’re running. Kick one in the noggin, and everyone behind gets knocked back as the sorry sap goes flying.

Groups covered in shields rush you to box you in. Good thing you can break them, leaving gaping holes where you inflicted damage that serve as weakspots.

This attention to detail is remarkable, all of which adds up to a fully realized world of fear and fun.

To top it all off, the game overcame what should have been the death knell that is development hell. Its origins can be traced back to 1999 when it was first being developed for the early days of the PlayStation 2. That first version would wind up as the prototype for one of the most popular hack-n-slash video games, Devil May Cry. 

It would undergo a couple more game-changing revisions that lasted for 5 years before it finally saw the light of day in 2005 for the Gamecube thanks to the VISIONARY GENIUS of Shinki Mikami. Capcom, the business savvy sons of bitches, made the right move of porting it to its once original console of choice, the PS2.

thank you based god mikami

So yes, Resident Evil 4 even managed to buck the odds of coming out as a terrible disappointment because of a troubled development cycle, reflexively reinforcing its theme of WHAT IS DEAD MAY NEVER DIE.

It’s got top-notch presentation that mostly holds up to this day and creates an engaging atmosphere. It’s got countless memorable moments both in dialogue and setpieces. Most importantly, it’s got insanely addictive, game-changing and straight-up fun gameplay that lasts for hours and hours and hours. No convoluted plot bordering on the pretentious, no game-breaking mechanics, technical flaws, monotonous lulls, and shitty anti-consumer restrictions that weigh it down.

And it even did a Resident Evil, rising from its development grave to feast on video game fans’ praise brains.

It is the perfect video game, and that is why Resident Evil 4 is the best game ever.

and to reiterate, it’s got this guy

So Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate just came out. It’s the long awaited NA/EU release of Monster Hunter Tri G for the WiiU and 3DS, featuring greater fine-tuning of the totally hardcore and extremely rewarding gameplay and a slew of new monsters to hunt.

Part of their marketing campaign to hype up the launch is this odd but somehow entertaining infomercial.

So what’s the takeaway here, ladies and gentlemen?

[Every Thursday, Kambyero pokes fun at somethang in gaming.]

With our hands on the dull metal post we call home, my teammates and I wait with bated breath for the enemies to make the first move. We don’t wait long, as one of them, Jake with his horned eyebrows perpetually mocking us, saunters to the center of the court radiating a swagger that screams “FUCK YOU, TAG ME”.

He crosses the imaginary boundary separating their turf from ours, puts his hands on his knees, and gives us that signature shit-eating grin. My teammates give sidelong glances to each other, as if urging on the other to try and catch one of the fastest runners in the game this early. Without saying a word, I break into a sprint heading straight for Jake, knowing full well I’m running into a trap.

I know the risk, but I believe in my bones that I can catch him and put the smug motherfucker in his place.

Agawan Base reminds me of the familiar concept of the good old game Capture the Flag wherein two opposing teams face off in a playing field with the objective of stealing the other’s prized possession. The key difference is that in Agawan Base, there’s no need to run back to your home base with a token to score a victory. All you need to do is get close enough to “tag” the base.

By not including this seemingly crucial phase in the gameplay, you’d think the fun you’d have would be cut in half. However, the lack of such a stage brings to the game a much higher sense of urgency, resulting in an interesting dynamic.

Because players don’t have to worry about having to escape enemy territory once they get there, the offensives are fast and brutal. This is aided by the gameplay aspect where tagged players don’t get kicked out of the game; they merely spend time on the opposing team’s base with their hands out hoping to get tagged by their teammates to save them from purgatory.

It’s not surprising then to see players go on kamikaze runs for a chance at making contact with either a teammate or the enemy base itself.

On the defensive end, players are forced to be extra careful in guarding the base. There is no making up for mistakes by catching the one who managed to sneak through your human fortification. You screw up once, you lose.

Adding complexity to the game is that tag priority is determined by the order in which the players touch and leave their home base. The first one to leave the home base is vulnerable to being captured by the rest of the opposition, but that player can then lure one of them out of their safe zone to get captured by a teammate fresh off of leaving the first player’s home base.

Considering the difficulty of penetrating a base fully guarded, the game more often than not becomes a concerted effort of feints and fake-outs to trap enemies with the intent of weeding out the competition. The less enemies darting in and out of their base, the easier it is to steal it.

Accomplishing any of these goals though ultimately requires one thing that certain players are just gifted wit – speed. Some players just have it, some don’t. If you have it, you’re golden. If you don’t, well, you better get used to sitting on either your home base or the enemies’.

Fortunately, there is an auto team balance feature that somehow  manages to even out both teams with a fair distribution of runners. And looking at how my last game resulted wherein I traded tags with that smug motherfucker Jake who everyone says is one fast motherfucker. 

Of course, teamwork is still essential to achieving victory considering the back and forth play between the teams’ offense and defense players necessary in actually scoring goals. Being able to develop a rivalry with any one of the opposition only serves to add to the game’s depth.

There are also multiple levels you can play in aside from the basic concrete schoolyard court map. There’s the outdoor grassy field where small pools of mud can slow you down. There’s the beach area where everybody plays barefoot and the sand starts heating up to the point that it actually hurts to run, cutting the game time short which then adds a sense of urgency.

All these different game elements coalesce for an experience like no other, except for maybe this game:

[This is the first part of a two-piece essay. Click here for Part Two. This post contains spoilers for Hotline Miami.]

A History of Violence

Violence has long been a part of video games. For those of us who’ve grown with this form of media, we have long since come to accept it as a natural element of the platform.

We jump on menacing mushrooms, and run roughshod over mechanical monstrosities. We beat up street thugs with lethal combinations of kicks and punches, and summon elemental gods to rain ice and fire on behemoths and tentacle monsters. We hunt all sorts of birds, reptiles, dogs, rats and cats to pit them against other such powered-up animals, and we simply hunt wyverns and dragons to get more powerful weapons and armor to get better at killing.

We hack and slash through imperial armies, demons, colossi  and the legions of Hell itself. We shoot down criminals, cops, terrorists, counter-terrorists, Nazis, Allied forces, aliens, and zombies.

Even in video games where violence isn’t the main path of achieving success, we find ways to enact atrocities such as removing ladders from pools to drown virtual dolls and calling upon meteors to level populated cities.

We justify committing these acts of violence with all kinds of reasons, most of which are valid in the context of the games’ worlds. We have to rescue the stereotypical damsel in distress. We have to save the world/galaxy/universe from being destroyed/conquered/altered-into-a-hellish-new-reality by a mad dictator/corrupt shadowy organization/nigh-omnipotent malevolent being/s. We have to avenge the death of a family member/dear friend/significant other.

We want to become the best fighter/Pokemon master/monster hunter in the world. We want our cause and/or country to prevail.

We need to survive.

Developers give us all these reasons to make thumping, stabbing, slicing, piercing, shooting, maiming and killing acceptable. The thing is though, we’ve come to take all these violent actions as the normal route to “beating” a game that we immediately get into this mindset, sometimes even before the context for killing is cleared up.

We’re all grown-ups here, so the thought of video games actually spurring most of us level-headed gamers who’ve been taught basic human decency and morality into lashing out physically in the “real world” isn’t what we’re afraid of here.

It’s just that there is something inherently disturbing even for a little bit about the fact that a lot of us enjoy taking an active part in such a primal and destructive act as a hobby (and for a few of us, as a profession).

It’s something that two video games I recently finished have begun to question – Hotline Miami and Spec Ops: The Line.

The former is a top-down action game made by indie developer Dennaton Games, and the latter is an FPS made by fairly new AAA dev companyYager Development. The former is a surprise smash hit from the independent scene, garnering glowing reviews and impressive sales for an indie game. The latter is a critical darling, sparking many a debate for its tackling of heavy issues.

Drop Me a Line

In Hotline Miami, the player takes control of a nameless man who receives cryptic phone calls in his apartment telling him through thinly-veiled orders to murder a group of gangsters in a certain area while wearing an animal mask.

The gameplay is simple in concept. You start a level with a choice of what mask to wear, as all of them except the first one grant a bonus that will help you in your mission to kill every mafioso. The enemies are unaware of your presence at first, while you can scope out their positions and patrol patterns and the level’s layout thanks to the top-down view.

Having this information is vital, as you are as vulnerable as the opposition, meaning one swing of a baseball bat or a shot from a rifle equals death. The fun is in figuring out how to successfully end the lives of all the mobsters without getting hit once, usually after getting hit and dying over and over and over.

This goal can be achieved in a number of ways. You can take the relatively safe route of firing off a loud shotgun shell into a thug’s stomach in one room to attract the rest into a proverbial conveyor belt bullet buzzsaw.

You can also go down a more creative road by knocking down a goon with a door slam, throwing a knife straight at the throat of an incoming enemy, searing the face off another with a frying pan, and boring a hole into the face of the poor sap you introduced to the plywood earlier with a power drill.

Such morbid ingenuity is actually rewarded by the game. You get style points that pop up on screen as you rack off kills and combos, giving you a specific letter grade at the end of the level with a code name designation depending on your performance. New masks and weapons are unlocked to sow more carnage with. All this is mayhem is set to a bright pixelated palette and thumping synth-heavy dance music, a visual and aural aesthetic heavily influenced by the 80′s and the coolest movie ever. It’s a kitschy catchy ambiance that makes the violence hypnotically addictive and all the more inviting.

You go about this murder spree for a good number of levels with only the ambiguous hit messages and bits of your exploits connected to activities with the Russian mafia reported in newspaper clippings to go on. Grimy darkened fly-infested visions of three anonymous people wearing the animal masks you have access to only serve to obfuscate your main goal.

Then halfway through the main story, the game experiences a schizophrenic shift. After cleaning house in a condo building, a nearby telephone rings. You pick it up, and you’re told by your “handlers” to take care of a particular prank caller immediately. It’s the first time you’re burdened with another mission right after completing one, and you start to feel that there’s something wrong.

That feeling is validated as soon as you enter the phone company where your target is up to no good. Bodies are strewn across the floor, the desks, the walls, and it’s not because of you. You find the enemy in the middle of hacking a computer, interrupting him for an improvised fight to the death. It’s the first time the protagonist faces real adversity one-on-one, as the man in the biker helmet moves deftly to corner you and slice your neck open with a knife.

I struggled to get past his fast and furious attack. I felt the spike in difficulty was unfair, as I had little time and room to pick up the golf club and smash the guy’s head in as he lunged towards me. Having to do this three times to finish him off only made it worse. But I prevailed eventually.

Or so I thought.

The post-mission sequence where you go to a bar to partake of a “reward” from the same bearded bespectacled man behind the counters of the pizza shop and video rental outlet feels off. He says it so himself before handing you one last drink. You get one last meeting with the three masked men before the interludes start going haywire. The corpse of the biker fidgets on the floor of the convenience store, and that same guy at the counter tells you none of this is real. Static fills the screen for a split second. The body’s gone, and the clerk is none the wiser.

Soon enough, the mangled cadavers of your fallen enemies appear in those safe havens and even in your apartment, pointedly asking you what you’re looking at if you try talking to them. The friendly face behind the counter is seen belly down on the floor in the pool of his own blood, and the bald uggo replacing him tells you off instead of giving you prizes, incentives. Two never before seen janitors stare and grin at you in between missions.

Clearly, something is not right. And yet, the missions stay largely the same. You get messages on your phone’s voice mail, you don an appropriate animal mask, and you waste everyone in the level with brutal efficiency. You do your work, no questions asked.

Of course, these “glitches” do come to a head in the form of a rat mask-wearing pistol-toting assassin who shoots you in the head when you return to your apartment. In its first fourth-wall breaking moment, the game tells you to press R to restart, just as if you had screwed up in one of the missions and died.

You hit the button, and you enter the same scene. Your apartment ransacked, your girl shot dead in the bathroom. This time, however, you also see your dead body where the rat shot you. The rat is gone and it’s the chicken mask guy in the grimy visions sitting in the former’s place on the couch. He leaves you with an ominous message that you will be all alone, that nothing you do will have any purpose, that you won’t be able to see the whole picture, and that it’s all your fault.

You leave the apartment into a dirty white space, your letterman jacket and jeans switched with a hospital gown. You see a bed with your body on it. You fall to your knees. Your head explodes in a burst of blood.

What follows is a tale of the improbable story of vengeance. The protagonist escapes from a hospital in a hazy post-coma state, invades the police station to get to the captured killer, and ultimately finds his way to the heavily fortified mansion of the local Russian mafia chapter. He kills them all; the purple panthers, the katana-wielding lady assassin guarding Tommy Wiseau with his akimbo uzis, the wheelchair-bound old boss who’s done with all the violence.

It’s a non-stop action-packed sequence of events that ultimately feels like a tangent after the mystery set up in that fateful meeting with the biker in the phone company. So of course, the game continues after the credits have rolled, and you’re suddenly in control of that one biker.

The circumstances are the same. He’s a contracted killer hired by the same anonymous person/group as the main protagonist. The difference is that he’s no longer content being a puppet to some unknown agenda. He sets to find out the truth, and he’s back at the phone company trying to hack the mainframe.

When “Jacket” shows up, the biker dispatches him easily. He then uses the information he dug up to trace the root cause, only to discover the masterminds hiding in the sewers. It’s the two mysterious janitors.

At this point, the game presents two different endings that play out depending on whether or not the player solves the puzzle present in the pause screen. Although the “secret” ending you get from solving the puzzle gives a clearer picture for the chaos, it is somehow less fulfilling because of its turn towards conspiracy that doesn’t quite jive with the rest of the game’s approach to violence.

The default ending lets you ask all the important questions that have been bubbling in your mind. What’s going on? Who are you people? Who are you working for? Why are you doing this?

And the answers come in…

“We’re playing a game… aren’t we?”

“You don’t know? Haha, that’s pathetic!”

“We’re independent, we did it all ourselves!”

“We haven’t killed anyone, you have…”

“You think they deserved to live? Do you?”

“We were bored, that’s why!”

“Why would we need to justify our actions?”

“If you don’t understand why we’re doing this… then why should we tell you?”

“Haha, you seem disappointed?”

In the end, there is no rhyme or reason to the violence. It was all done in the pursuit of fun. No excuses necessary. If there was one, it was in the last half of the main protagonist’s journey into the crime bosses’ lair which offered no real closure. His hallucinations after his encounter with the biker also serve to skew his story into skepticism. Did he die, or at the very least was put into a coma, and just imagined the rest of the game, living out a literal revenge fantasy in his head? An excuse for the player to kill and kill and kill?

Was that secret ending actually thrown in as yet another excuse for those completely unwilling to accept the irrationality of the game’s premise, feeding into their desire to look for semblances of logic in a fucked up world?

To be perfectly honest, I enjoyed the slaughter. I felt pleasure in formulating strategies that would overwhelm an entire building full of mooks ready to kill me. I felt the adrenaline rush in executing them flawlessly, as if I were the Driver. I felt joy in bashing the skulls of already beaten men crawling helplessly along the floor. I laughed or oohhhed in amazement when I decapitated or sliced a man’s torso in half, his 16-bit guts dangling from the clean cut.

The music drove me.

Until it screeched to a low buzzing halt whenever I finished a level.

The game doesn’t just fade to black or cut to the next interlude. It leaves you in the same place, making you backtrack through the level to reach your getaway car.

I am forced to bear witness to the aftermath. My masterpiece of violence. I pause for a second, then rush to the exit. There is no one left to “get” me, but I can’t shake the feeling that I have to get out of there ASAP. I can’t stand it. I’d prefer silence, but that buzzing, that lone note reverberating, the echoing. It’s unsettling.

I have to get out.

The laidback synths of the grading screen are soothing. I’m given a pat on the back. I’m good to go.

To be continued.

[This is the second part of a two-piece essay. Click here for Part One. This post contains spoilers for Spec Ops: The Line]

In Spec Ops: The Line, the player takes control of Delta Force Captain Martin Walker on a reconnaissance mission to desolate Dubai. Under Walker’s command are heavy weapons and explosives specialist Lieutenant Alphonse Adams and Staff Sergeant John Lugo, sniper, engineer, and polyglot.

The sparkling postmodern oasis that is the city of Dubai has been ravaged by freak sandstorms, turning the metropolis into a wasteland. Its leaders abandoned their people before the cataclysmic natural disaster hit. As luck would have it, the 33rd Infantry Battalion of the US Army led by distinguished Lieutenant Colonel John Konrad had just finished their tour in Afghanistan and came across Dubai. Their decision to join the relief effort was curtailed by orders to abandon the city, but they defiantly chose to stay to help the civilian populace.

Soon enough, the sandstorms got worse, stranding the 33rd with the rest of the citizens of Dubai. After failed attempts to keep the peace in the dire conditions, the 33rd tried evacuating the people only to fail at that mission as well. With all communications lost, the UAE declared the city as a no man’s land and the 33rd was disavowed by the US government for treason.

With one ominous radio message by Lt. Col. John Konrad managing to breach the sandstorm wall after the tragic events, Capt. Walker and his men are sent to investigate.

In the beginning, the game doesn’t do anything to set itself apart from the average modern shooter. The premise sounds much like your garden variety VG war thriller plot, and the mechanics follow the formula of your generic realistic third-person cover shooter.

You fight native “insurgents” in the beginning. You try to rescue your fellow soldiers. You dash from wall to wall to get closer to your objective while avoiding gunfire. You pop in and out of hiding to carefully aim and shoot at your enemies. You issue a command to your squad every now and then to throw a grenade or snipe a turret operator. You move from action-packed set piece to set piece. Your health slowly regenerates. You even get little notifications for performing particular actions like blasting an Arab’s head off with a pistol or blowing up a group with one grenade.

If you were to stop playing an hour or so into the game, I wouldn’t fault you for dismissing it as “just another shooter”.

In terms of gameplay, it doesn’t really rise above that statement. Where it makes its mark as one of the more important games of this generation is in its self-destructive narrative tied to player agency.

The game presents you a number of moral dilemmas. In the first one, you have to choose between rescuing a CIA agent being tortured right in front you or civilians getting lined up to be executed. In another, you have to decide the fate of a civilian who stole precious water and a soldier who apprehended the thief not before killing his family.

None of it comes easy.

But what turns out to be the some of the most powerful choices are the ones made for you by Capt. Walker.

Late in Chapter 4, you turn your crosshairs from the insurgents to your fellow Americans, the Damned 33rd. All because of an established internal conflict with the CIA sowing dissension, you and your subordinates are shot at by Col. Konrad’s loyal men. You shoot back, wiping the squad out with your impressive shooting, by now refined to calculating effectiveness.

In self defense, Walker says to the dissatisfied Lugo and Adams. Plus, they’re traitors as deemed by the powers-that-be. They’ve also imposed their own form of dictatorship, rounding up rowdy civilians in the name of the law.

From here on out, the 33rd Battalion is the opposition. Those treasonous power-hungry mad men deserve to be put down.

Then Chapter 8 “The Gate” happens. Walker, Adams, and Lugo come across a heavily fortified encampment of the 33rd, none of the soldiers there aware of Walker’s squad’s presence. Though their position offers them a good vantage point, they still have a whole platoon armed to the teeth with trucks, turret-mounted jeeps and APCs to deal with.

Engaging in direct combat leaves them little to no chance to survive. In a bit of twisted fortune, a barely guarded loaded artillery unit sits on that very place. Its payload: white phosphorus. Having already seen its effects on humans in a barren target site just before they got to the encampment, Lugo and Adams hesitate. So does Walker, but he knows what has to be done. Lugo implores him to stop. There’s always a choice.

You press on. For the mission.

Load up the grayscaled top down screen, point to the scurrying figures on the ground, and rain white hot death with a click of a button.

it’s like a minigame

You rappel down the battlements, and just like in Hotline Miami you walk through the horrors of your own doing. Soldiers with their legs blown off. Americans half-dead stumbling through the charred rubble. And finally, a container full of innocent civilians huddled up with their faces completely burned away from their skulls. What was once a woman clings to what was once a child in the middle, the woman’s one empty eye socket staring straight at Lugo, at Adams, at Walker, at me.

Their saviors.

I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know they were there. This is all my Konrad’s fault.

He made me do it.

I move forward. He needs to pay for this.

From this point on, Walker slowly starts to grow unhinged. He starts cursing out his squadmates whenever he gets hit for not providing cover. He growls his kill confirmations with an expletive thrown in unlike the measured tone in the first parts of the game. Instead of the mercy shots Walker does to execute downed opponents, he gets vicious by making enemies plead first before blowing their heads off, beating them to death with his fists, or crushing their necks with his boot. Later on, the hints in the loading screens change to mocking questions and fatalist statements.

Soon afterwards, he and his squad see dead soldiers tied up to chairs – more victims of the infamous incendiary weapon. At least their deaths don’t entirely hang on Walker’s conscience, as they were executed upon Col. Konrad’s orders for disobeying him. Walker grabs the radio nearby, and speak of the devil, it’s Konrad on the other side. Walker brings it with him, and Konrad never fails to question Walker for his actions every step of the way, serving to both burden Walker’s fragile mental state and drive him to press on.

A side mission with grizzled CIA veteran Riggs to supposedly bring the Damned 33rd to its knees by taking control of the city’s remaining water supply goes badly through betrayal, and only compounds the psychological stress Walker is experiencing. I doomed the city Riggs tricked him into euthanizing the city, and he’s forced to make one last ditch effort at evacuating the citizens, some of whom were witnesses to Walker’s complicity in crashing the water tanks.

A hallucinatory trip to the satellite tower to broadcast the evacuation message ends in the entire structure collapsing thanks to Walker’s need to see the helicopter’s mounted gatling gun’s power.

Then all of a sudden, I’m transported back to the very beginning of the game. I’m reliving the chopper shoot-out sequence, and even Walker remembers that we did this already. And just how that section ended earlier, we crash.

Only this time, I awaken to a Dubai blanketed by a red mist, with the iconic Burj Khalifa turned into a symbolic Barad-dûr in the background. A complete 180 from the tempered entrance of the Delta squad to Dubai filled with light-hearted banter and just a handful of questions.

Konrad starts berating Walker once more for stamping out any hope Dubai had left with his actions while turning against his fellow Americans. Walker sees some of the people he’s killed, shambling towards him while making him damn sure it was all his fault. The short scene was also rather eerily reminiscent of Naked Snake’s walk through the river of Sorrow in Metal Gear Solid 3, but it packs more punch into the seconds that felt like eternity. It doesn’t make a full listing of the nameless soldiers you killed unlike in MGS3, focusing on just the three men that directly affected your mission.

Finally, he sees Lugo being swallowed by the sand as he cries for help. And as Walker would find out soon enough, it was foreboding of the Staff Sergeant’s death by the hands of the civilians. One more hard decision comes, as Lugo’s lifeless body is cut down from the noose and the Arabs surround the two remaining soldiers.

Faced with a literal angry lynch mob who just killed a squadmate, a friend, I still somehow managed to keep myself from mowing them all down. Despite the shoving and the pelting of rocks, I shot at the ground to scare them all off. Despite all that, Walker swears vengeance on the Damned 33rd and on Konrad.

The climactic battle between Capt. Martin Walker, Lt. Alphonse Adams and the Damned 33rd kicks off with Walker being reminded of the horrors of white phosphorus. The artillery is fired into the air, exploding in a flash that envelops the screen. Konrad welcomes Walker to hell, and he too is burned alive.

He snaps out of it thanks to Adams, and the two overcome the odds once again. On the last road to crush the remnants of the 33rd, a heavy obstructs their path. But Walker sees Lugo instead, screaming in anger for being left behind to die, and having to be dragged through this suicide mission just so Walker can feel like a hero.

If you die in this segment, the game instantly reboots to the start of the section as if nothing had happened. The heavy looks just like a heavy now.

In the last stand, Adams and Walker are finally overwhelmed. Walker wants to surrender, thinking it’s the only way they can still finish their mission of evacuating the civilians from the city. Adams has none of it, asking the enemy to just kill him already because he knows it’s over. Out of frustration, he pushes Walker to safety so that he can “finish the mission”.

Walker makes it to the tower with no opposition, only to be greeted by a squad of soldiers – the last of the 33rd. They stay in file except for one who greets Walker, telling him that they surrender, that Dubai is his, and Konrad is waiting upstairs. They salute him. Not what Walker was expecting, but what he probably wanted all along.

It’s worth noting that throughout the rest of the game, Walker and his squad move from one big area to another mostly by going down. They rappel down cliffs, zipline down through empty buildings, Walker slips down across the face of a skyscraper, and they crash land from a helicopter ride. The mission is both a figurative descent into madness and a literal descent into the bowels of Dubai.

Until Walker takes the elevator ride up to Konrad’s suite to finish his mission. Suffice to say, the “encounter” with Konrad is a revelation. Walker wasn’t just hallucinating turning Adams’ face into mush or Lugo firing bullets at him. He was hallucinating the entire situation where he “had to choose” between the water thief and the cruel soldier. He was hallucinating when he was hearing Konrad’s voice “over the radio” which was busted up the entire time. He needed someone to blame. A dead man.

His original assignment was simple reconnaissance, but he just had to play the hero. He had to fire the white phosphorous. He had to keep going.

He was just trying to save everyone.

Faced with the unsettling truth, “Konrad” gives Walker one more choice. Owe up to his transgressions that left nothing but a trail of dead bodies in his wake by shooting himself, or stick to the script that none of it would have happened in the first place if it wasn’t for Konrad. He has five seconds, or Konrad chooses for him.

It takes a strong man to deny what’s right in front of him, but it takes me the full five seconds to make that decision.

At the very least, Walker gets to go home. He’s a broken man, but at least he’s home.

But then Walt Williams, the game’s lead writer, shares his personal take on the story saying that Walker and his crew died in the helicopter crash after destroying the satellite tower. Everything after that is him stuck in a hellish purgatory. Williams also points out the fade transitions also play into the story, as every time the screen fades to white instead of black, Walker hallucinates.

In the ending where you choose to surrender your weapon, sure enough, the screen fades to white. The other two endings where Walker refuses to hand over his AA12 and either dies in a hail of bullets or overcomes rescue team Falcon-1, the screen fades to black.

In the end, there is no saving Captain Martin Walker.

It’s a sobering statement that goes against the typical glorification of war in your average shooter. In taking this route, the act of committing violence regains the weight it lost from being trivialized in most games.

But for as powerful as the acts of violence are, the game doesn’t quite hit all the right notes to keep its execution of its themes pitch perfect.

Having to face wave upon wave upon wave of nameless soldiers didn’t quite help me empathize with any of them. Besides the white phosphorus scene, I never once felt sorry for a single soldier that I killed.

I understand that Williams intended for the countless battles to wear on the player. However, having no real emotional connection to the Damned 33rd besides them being “fellow Americans” (which doesn’t even have that going for it since I’m not American and I’m totally against America’s modern military interventions) won’t make me care. Popping off their heads and blowing them up with a sticky grenade just don”t have the same emotional punch to the gut as dealing with a CIA agent who tries to earn your trust and gives you a way out then backstabs you later.

I also see it as a concession to a third person shooter requiring such gameplay. You have to fight through hordes of enemies, or it wouldn’t be much of a military third person shooter. The achievements popping up on screen whenever you perform well with a certain weapon or make one of the decisions also don’t help, breaking the immersion by reminding players that it’s still just a game that pats your back for killing people in a specific way.

On one hand, sticking to the conventions keeps the experience as close as possible to the genre it’s criticizing, making that action much more apparent. On the other hand, being trapped by those conventions detracts from its goal of giving more weight to the act of killing.

Nevertheless, the rest of Spec Ops still manages to squeeze out real drama from both its gameplay and narrative. Walker should be the poster boy for every war game with stories that rest entirely on one man’s shoulders – suffering from a severe case of PTSD.

Although some have argued that removing choice from its most powerful moment – the white phosphorus scene – makes it seem hollow, Williams defends it by saying soldiers are thrust into such situations where there are no good choices and not all pertinent information is readily available.

The circumstances are quite similar in Hotline Miami, and yet we gamers just have to keep killing despite not fully knowing why. Of course, having paid good money to be able to play these games in the first place is one important factor. However, it can also be argued that buyers enter any transaction with any product without the guarantee that they will enjoy it. People can walk out of a movie theater, put down a book, turn off the DVD player, or delete an album from their music library if they don’t enjoy it.

We’ve been desensitized to video game violence from all our past experiences where killing (and killing plenty) is a given, and that our enemies’ deaths really have no effect on us. Because of this, we accept “missions” that involve a whole lot of violence without question. Besides, we’d probably be given a good enough excuse later on anyway.

So when that expectation is subverted by a reason such as a selfish act of intended heroism gone absolutely wrong or by having no good reason at all, it either makes us feel sick enough for playing through the whole thing anyway or has us question why we seem to revel in the violence.

Whichever the case, it’s a good thing that there are games such as these that cast this deeply-rooted aspect of video games in such a light. This form of media can be more powerful than traditional ones such as books, film and theater for its inherent interactivity driven by the consumers themselves. By approaching the visceral and relational act of committing violence as something that means something to the players, video games can bring about more emotionally-engaging and thought-provoking experiences.

It can also help diversify the already saturated market that has relied too long on violence-centric gameplay mechanics (as Williams himself mentioned in his talk at this year’s Game Developer’s Conference), leading to more creative avenues that explore conflicts which successes don’t hinge upon inflicting pain or outright killing another party.

Jowy-seph: After Final Fantasy Tactics, Suikoden II would be my favorite RPG of all time. As all JRPGs are, you play the role of a scrawny boy next door who happens to have been fated to become its world’s hero, unifying its warring peoples to fight a greater evil with your charismatic personality despite barely uttering a word and your unexplainable physical and strategic prowess.

Well, I guess having possession of one of that world’s powerful true runes helps! Although technically, the Bright Shield rune is just one half of the true Rune of the Beginning, and the other half, the Black Sword rune, being in the possession of the hero’s best friend Jowy, makes for one of the strongest conflicts in all of video game history. A sentiment I’m sure the better half that completes me will certainly agree on!

[In this special edition of Sundate, Joseph and his REAL-LIFE SO Racine kick back in their loveseat and wax reminiscent.]

Riou-acine: This game is definitely in my top 5 as well! What makes Suikoden II stand out from other JRPGs, and even from the other games in the series, is the aforementioned conflict between best friends that is the focus of the story. There is an invasion on-going, but that isn’t even top of mind to the main character, and thus to the player — it’s how this war has pushed these two childhood friends apart, and how each of them tries to bring the war to an end from opposite sides. And when you do get to the end, it’s one that could go either way, depending on your actions in the game. But how can you not try your hardest to get the best ending after seeing this video in the very beginning?

Jowy-seph:  Beautiful, just like you. With just a handful of charming scenes in sepia, you’d know immediately how close the bond the hero and Jowy (and Nanami, the little sister) had. Above all the politicking, the town-burning, and the demon-summoning, it was a story of TRUE FRIENDSHIP. Of course, the desire to reunite the two that didn’t lead to SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT Jowy’s death SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT just had to be a huge challenge. Recruit all 108 stars of destiny? And you have to do it before getting to a pivotal point in the game? And you have to make a split-second decision later on?

In the year 2000, back when Square Enix was just plain old Square, it was at the height of its power. It had built itself a grand reputation as an industry giant with the incomparable successes of its flagship Final Fantasy franchise and its other notable JRPG hits such as Xenogears and the Chrono, Mana, and SaGa series. Such titles are sure to hit many a gamer growing up in the 90′s with a wave of nostalgia, reminding them of the good ol’ days of saving a magical world as a teenage boy with the help of colorful party members, ultimate guides, and days spent grinding the night away.

Lost amid these recognizable names is the one game that Square only dared to make because of its position then when it could do no wrong. For all of the little innovations its JRPGs had, they followed a winning formula. An expansive world where the players could roam free, interacting with welcoming NPCs in towns bursting with life and unfolding a fantastical narrative where the fate of the universe hangs in the balance. Along the way they meet characters filling archetypal roles to join the party, and they all get some sort of personal story arc to justify their existence. As the game progresses, the characters all get stronger by gaining experience through battles and acquiring better gear. They can even easily surpass enemies set into the main plot points with fixed power levels if the players choose to spend hours leveling up the characters in appropriate monster-filled areas.

And of course, Vagrant Story doesn’t follow any of those guidelines, resulting in a gaming experience unlike any of Square’s previous offerings, much to the dismay of its core audience, unfortunately.

Its plot takes some well-worn inspiration from JRPG tropes such as having a religious institution turn out to be corrupt, looking to silence anyone from uncovering its unsurprisingly unholy practices to (continue to) control the world in a conspiracy with/against the ruling government. Caught in between is a shadowy organization looking to make things right/usurp power, and the mysterious yet charismatic villain vulnerable to grand displays of power and speechifying.

However, Vagrant Story pulls off some neat twists that manage to make players question their allegiances, their missions, and even main character Ashley Riot’s own identity. That is if they can hold on to the bare narrative thread that mostly just leaves them grasping for a story to hold onto once they’re dumped in the dead city of Lea Monde.

And it’s in this setting where the game begins to lose the traditional JRPG fan suckered into thinking this was going to be another ride through convention after playing Final Fantasy VII and VIII. Lea Monde is a forgotten realm, buried in its haunted past of dark sorcery. Its dungeons are tombs filled with reanimated corpses and all other manners of evil; its paths twisting, turning and converging in a labyrinthine maze of floating platforms, puzzle cubes, and locked doors. Passage through its halls only promise dread, even in the inescapable beauty of its forest and under the harsh light of the sun through its abandoned streets and alleyways inspired by 18th century French architecture.

Through it all, Ashley Riot walks alone. 

No shopkeepers peddling their wares with glee, no bartenders to idly chat with for rumors spreading across the land of Ivalice, no unlocked houses to barge into and strike up polite conversations with villagers ready to give you their opinions and whatever wares and money they might have lying around. Your only respite is the forging of armor and weaponry behind four walls of workshops scattered throughout the land.

Ashley himself is a cipher, his very meaning for being left to a series of ambiguous flashbacks locked away in the frame of a cold-blooded one-man army, as pointedly noted by main antagonist Sydney Losstarot in one of the game’s many superbly shot and written dialogue.

Sydney is also a man of mystery, his intentions never becoming truly clear until the final moments where the game hits a profound moment of tragedy and heroic sacrifice. And he carries himself with a charisma like any good villain should have that gives the chase spaced out between long dungeon crawls some much needed weight.

Deeper into the heart of the game itself, the interconnected complexity of the equipment and fight mechanics, are what ultimately either alienates you or drags you down the rabbit hole.

Like your typical RPG, Ashley has baseline stats like STR and INT and HP that grow as he vanquishes increasingly tougher opponents through his quest. The difference though is that these points barely make a difference when going up against enemies. It’s the gear that matters, with each piece of equipment possessing certain properties that play to varying strengths and weaknesses. Matched up with the appropriate adversaries, a bronze dagger with low innate strength can be a more effective tool than a silver great axe packing more raw power.

Such equipment, however, does not usually come prepackaged with its elements molded to deadly efficiency. Weapons and armor have to be forged in battle to increase their affinities, and raising one property always comes at the expense of another. Thus, there can’t be one ultimate sword or shield to defeat every enemy, forcing players to develop an entire collection of killing tools to deal with all the varied monstrosities lurking in Lea Monde.

Players can also craft new gear by combining existing pieces together, attaching gems imbued with power to supplement their strengths, and there is a bevy of unique combinations that can be made.

None of it would matter though if not applied properly in the inevitable encounters through the unique battle system. Movement is in real time, but attacking is a freeze-frame process of precision striking of body parts. Once initiated, Ashley can then string together chains of attacks by timing button presses assigned to a specific Battle Ability for various effects.

To keep players from catching enemies in an indefinite loop of chains till they die, RISK comes into play. The more chains done, the higher the RISK. The higher the RISK, the lesser the chance of hitting the enemy and the higher the damage the player receives once attacked. There are benefits to increasing RISK, such as improving chances of doing critical damage and making certain magic more effective.

On the defensive end, the well-timed press of the right Defense Ability button can save your life, halving the damage of a heavy blow or restoring Ashley’s HP among other beneficial defense mechanisms.

Then there are Break Arts, grimoires and the magic system, the dungeons with their deceptively simple puzzles, and all the different enemy classes. Learning all of it already sounds like a hassle. It doesn’t help at all that the game drops you into all this with only the slightest of in-game hints and a manual that merely scratches the surface of its inner workings.

It’s certainly not uncommon to hear people share stories wondering why they’re doing zero damage to bosses and getting Game Over screens after engaging a couple of random generics. And so there’s no surprise how despite the near-universal critical acclaim (it was only the third game to receive a perfect Famitsu review score before they started handing them out to hyped up AAA titles) and initial strong sales, it has largely been forgotten by mainstream audiences and Square Enix has yet to develop another game in the same vein.

They stuck to their guns, producing best-selling JRPGs hewing closely to their tried-and-tested tenets to triumph with titles like Final Fantasy X (a personal favorite of mine, to be honest) and Kingdom Hearts and its many iterations (the first one being a guilty pleasure of mine, to be frank). But as history would have it, that well would soon go dry not just for Square Enix but for other developers focused on the genre. Western companies soon took over the RPG scene with games that gifted players more expansive worlds, more daring plots, and the power to choose their own fates.

Square Enix has lost all the goodwill it accumulated in the 90′s to a host of reasons like pursuing a pet project turned certified Hollywood bomb, bungling their latest online venture, having incredibly lengthy development cycles that only lead to disappointingly mediocre products, overly relying on ports and remakes of past titles instead of creating new IPs, and setting unreasonable sales expectations for millions-selling published games that resulted in a net loss. I also believe it’s mainly for their stubborn insistence in staying the course, seemingly not realizing that their target audience has grown up and is looking for something more, something different, something new. If only they bothered to appreciate what they had in their hands in the past!

Perhaps its a testament then to the visionary genius of its maestro Yasumi Matsuno (creator of the similarly deep strategy-focused games Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics) that he managed to enthrall a group of die hard devotees with this giant question mark of a game, the game that could have steered Square into an exciting new direction. They are the ones who to this day light up with an effervescent glow at the mention of the game’s name, ready to trade war stories with fellow fans about crafting their own repertoire of badass blades and nigh-impenetrable mail with personalized names like “Deathbringer 5000″ or “My Ex-Girlfriend”. They are the ones who also dared to take the risk and make the big leap with him, out of genre expectations and into uncharted territory never since explored again.

[As duly pointed out by some readers, I screwed up by mentioning the Breath of Fire series as one of Square's when it was developed by Capcom. Square was only a publisher and just for the very first game for its NA release. Doh.]

XBOX ONE? MORE LIKE XBOWNED OWN

I’m getting ahead of myself.

So Microsoft was coming into E3 with nothing but bad press. This was going to be their one chance to win back even just a little of the hardcore gaming audience they’ve since alienated with a focus on a “all-in-one” entertainment smorgasbord of TV, sports, and COD and horrendous anti-consumer policies.

Did they accomplish that, or did they just keep digging their own graves? Thankfully, we at Kambyero were there LIVE* to see which direction Don Mattrick and the rest of the clowns were heading!

i’m somewhere in the front row seats to get a real good look at how Microsoft planned on making their hour and a half long public apology

If there was one way for Microsoft to make me not hate them, it’s having them show off an exclusive first peek at Metal Gear Solid V. Although we don’t have David Hayter doing the iconic Snake voice, I think having Keifer “Jack Fuckin’ Bauer” Sutherland as the new VA is a pretty damn fine second option.

WELP, THEY GOT METAL GEAR SOLID V ALL SINS ARE FORGIVEN

Everything about the game itself looks great, although the power of this next generation doesn’t really shine so much in terms of having “more pixels” and higher resolution textures. It’s in the other things such as lighting, particle effects and other background graphical features.

A shiny new Xbox 360 sporting the sleek black Xbox One look is… OK? No announced price drop though so I’m not sure what the point of that was! Getting two “free” games by subscribing now to Xbox Live Gold also isn’t really drawing much attention, especially with the games they’re offering soon were released in 2010 and 2007.

TANKS FUCK YEAH

A couple more 360 games to come out soon, but nothing that really stands out much except for maybe Dark Souls II confirmed to be out on the console.

As for the games coming out for the XBONE, Microsoft actually delivered on their promise to showcase what they’ve planned for E3.

-There’s Ryse: Son of Rome AKA “QTE: The Game”

-The out of nowhere revival of long dead fighting game franchise (and total Mortal Kombat rip-off) Killer Instinct

-The latest entry in the Forza Motorsports series where the computer plays the game for you when you’ve got better things to do

-Sunset Overdrive which actually looks kinda cool (although what was shown was just a trailer)

-Minecraft which is getting its own fancy new Xbox One upgrade

-Quantum Break which has an intriguing time stop premise and will integrate with the Xbox One TV show of the same name

-Project Spark AKA Minecraft But Even Better

-”Episodic murder mystery” D4 starring Keanu Reeves.

-Another franchise revival of sorts with Crimson Dragon that had the crowd cheering and making their own sound effects

-Dead Rising 3 which seems to have abandoned the silliness of the first two games for a grittier atmosphere (oh who am i kidding HAMMER-SAW)

ALL THE DARK MATURE AND EPIC EMOTIONS

-The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt which is as DARK MATURE AND EPIC as the first two

-Battlefield 4 which made for an even more awkward presentation than the Killer Instinct 3 “match” that had a RAPE JOKE

-All new unnumbered Halo that had Master Chief wearing fucking rags for some dumb reason

-Indie game support with the highlight on a dungeon crawler/explorer Below

-And another new IP Titanfall featuring more giant robots, more shooting, more teamwork, and more explosions

All in all, the games showcase wasn’t bad. It’s got a good mix of new and old IPs in different genres, most of which are exclusives, to satisfy fans of longtime series while also introducing something fresh for people to get excited about. The possibilities of cloud computing in the realms of advanced AI (it’s still AI no matter what that dude said) and on-the-fly world building were also rather impressive, as shown by Forza, Project Spark, and Titanfall. 

Unfortunately for Microsoft, there is still the dark cloud of used games and always online DRM looming above that prevent hardcore gamers from reaching a good level of interest on the console. The $499 price tag also didn’t help matters. If only Microsoft didn’t force the Kinect on customers in the XBONE package, they might have come up with a much more competitive price.

And of course, as we all found out later on, Sony proceeded to bury any hope Microsoft would have of winning over the hearts of hardcore gamers in their own E3 conference.

Microsoft’s latest reactions to the overwhelmingly positive response to Sony’s decisions to not go down the same route as Microsoft also aren’t very encouraging about a possible recovery. Microsoft Game Studios Corporate VP Phil Spencer believes that the video game console race “isn’t a sprint”, and that they’ve still got Gamescom and the Tokyo Game Show to impress more people. Mentioning TGS is rather ironic, considering Microsoft’s narrow-minded focus on the US with the XBONE’s all-in-one entertainment features and their total lack of brand presence in Japan.

Then there’s Don Mattrick basically giving a fuck you to people complaining about the XBONE’s 24 hour online restriction.

It’s a familiar arrogance that led to Sony giving up their market domination with the reveal of the PlayStation 3 back in ’06, showing that supposedly loyal customers could very well jump ship if the one they’re currently on is going to sink.

With that in mind, I think we can all agree that for the audience that actually cares the most about Microsoft’s consoles, the Xbox One is pretty much done.

I went into The Last of Us with very little knowledge about the game itself, having largely ignored the hype machine in full swing for the most part simply because I was not an owner of a PS3 until very recently. I have not seen any of its trailers, gameplay footage, interviews or any of the pre-release marketing that comes with any blockbuster AAA game. All I knew was that it was set in some post-apocalyptic future infested with zombie-like creatures, and that it was apparently “gaming’s Citizen Kane moment“.

As circumstances would have it, I had just enough money saved to buy a PS3 and a monitor at that time, and having been repeatedly frustrated in my attempt to save up for a gaming laptop, I decided right after seeing that picture to finally enter the 7th generation of consoles and see what all the fuss was about.

Unsurprisingly, that statement turned out to be just hype. The Last of Us isn’t gaming’s Citizen Kane moment. It doesn’t do anything revolutionary gameplay-wise, nor does it even take any bold steps into uncharted territory in terms of story-telling.

The premise is nothing the industry has yet to see, and the gameplay elements of stealth, shooting and melee combat aren’t particularly innovative.

And yet, I believe the game deserves all of the praise it has received, Empire magazine’s hyperbolic analogy aside.

Starting off with the presentation, this game is drop dead gorgeous. I think I’ve already spoiled myself graphically because the rest of the PS3 games I’ll be buying will look like monstrous Clickers compared to The Last of Us’ ruggedly handsome man’s man Joel.

i dare you to try and not get lost in those steely eyes

The lines on the aforementioned leading man’s face draw all the burdens he’s carried in his soul. Ellie, the girl who’ll save the world, exudes spunk in her bright eyes hardened by years growing up in the brink of humanity’s extinction. Light shafts piercing through lush green leaves of trees in summer speak of hope, and the blistering snowstorms of winter hail an ever darkening struggle.

Characters come alive with the superb animation (motion captured by some of the VAs themselves!) that only has the smallest of hiccups in tight situations in-game. Joel shrugs his shoulders and shakes his head at the thought of having to travel across states with a teenage girl, and I believe his frustration. Ellie shows all her doubts and dreams in her wide-eyed stares and the slight downward curve of her pursed mouth.

Without relying on bombastic gestures, the cast is rendered all the more human with subtle body language saying all that needs to be said. This nuanced display of emotion then makes their outbursts all the more powerful.

The infected also show how great a job the animators did; writhing, twitching, lumbering and running after the player in appropriately disturbing and manic fashion.

it’s a helluva lot scarier in motion

Much kudos should be given to the sound department as well. Every footstep is distinct depending on the ground covered. You can hear the crunching of broken plates just as panic sets in, having alerted an enemy because of your mistake. Voices are muffled in the distance and when behind obstacles, only getting clearer in open spaces and in close proximity.

Gunshots puncture the silence like a signal for the ensuing chaos, shiv stabbings rip through your ears, the gurgles of the strangled are suffocating, and the weepings of Runners and the clicking of Clickers will haunt you.

Academy Award winning composer Gustavo Santaolalla crafted a very understated soundtrack. Clean guitar picks awash in melancholy move the music forward, while the undercurrent ebbs and flows from sinister to hopeful, slowly rising to the surface with heavy strums and ominous percussion.

The voice acting certainly doesn’t let down. Troy Baker showcases impressive restraint in his work as Joel, balancing grit and gallantry in his Texan accent. There’s force in his bark, resignation in his sighs, and warmth in his reassurances to Ellie.

Ellie’s VA is no slouch either. Ashley Johnson sounds every bit like a playful yet determined teenage girl with a potty mouth. She is earnest in her anger as well as in her wonder.

hats off to Nolan North as well for another noteworthy Nolan North-esque performance

Of course, all this top caliber voice acting would’ve been for nothing had the dialogue been subpar.

It’s excellent, by the way. There are no grand pronouncements, just stating the hard facts; no forced one-liners or cheap comedy, just small moments of kindness and good-natured ribbing; no melodramatic cries of anguish, just panicked breaths and shocked silence.

The quality in writing extends to the fleshed out characters, the relationships they build, and how those bonds affect the plot. There is genuine growth in the main duo’s connection as well as in their own individual characters, especially in the case of Ellie who has become my favorite female character in video games.

who knew that a 14 year old girl who casually drops f-bombs and browses through gay porno mags would become a paragon of female empowerment

The people they meet along the way each have clear purposes and their own little quirks that make them memorable. Every choice they make is grounded on their beliefs, their hardships and their sacrifices.

And it all unravels in a measured pace, giving players time to soak in the development and the atmosphere in between frantic and heart-pounding set pieces.

The gameplay reflects this philosophy of self-control, never giving the player too much that it all becomes expected and a chore to go through.

Joel is tough but he’s no one-man army, and life 20 years after the end of the civilized world means very little resources. So instead of taking on enemies upfront, you’ll be mostly hiding behind overturned tables and empty vehicles. Pressing R2 brings up Listen Mode, acting as a radar of sorts that detects the locations of enemies based on the noise they make.

Pick up a brick or an empty beer bottle and throw them somewhere as a distraction, or right on the enemy’s head to stun him/her/it. Creep up behind so you can either go for a little noisy strangulation or silent throat stabbings if you have a shiv.

the only permanent cure to the disease

Scattered throughout the areas are a number of items which you can use to craft makeshift weaponry. Scissor blades, medicinal alcohol, and cloth rags combined turn into shivs, molotovs and medkits, making scavenging integral to survival.

Overlap between resources necessary for crafting different items and the limited amount you can bring make for more strategic thinking. The nail bomb you create now might not be as useful as a modified 2×4, and the rags and alcohol you used for a molotov could have been used to make a medkit to patch up your wounds with enemies approaching.

If you do get found out while sneaking around, you can choose to engage in open combat if you’ve got a melee weapon at hand or a gun with ammo to spare. You’re chances aren’t as good as silently taking down enemies one by one, especially with how scarce bullets are and that all melee weapons break after a number of hits. Ellie and whoever else is with you help out in the chaos, firing whatever guns they might have or jumping into the fray with a knife or a baseball bat while ducking under cover if possible.

Joel’s fists are his last resort, and he can dish out a lot of pain. This is most apparent when punching in closed environments, as the unarmed fights are context-sensitive, lending to brutal displays of violence where Joel slams people’s heads hard on desks and rams their bodies up against walls, choking them with his forearm on their necks. It’s ugly, but in a good way.

punches so hard they make these uglies even uglier

You can upgrade your projectile-based arsenal with the help of gathered tools and a workstation; increase clip capacity, improve range, hasten reload speed, etc. Collected prescription pills also allow you to enhance Joel in different ways such as amplifying Listen Mode’s range and giving Joel the ability to use shivs when Clickers grab him, which means instant death without those blades.

But again, you won’t be getting too many parts and pills that you’ll be maxing out all of the upgrades in one playthrough. You have to decide which areas you want to focus on to really get the most out of the weapons you’ll receive, and to survive the situations you’ll find yourself in.

And boy can those situations be intense. Armed hunters will head for cover, signal to others in the area, separate to flank you, pull back if you’re packing heat, and charge you if they know you’re out of ammo. Even the infected show some intelligence, as Runners and Stalkers swarm you if they see you, dashing to your last seen location while weaving in between obstacles so you’ll end up surrounded.

The most nerve-wracking of all though is when you’re navigating through a dark maze filled with those damned Clickers. Blind they may be, their heightened sense of hearing demands that you move ever so slowly. One hurried footfall can spell your doom, as they charge quickly and relentlessly, screaming to rip your throat out.

pictured: Ellie about to make her cross-country trek on her own

It wouldn’t be a modern Naughty Dog game without the cinematic sequences that will have you holding down L2 to sprint while deftly avoiding death through button-mashing the square button in moments of struggle. These segments are largely few and far between, and never do they overstay their welcome, making these tension points all the more effective in their economy.

When you’re not lurking in the shadows or running and gunning past enemy hordes, you get to explore the empty expansive environments with a little platforming involved for a sort of meditative journey. The silence only breaks in the short conversations between Joel, Ellie, and whoever might be tagging along at the time.

I’ve already mentioned the great dialogue, but it bears repeating, as even the optional ones where you talk with Ellie about the world that has come and gone before she was born are fascinating with how much they reveal about the characters.

Ellie delivering an INSTANT CLASSIC that encapsulates the brilliance of the game’s writing

Then there are the artifacts hidden away in every area, each one telling a story of the many people that tried to keep on living in a world that has forgotten how. They range from amusing to disturbing to heartbreaking. Coupled with the other collectibles that can be found throughout the game like comics and pendants, they all help build the fully realized world of The Last of Us.

The online multiplayer is a whole different post for another time, but in short, it’s just as intense and fun as the singleplayer campaign.

The Last of Us doesn’t set out to change the way video games are played, nor does it look to blow anyone’s mind with a wholly original plot full of twists and turns. It takes every factor in the gaming formula, refines each one to the point of perfection, and brings it all together to deliver a tight and compelling experience that simply asks us why we live.

Gaming has it good this year, having two GOTY contenders come out within the first half of 2013 in Irrational Games’ Bioshock Infinite and Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us. Both games have a couple of important similarities that make the inevitable comparisons worth the discussions. The most obvious one would be the older male-younger female partnership dynamic, something that the two share with another story-driven game and my personal 2012 GOTY The Walking Dead.

GAMEOLOGICAL ZEITGEIST

[There will be spoilers for both The Last of Us and Bioshock Infinite here on out.]

In The Last of Us, you play the role of 50-something-year-old Joel who’s been hardened by life in the post-apocalypse, becoming a professional smuggler just to get by. You’re forced to accompany 14-year-old Ellie across a cordyceps-infested America in the vague hope of finding a vaccine to the virus that has ravaged the world by way of Ellie’s unexplained immunity.

In Bioshock Infinite, you play the role of 40-something-year-old Booker DeWitt who’s been hardened by life in the post-American Indian Wars, becoming a private investigator (and an alcoholic and a compulsive gambler) just to get by.You’re forced to bring 20-year-old Elizabeth back from a technologically-advanced-yet-ultra-fundamentalist version of America in the sky in the vague of hope of wiping away your debts by way of Elizabeth’s unexplained reality-warping powers.

Delving even further into each game’s plots, you can draw more parallels between the two. Joel and Booker start their relationships with Ellie and Elizabeth on a professional level. No more, no less.

Both just see the two as “things” to be delivered so they can resolve a problem that’s got nothing to do with anyone else but themselves. Joel needs his guns from the resistance group the Fireflies, and Booker needs a clean slate. They’re just looking to get the job done, treating their female partners rather coldly.

Booker straight up lies to Elizabeth about his intentions to get her to go with him after they meet up. Joel simply refuses to entertain any of Ellie’s curse-filled rants and sarcastic quips, giving her the silent treatment when he isn’t commanding her bluntly to stay close and quiet.

But as the stories progress, the tough exteriors of our leading men crack as they grow fond of their co-protagonists. They become thoroughly attached, moving them to place their trust in their companions and accomplish herculean feats for the sake of the people they’ve realized to be their partners in their journeys. Even their original wholly selfish goals get thrown aside.

who better to trust a hunting rifle to at the end of the world, am i right?

It’s also worth noting that Joel and Booker both come from a place of loss that creates their shells and drives them to do everything for Ellie and Elizabeth respectively.

Joel loses his young teenage daughter Sarah in the beginning of the end of the world, and once he grows close to Ellie, sees her as his own flesh and blood to protect.

Booker is revealed to have lost his infant daughter Anna who is actually Elizabeth.  This starts off the events of Bioshock Infinite and his quest for redemption that has him fighting to bring down Comstock to prevent his own flesh and blood from becoming a destructive pawn of Columbia.

In any other typical AAA game, the focus would be all on the male leads while the women would be relegated as mere plot devices to justify the men’s gratuitous acts of violence. Fortunately, the guys at Naughty Dog and Irrational aren’t your typical AAA game developers.

GAMEOLOGICAL TRANSCENDENCE

Ellie and Elizabeth share the spotlight with Joel and Booker, having their own personal motivations and character quirks not defined by their co-protagonists. They develop through the course of their respective stories in step with their other halves, giving you reasons to actually care for both characters.

It’s in the differences in how both the female leads are handled that had me connecting so much more to the teenager with a potty mouth than the bright-eyed reality-warping young woman.

Elizabeth is introduced as a picture of perfection. She’s eloquent, graceful, caring, beautiful, well-read, witty, highly knowledgeable in various fields of arts and sciences, and even knows how to decipher codes and pick locks. Oh and there’s the whole opening-up-tears-to-parallel-universes power that is central to the plot.

When it comes to the gameplay portions of Bioshock Infinite, she is ever the helpful AI-controlled partner. She throws you ammo, health, and salts when you’re in dire need. She brings supply caches, mechanized weaponry, and cover from alternate realities to help you in combat. She knows where exactly to hide, although she is technically invisible to enemies, requiring no protection whatsoever so you can focus on fighting without any worries of her dying.

She gives you money she stumbles upon in the areas you enter. She can read the Vox Populi’s secret messages, giving you more insight into the group’s motivations. She can pick locks that lead to hidden goodies and to the next stages of the game. She is even the one that revives you when you get killed.

Unsurprisingly, she is genuinely curious about all the things Columbia and the rest of the world has to offer, reacting to the pretty oddities in the game’s world much like how the player would. Her only flaw is naivete, and it’s totally understandable considering she’s been locked up in an angel-shaped tower her whole life. And through the course of the game, she grows to be a strong woman who makes tough decisions including having to take a life on her own and sacrificing her freedom for Booker’s safety.

She is a Disney princess through and through.

Did I mention she can also dance and sing beautifully?

The woman is a saint.

Ellie, on the other hand, is a rambunctious kid with a dirty mouth and a rebel streak. She doesn’t back down from arguments with adults, dropping f-bombs with no reservations to show just how much respect she has for some of them. She drives Joel crazy in the beginning with her behavior, and her exchanges with the solitary paranoid survivor Bill is just as antagonistic as they fling insults at each other during their uneasy alliance.

The girl can’t even swim! Art by Sara Mauri

And yet she has become my favorite female video game character.

Having been born well into the fungi armageddon, she knows nothing of the life a typical teenager would experience. Instead, she lives in a world where cynicism and hardship rule. Her parents die early, and she winds up in the care of Marlene, head of the anti-government militia group “Fireflies”. Survival is supposed to be all there is.

It’s her spark of youth that keeps her from being a depressed nihilist. Living within the borders of Boston for most of her life, she yearns to see the world beyond the the city’s tall grey walls and the suffocating control of the military. There is no denying her spirit for adventure and her desire to know more about human civilization before the fall.

This makes her such a joy to watch and listen to when you’re out in the country, stumbling across artifacts and monuments of days gone by. Every piece of human history is met with awe and wonder. From arcade machines to comics to chess boards to ice cream, she’s always got something to say that shows an endearing innocence and a rather sharp wit. In those small moments, she’s gets to be a normal kid.

ready as i’ll ever be, having just left a room full of dead kids smothered by their guardians to keep them from experiencing the horrors and pains of being devoured by the infected

Elizabeth makes her own comments about the beauty of Columbia as well, but never amounting to as much as Ellie’s, and there isn’t much of a rapport between her and the mostly silent Booker. Their interactions are mostly limited to the combat dynamic, and they frame Booker solely in the rescuer/protector role. Joel is dismissive of Ellie’s attempts at banter early in the game, but he learns to love telling her stories about the past and even leaves open a crack for her to get a peek into his own painful personal history. Bioshock Infinite‘s twist-heavy plot just can’t allow for a closer look into Booker’s true source of grief that drives him throughout the game, and his bond with Elizabeth suffers for it.

There is also a sort of disconnect with Elizabeth and the people of Columbia, as she interacts with them mostly from the perspective of an observer (dancing and singing in one-off moments aside). Comstock and Songbird are the only other characters she gets involved with for any meaningful time, and it’s never for more than fits and starts that only hint at their shared pasts. Despite her importance to the plot, she isn’t even given more than cursory acknowledgements by the Luteces, Slate, Fitzroy, Fink, and the rest during conversations, making her seem just as invisible to the majority of the cast as she is to the nameless goons you mow down.

Ellie establishes a link with each person you meet in the journey. Marlene is her second mother. Tess, Joel’s smuggling partner, teaches her the ways of the world. She and Bill exchange jabs, and they eventually earn a begrudging respect for each other. She trusts Henry, and she feels like a teen again with Sam whom she can joke and play around with. Maria sees her courage, and they get to bond over horses.

And of course, David shows just how strong Ellie really is.

BY SURVIVING A MACHETE TO THE FACE

In-game, Ellie isn’t as immediately helpful as Elizabeth as a partner. She hides for the most part, and if you do well in that regard, you won’t really need her to do anything. Although she’s “invisible” to the enemies like Elizabeth when in stealth, she’ll need a little saving when a fight breaks out and she’s grabbed by hunters or the infected.

She can, however, assist you in the heat of battle. She’ll pop out of cover to throw bricks or bottles at enemies, and she’ll even fire a shot or two once she’s given a gun. Brawling with hunters can have her jumping on their backs to stab them to death with her switchblade. If you’re life meter’s running low, there will be times when she’ll hand you a health kit if there’s one lying around nearby. She doesn’t have superpowers, but she’ll take an active role to aid you in battle.

Where she truly shines though is in “Winter”, my personal favorite part of the entire game. After Joel gets rebar’d through the abdomen and passes out, you get to control Ellie in the most beautiful and most thrilling chapter. Her time with Joel has made her competent with weaponry and survival tactics, and you get to test your skills with a physically weaker but faster character.

Video games are at their best when they can tell stories through the player’s own actions, letting them experience agency instead of yanking control from them so they can watch a pretty cutscene or listen to lengthy dialogue. This whole section showcases just that, as you have to adapt to a slightly different playstyle reinforcing the doubts, weaknesses, the quick-thinking, the bravery, and even the hardening of Ellie’s heart.

She is no match against the physicality of David and his men and the animal strength of the infected, so she has to sneak to survive. She can’t afford to hesitate, so she has to get violent. She has to grow up, and she does so rather quickly, taking her fate into her own hands and not waiting for the incapacitated Joel to wake up and rescue her.

She keeps up with David, tricks him to escape, and overcomes his every being to stay alive. The only thing Joel has to do is take the machete away from her hand after she has taken David’s life.

yeah let’s just stop there

Elizabeth for the most part gets to make significant actions only after she has been rescued by the player, which by the way happens over and over. Her only choices that don’t lead to captivity are killing Daisy Fitzroy (a problematic symbol that needs a whole ‘nother post for discussion) to save a child, and knocking out Booker after finding out his original plan to take her to New York instead of Paris. They make up after he chases her, realizing that he’s her only ticket out of Columbia.

Ellie makes a similar choice when she realizes Joel will leave her to his brother Tommy on the last leg to the Fireflies’ lab. However, they reconnect not because of pragmatism. Ellie doesn’t want to be alone, and even brings up Joel’s dead daughter Sarah to try and convince him to stick with her. Although he gets pissed initially, he comes to the realization that Ellie isn’t like Sarah after that confrontation. He stays with her.

The ending can be argued as having robbed Ellie of her own agency. She’s knocked out cold for the latter half of the final chapter, and it’s up to you to keep her from being sacrificed by the Fireflies. At the very end, Joel lies to her about the events that transpired. The decision to doom mankind in exchange for her life and Joel’s fragile psyche wasn’t hers despite her own body being the crux of the issue.

Her reluctant “okay” to finish the story could be seen as her falling victim to the tired tropes against women in video games. Even if her tone and her body language seems to suggest she knows Joel isn’t telling the truth, she doesn’t desert him for his dishonesty.

But I find the ending entirely reasonable because Ellie isn’t reduced to a simple object to be saved. The entire game builds her up to be a fully fleshed-out character that manages to penetrate the emotional wall Joel put up to deal with her own daughter’s death. She isn’t there merely as a tool to show how conflicted a character Joel is and to justify his violence. She is the one that actually gives meaning to Joel. Without her, he is nothing.

The game makes it a point to display Joel’s cold brutality as a sort of defense mechanism to keep him from reliving his loss, and the relationship he develops with Ellie is a complex push and pull on both sides. He lets his guard down to laugh at her jokes, and he also tortures those in league with her captors. He is presented as both caring and selfish in his actions. His unconquerable love for Ellie doesn’t demand praise when it extinguishes hope for humanity, nor do his blood-soaked hands condemn him when done for the sake of a young girl’s life. He’s just someone who has found his reason for living.

And in return, Ellie finds her reason to go on in Joel. Ellie learns how to survive and forges a lasting connection with someone. She grows to see Joel as her own father, willing to go to any length for her sake, even if it means lying to her in the end. She accepts that because she knows he loves her, that he can’t suffer losing her like he lost Sarah, and that she loves him in spite of all that baggage. He proves it time and again throughout the game, and she proves her affection through the Fall and Winter chapters.

Ellie’s ultimate fear is being left alone. Joel’s ultimate fear is having to relive his loss. Both are ultimately self-centered motivations, yet they are emotionally resonant, as they reflect how most of us come into our own relationships. They’re just two broken people keeping each other from falling apart.

To show how much Elizabeth has grown to care for Booker, she lets herself be captured by Songbird to be locked up once again and experimented on so that Booker might live. Although that sacrifice is still worthy of respect in its own right, it adheres to the regressive plot point of having the female give up herself for the sake of the male lead. It also turns out that she does transform into the megalomaniacal leader of Columbia as Comstock always wanted because Booker fails to save her in time in one reality.

what happens to strong decisive women if they aren’t rescued by strong decisive men in time

Her final act of drowning Booker in the river where Comstock was born should have been her biggest moment, but it hinges upon Booker making the decision to “smother the son of a bitch in his crib”, not Elizabeth. It’s done for the sake of the rest of the world that the game doesn’t really put in much of a sense of urgency, focusing more on Columbia’s cracking artificial reality instead of the impending doom the world below will face in future Elizabeth’s wrath. It’s done out of pity for Booker’s moral failings, to put him out of his misery, instead out of a love that will last against all odds, Bioshock Infinite’s epilogue be damned.

Elizabeth, for all her perfections and powers and the twists and turns of the mind-bending plot, never truly escapes the cage Mr. Levine and his team locked her in at the start by creating her as the  idealized heroine. Ellie gets to break through the proverbial mold by being fallibly human.

The Metal Gear Solid series holds a special place in my heart. I already talked in length about how Metal Gear Solid changed my view of video games. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty broke my mind. After shedding a tear (or two) during the ending of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, I was ready to have my very being consumed by the follow-up that would tie it all together into a masterpiece of innovative gameplay and compelling story-telling playing out in groundbreaking next-gen technology. 

It was 2008, and my parents and I just did not have an extra FIVE HUNDRED NINETY NINE US DOLLARS (around 28k in Philippine pesos at the time) to spend on a PlayStation 3. So I waited. For five years, I managed to avoid all manner of spoilers. But what I did hear about the game during my wait wasn’t exactly very promising – a plot that managed to be even more convoluted than MGS2 and cutscenes that went on for more than an hour.

I forgot about all that when I got to buy a PS3 just last month, and the prospect of finally being able to play the game turned into a reality. Borrowed the game, and I braced myself for what I thought was going to be another life-changing experience.

[There will be spoilers for the Metal Gear Solid series from this point on.]

Old Badass Snake, Equally Old Badass Liquid Ocelot, the return of Meryl, Raiden in full Cyborg Ninja mode, throwback bosses to the best villain team; what could possibly go wrong?

My first takeaway playing through it?

GOOD GOD THERE WERE WAY TOO MANY CUTSCENES AND THEY WERE WAY TOO FUCKING LONG

Yeah, the previous three main games had their fair share of 30 minutes to hour long cutscenes. They just weren’t THAT many, and they didn’t come right after the other like in this game. And even if they were interesting, I wouldn’t have expected that in a freakin’ video game. It really felt like I was just watching an incredibly lengthy film at times with how much I had to put down the controller.

It didn’t help at all that this was probably the worst in the entire series when it came to dialogue (or my tastes just have grown up in the past 8 years). Almost everybody was speaking in either technobabble or metaphorical platitudes. The technobabble was intriguing in a way because I’ve always been a sucker for MGS’ conspiracy theory leanings about technology, but it really made for really stilted dialogue that had the characters repeating themselves with THE WAR ECONOMY and PROXY WARS and MEMES and NANOMACHINES.

The melodrama was mostly unbearable, especially every time Naomi opened her mouth. Never have I had such little compassion for a character that was shown as a victim of sorts. I truly felt saddened about her back in MGS1, but I just loathed her throughout the entirety of MGS4. Good riddance when she died. Otacon’s romance angles just plain suck.

Did not find any of Johnny’s antics funny at all because of how utterly juvenile and distracting they were. In the past MGS games, the toilet humor of Johnny was more of one-and-done deal so it never got grating. Because of his heightened importance in this game, they just had to keep going back to it.

oh he shit his pants AGAIN?! HI-FUCKING-LARIOUS

I was not convinced at all by his sudden “BADASS” turn. My eyes were just rolling at every scene with his developing romance with Meryl. In fact, that entire Rat Patrol was a waste with how little I cared about the team. At least that guy with the stupid exclamation point haircut was worth a chuckle the first time you see him.

And what the hell was up with all those pervy shots? What possible reason was there for Naomi’s shirt to be unbuttoned all the way down to her sternum? SIDEBOOB EVERYWHERE. Same goes for Eva. The B&B’s portrayal was also blatantly fetishistic. ASS SHOTS AND JIGGLY BOOBS ALL THE TIME. Even Mei Ling wasn’t spared!

Speaking of the B&B, they went full-on storytelling mode with their backstories. Kojima simply does not know the saying “show, don’t tell”. Then again, actually giving them screen time would have eaten up more space for gameplay.

As for the plot itself, I wouldn’t have minded its convoluted nature because that’s just what I expect from an MGS game. It just goes back to the poor pacing with the s***load of cutscenes doing nothing but spewing exposition. Even then, that very last bit with Big Boss appearing and explaining that the body that was burned being Solidus’ and Ocelot just pretending to be Liquid all this time and everything else for that matter was just UGHHH. His entire death scene was also incredibly dragging, as he had to give closure to every single plot thread. He managed to keep talking for like a good 10 minutes despite his lungs giving out.

last one to get buried is a government tool!

And I would’ve been absolutely fine with Snake offing himself to put a tragic end to his life. It would’ve still been seen as a wholly unselfish and kinda heroic act if the game hadn’t gone back on the plot point about Snake turning into a biological weapon in a couple of months.  Having him be the only thing that could really kill himself – not any Metal Gears, not Liquid, not FOXDIE, not Big Boss, not Ocelot, not the microwave hallway that would’ve killed any other man – would’ve been a great exclamation point for Snake.

I also wouldn’t have minded having Raiden meet his maker at the end of Act 4 or at the end of Act 5. Staying alive after being crushed by a fucking battleship, getting impaled multiple times and having both of his arms cut off, only to have him recover through all that and find out that Rose never really married Campbell and that they’ve got a kid who idolizes him was all just way too neat an ending.

In fact you could say that for the whole game, leaving me rather empty with how all the good guys win and the bad guys all get their due. Nothing as heartbreaking as Meryl potentially dying in the first, Emma getting killed by Vamp in the second, and The Boss sacrificing her life for her country.

I did thoroughly enjoy the scenes where the game just embraced absurdity, including most of Raiden’s and Liquid Ocelot’s shenanigans. Raiden just flipping the fuck out as a cyborg ninja, slicing and dicing Geckos and battling Vamp were jaw-dropping. Liquid Ocelot going crazy with the hand motions when he took control of SOP as well as the part where he fakes dying of FOXDIE were the most fun I’ve had watching.

and i’m not having nearly as much fun as Liquid Ocelot here

As for the gameplay, what I got in between all those cutscenes was pretty damn good. Really liked the chaotic dynamic in the first two acts, even enjoyed following that one dude around in the third, loved just about everything in act four especially with the unexpectedly awesome METAL GEAR FIGHT, and was absolutely thrilled by that climactic one on one battle against Liquid Ocelot.

The first three B&B fights were also great, but the last one was a bit disappointing albeit quite nostalgic. The hide-and-seek battle with Laughing Octopus was incredibly tense with how she hid herself. Raging Raven had my adrenalin pumping every time she flew right into the tower. Stalking the Frogs and Crying Wolf in the snowstorm had me using all the tools I had. Screaming Mantis at the very least had the funny codec conversations with Campbell and the ghost of Psycho Mantis giving me a literal blast from the past moment.

The weapon customization system was pretty tight, and I loved experimenting with some of the guns and the upgrades you could get for them. Rocked the sniper rifle, the M4, and the shotgun and had fun shooting the enemies’ faces off. Have to say that the first person shooting was actually good, considering it was a bigger leap in combat for the series and it’s a 2008 game!

If only I just got more of those instead of melodrama, forced romance angles, and mostly trite and expository dialogue every hour.

and definitely more giant robot fights

A video game’s strongest trait as a medium is its power to engage through interaction.

It becomes totally limp when you’re forced to go through its supposedly most compelling moments simply staring at a screen, robbed of all agency. I can usually forgive that when it’s all reserved for a game’s ending when you’re just done playing. Unfortunately, this was not the case for MGS4 with how every act was littered with so. many. cutscenes.

It’s also why I actually enjoyed the entire segment where Snake wills himself through the microwave hallway by way of the player furiously having to tap triangle. In that moment, I truly felt one with Snake, his struggles, and all the burdens he had to bear.

best QTE sequence since Ocelot’s torture in MGS1

Same goes for the battle with Liquid which was a stroke of genius. Every strike felt meaningful because I was also a part of it. Of course, the stage, the shifting music, the sheer epic scope of it all helped immensely. That was great video game storytelling. Not the parts where the characters were just explaining every single plot detail for an hour and throwing in “dramatic” lines in an effort to sound deep. Only Mei Ling gets to wax poetic because that was established in the first game.

I just feel like if it just focused more on actually playing a game, it would’ve been so much more satisfying. Here’s hoping Hideo Kojima realizes that for Metal Gear Solid V, because as much as I feel disappointed by 4, I’ve invested way too much to give up on this series.

OR HE’LL GET AN EVEN BIGGER ASS-KICKING

Back when I made the hasty decision to get a PS3 for The Last of Us, I was preparing myself for one of the greatest single player experiences in my entire video game playing history. That’s exactly what I got, and I was fully satisfied having played it even for just that one time. I did pay full price for it, so I planned on replaying the game a couple more times to collect every item and experience the real struggles of the higher difficulty levels.

It’s been three months, and I’ve yet to touch the single player game since I first beat it. But I’ve logged in more than two week’s worth of hours in The Last of Us, and it’s all because of the one mode I didn’t even know existed for the game till I booted it up for the first time (and which I promptly ignored at the beginning).

Online gaming on consoles isn’t exactly a big thing over here in the Philippines despite the concept having been a thing in industrialized regions like the US, EU, and Japan for the past eight years. That’s because piracy is the big thing here, and as everyone knows, connecting online with a hacked gaming system is asking for trouble. Internet connection speeds here, while being mostly serviceable, also aren’t up to par with the standards of first world countries. There certainly are ISPs that offer faster-than-1mbps connections, but I’ve no access to those currently, unfortunately.

Then I was reminded that, one, I paid full price for The Last of Us; two, I’m actually living in the 21st century; three, that I actually know a couple of guys who play video games on the PS3 online; and four, that I paid full price for The Last of Us. I could at least try it out once, just for the experience (and to justify all those pesos I spent).

Surprise, surprise; the multiplayer is actually awesome. 

Taking It Slow

it’s just like playing the Arkham games but the enemies are twice as smart and there’s much more cursing

Although this game was my first time venturing into online MP in consoles, I’ve played my fair share of multiplayer shooters on the PC through LAN gaming. Most of them are all run-and-gun free-for-alls that favor the quickest and the sharpest (and the one carrying the biggest gun). One player can rack up the kills, soloing entire teams to victory. It’s chaos, which is enjoyable in its own right, but it can get tiring for me.

Factions, as the multiplayer is called, still requires great aiming and reaction times for high-level play, but the chances of one player taking out all four players in an enemy team just based on precision shooting are close to zero. Taking a couple of shots will have you crawling on the ground and bleeding to death, and you start out with very limited ammo in keeping with the game’s post-apocalypse setting so you can’t go in guns blazing. Rush into the enemy by yourself, and expect a bullet storm or a molotov to the face.

Your weapons also don’t come fully maximized to their abilities, making them slower to fire, longer to reload, and harder to aim. Such a gameplay structure then encourages a much more deliberate pace, with the maps providing lots of cover and hiding spots to really emphasize the sneaking dynamics. The shivs from the single player are in play here, and they allow for instant stealth kills so you always have to be aware of your surroundings if you want to avoid a rusty blade jammed into your throat.

There’s a barebones radar that tells you where your teammates are, but your enemies will only show up on it when they’re firing a weapon without a silencer, sprinting across the map, or when they’ve been marked by you or your teammate with the R3 button. You can go into Listen Mode which works just like in single player to detect jogging and crouch-walking foes nearby, but it’s limited to a couple of seconds and you’ll have to wait for its bar to slowly refill before you can use it again.

These foundational gameplay elements build up just as much tension as hiding from clickers and hunters, forcing you to be patient and paranoid, as one false move that alerts your adversaries can lead to a gruesome death.

Survival of the Fittest

the sugar helps the nails and gunpowder go down easier

Maintaining the “improvise to survive” aspect of the single player, the multiplayer also carries over the crafting system but with slightly modified requirements. Scraps for crafting are acquired from tool boxes spread around the maps in fixed locations, and the beginnings of matches usually spark first in these areas when both teams compete for those vital items.

All 7 multiplayer maps present unique situations with designs that capture the atmosphere of The Last of Us perfectly while maintaining a balance that’s fair to both teams. Each one is actually a modified version of areas in the single player, giving them a feeling of familiarity with enough tweaks to surprise. Checkpoint restricts players in abandoned stores and the quarantine area for intense close quarters combat; the wide open areas of Lakeside and its many high perches slightly favors snipers until a blizzard kicks in and everyone’s cloaked in white; and Downtown keeps players in the dark with its many hiding spots and winding alleys.

Chokepoints, rooftops, ravines and car-littered courtyards all make for great battlefields of back-stabbing, ambushes and firefights. Death can strike anywhere so you’re always on your toes.

Predator Essentials

that’s the light at the end of the tunnel

All the guns from the campaign are also in play with a couple of new additions exclusive to the mode. Each weapon handles differently, giving players a reason to try out everything from the fast-shooting but low power 9mm pistol to the one-two long-range punch of the hunting rifle.

I personally love the instant-down, room-clearing power of the shotgun, one of the six purchasable weapons that can only be used when you get enough parts to buy them during a match.

The inclusion of skills that give players all sorts of in-game abilities ranging from stealth perks such as becoming invisible to Listen Mode while crouch-walking to support powers such as creating gifts to give to other players further the strategizing into a complex system of varied builds and counterbuilds.

The three different game modes also demand full knowledge of which skills are best suited for the situation. Reviver 3 can be a game-changer for Survivors where there are no respawns until the whole team is wiped out. Strategist 3 lets you keep the pressure on the enemies guarding their safe as you keep respawning nearer and faster.

In the beginning though, players only have access to a few weapons and skills for customizing their characters unless they choose the preset classes that can’t be modified.

This is where the love-it-or-hate-it metagame comes in.

Staying Alive

BUM FIGHT

You start out the multiplayer with a choice to play as a Hunter or a Firefly. The only differences are aesthetic, as you have 12 weeks (with a match counting as one day) to keep your “clan” alive choosing either faction. During the course of the 12 weeks, you encounter a fixed number of missions that either add survivors to your clan or cut down a percentage of your population depending on how well you perform.

You actually get to choose what type of mission you do so you can prepare. The options vary from the offensive to the supportive such as downing a number of enemies with the semi-auto rifle or healing teammates a certain amount of times.

You start out with a handful that require a certain number of supplies to maintain. You get those supplies from the blue cans you pick up when you kill an enemy in a match as well as from the parts you earn by accomplishing particular actions like reviving teammates, marking enemies and crafting items.

If you get more than what’s required, your clan will grow but will then require even more supplies. If you get less than what your people need, some of them will get sick and eventually die if you keep playing badly and don’t get enough during matches. If they all die, you “lose” the mission, and you’ll have to start all over again.

It also serves the purpose of unlocking the rest of the weapons, skills and customization items such as hats, masks and emblems.

the face of a true playa for real

This system then encourages more competitive play, as sucking will lead to your clan dying and you not being able to use all the toys available.

There are downsides to it as well, as it has led to players quitting in the middle of matches to preserve their clans so that they can keep their clans alive and unlock hard-to-get items or keep their positions in the leaderboards.

It can also constrain your playstyle to a support role since you can easily get more supplies by healing, gifting, etc. Once I unlocked the admittedly badass Skull Mask which required 85 survivors in your clan by the end of the 12 weeks, I felt liberated as I finally had the freedom to screw around with all sorts of skills and weapons builds.

I’m A Monster

the purest form of death

Speaking of gruesome deaths, the brutality reaches a new level with the many (literally) smashmouth animations your multiplayer avatar dishes out and endures. As I mentioned earlier, players don’t die right away when their health is fully depleted. They go into a downed state wherein a meter drains out over a minute or so before they truly die, giving their teammates a chance to revive them and get them  back into the fray, or for the enemy to put them out of their misery with a hardcore execution.

Heads get caved in by 2x4s, faces get stomped on by unrelenting boots, and brain matter splatters everywhere with a point-blank shotty blast to the cranium. If a nail bomb were to explode nearby on a downed player, it’s a sure bet that one or two limbs will get severed in the blast radius.

The instant kills with the shivs, molotovs and flamethrower are equally raw. Victims gurgle as blood spurts out of their necks from getting shiv’d. They scream in agony when fire envelops their entire bodies, cooking them to a crisp in a matter of seconds as their screams die down, leaving a charred corpse for the victors to mercilessly teabag.

We’re All We’ve Got

to that hunter’s dismay, nobody is WATCHING HIS ASS

Communication with teammates is key to gaining the upper hand, whether it’s in setting up ambushes, flanking the enemy in the heat of combat, or covering retreating allies. A week into playing Factions, I had to get myself a headset to be able to talk to my friends for more efficient victories.

The satisfaction of pulling off those well-orchestrated attacks, counterattacks, and hail-mary comebacks through frenzied directing and howling cheerleading is what keeps me playing. I can’t count the times I’ve felt the rush of sneaking up on enemies for surprise shivs while my team distracted them, the sheer joy of raining simultaneous nail bombs on safe defenders then rushing in for the last minute unlock, and the so-absurd-it’s-hilarious scenarios of me and my teammates all getting burned alive by one molotov.

I’ve met so many new people, too. Most of which are cool and a really small minority being assholes, and all of whom have made my first experience playing online a memorable one.  From the smack-talking in the lobby before the match starts to the in-game taunting of the last player standing, it’s all been a blast.

And the best part is that Naughty Dog has long-term plans for the multiplayer with the promise of at least two DLC for Factions along with the one planned single player DLC. By the time this post is up, we might already have the full details thanks to Game Director Bruce Straley’s tweets:

Ok party people, more #TheLastofUs DLC info to be revealed THIS WEEK! Hang tight.—
Bruce Straley (@bruce_straley) September 23, 2013

Hug the person next to you. It's coming. #OutbreakDay—
Bruce Straley (@bruce_straley) September 25, 2013

If they announce a horde mode against the Infected, I’ll be playing till the cordyceps enslave the entire world.

Ever since Grand Theft Auto III showed the gaming industry how much chaotic fun one could have in a massive 3D city twelve years ago, “sandbox” games in the GTA mold have focused on giving players nigh-limitless freedom to cause as much widespread havoc as possible in these virtual urban sprawls. Cars are meant to be hijacked, pedestrians are to be run over, gang members are obvious drive-by targets, stores are just asking to be robbed, and hookers are employed then swiftly forced a refund. Any semblance of law is circumvented with a high-speed  chase/demolition-derby across the metropolis ending either in a conveniently located auto shop or in a defiant last stand of bullets and bombs amid twisted metal and dead pigs. One black loading screen later, and it’s back to the carnage.

So Red Dead Redemption stands as a sort of oddity compared to Rockstar’s main billion-dollar crime franchise and all the other games the series has inspired such as Saints Row, True Crime, and Just Cause. It certainly shares similarities in structure and mechanics. You are dropped into a massive detailed world populated by innocents, criminals, and lawmen which you can interact with in a number of ways, and you have the option to take on missions from important characters or go about your own merry way rampaging through without a care for where the plot might go.

What kept me from actually doing any of the latter unlike the many times I’ve gone for wanton destruction in the GTA games and Saints Row the Third for no apparent reason is, I believe, the choice of setting.

Set out west at the turn of the 20th century with modernity encroaching on untamed wilderness, former gunslinging outlaw John Marston is a man running out of time. He is forced to do the bidding of the budding Bureau of Investigation, chasing down his old gang buddies who left him for dead across the vast expanse of New Austin, all the way down south to Nuevo Paraiso in Mexico, and in the confines of West Elizabeth, running into strangers with sincere/sinister requests along the way. All this he does so that he may finally lead a simple life with his wife and son on a modest piece off farmland, to grow old and die in peace.

Marston’s story marks the refreshing change of pace in Rockstar’s offerings, as he longs not to build an empire or take bloody revenge. He doesn’t even hold grudges against his former partners-in-crime who betrayed him. His pursuit is strictly business between him, Bill Williamson, Javier Escuella and ringleader Dutch van der Linde. This tempered approach extends to dealings with the many authorities, opportunists and desperate denizens looking for his help.  However, he is still very much capable of violence, threatening those who try his very generous patience and, of course, exploding in thrilling outbursts when the player has to perform his/her “gamer duties” in quests.

His character though is ultimately a product of his environment. Born to a prostitute mother and a rowdy illiterate Scotsman, both of whom died when John was young, he was raised by Dutch and his gang, learning to live the life of the outlaw to survive. Their justification for their crimes was “revolutionary”, spreading the wealth for financial equality so to speak, and he was taught to read and treat men with enough courtesy. Certainly, the Wild West and the philosophical enlightenment of late 19th century America clashed to create such a character.

Then there’s the actual world Marston resides in. Because of its historical and geographical setting, Rockstar had to do away with the labyrinthine network of streets stretching out to fast-moving freeways and snaking into seedy alleyways of urban decay, with rushing vehicles, noisy citizens and hair-trigger gang-bangers and policemen jam-packed between brightly-lit high-rises and commercial properties.

In Red Dead Redemption, civilians are concentrated into pockets of civilization with a general store here, a saloon there, stables in the back, and the quintessential Rockstar cultural satire held very much in check with only a handful (or two) of characters acting out the blatant racial and gender insensitivity of that particular period. It’s hard to sneer too cynically at a time yet untouched by mass consumerism, vapid self-indulgence and existentialist crises, so the criticism is mostly leveled at the smug, righteous and exploitative authority figures, a stance that is never overbearing or totally misguided like that of the GTA games.

Outside the town proper, it’s all wide open lawless land with only dirt trails and singular railroad tracks to lead you back to “safety”. You’ll be traversing most of it on horseback, too, and digging your spurs deep into your steed will still take you some time to get to your destination. The view makes it all worth your while, though. Not since Shadow of the Colossus have empty vistas looked so damn beautiful to me.

I exaggerate when I say empty. Wildlife does inhabit everything in between towns. Deer spring along the prairies, wolf packs stalk the forests, snakes slither under brushes, buffalo roam the great plains, and birds of different feathers glide over sun-soaked skies. Hidden beneath carefully-placed landmarks are buried treasure, the likes of which many gold diggers lose their sanity over. With no car radio to keep you company, delicate guitar strums and soft horns blend in and out of the ambient sounds that you barely take notice how much it builds the lonesome yet awe-inspiring atmosphere.  It’s no shame at all to just get lost in the  looking for specific herbs; hunting and skinning all kinds of game from unassuming elk to wily foxes and rabbits to dangerous mountain lions and bears; or just discovering a nice little spot to start a bonfire and watch the stars.

The silence does get punctured with the occasional human interaction as you travel the land. Sharpshooters call you out to live target practice, sheriffs ask you to rope in convicts broken loose from prison wagons, and seemingly distressed maidens lure you into highway robberies. You can even stumble across gang hideouts, taking you straight into an impromptu rescue mission of a farmer’s daughter or an unlucky deputy. Rockstar deftly balances nature’s calm with man’s uncertainty, leading me more to acts of heroism than selfish risk-taking.

That’s not to say that all moments with the human AI are all action. I can’t count the hours I’ve spent playing the addictive minigames littered throughout the towns, none of which involve violence (except nicking your own fingers or getting caught cheating in poker). Horseshoes, Five Finger Fillet, and the card game classic Texas Hold ‘Em among others had me in a sort of quiet trance, having to gauge distances, memorize patterns and make the right calls to win. The systems for these contextually relevant world-building asides are smooth and simple, and I can’t help but pour in time to master them, enjoying all the frustrations and victories all the same.

Momentum shifts are a part of one of the core gameplay elements, too. A holdover from the original Red Dead Revolver, Marston has a tactical advantage over his foes with the Deadeye ability. Activating it slows down time significantly while letting the player aim and paint enemies with precision, allowing unparalleled control over gun battles wherein Marston is usually outnumbered. Upon release of the activation button, he fires off shots hitting his targets exactly where you indicated, leveling the playing field within a matter of seconds. There is a limit to how much you can use it, though, so there is still urgency within those long seconds. It’s essential to winning both firefights and duels, and the exhilaration of dropping six shooters before they can fire a single bullet is unmatched against any of the easy destructive thrills of the GTA games.

Near the end of the game, John Marston gets to live out his dreams of a happy retirement with his family. Like the first couple of tutorial missions in the beginning, you’re wrangling horses, herding cows, driving wagons and hunting pesky critters. Although he takes some adjusting, learning to be a father to a young man he never had much time for, there is contentment in his work. He isn’t perfect, but everything he did to get to that point he did for his family. Everything I did as John Marston, helping out those in need while making a name for myself by being one with the Wild West, made him a fine man. I was happy for him living out those moments of peace. It was my only consolation, knowing full well stories like these never end in sunshine and rainbows. There was no truly escaping his violent past, and the changing times had no more room for his kind.

I finished Red Dead Redemption for the first time about five weeks ago. I’ve since gone through Rockstar’s latest masterpiece Grand Theft Auto V, and put in about 10 hours in Volition’s own take on the genre with Saints Row the Third. Both games have been highly entertaining experiences – GTAV for its sheer scope and peak polish; SR3 for its non-stop over-the-top insanity (which I am confident in assuming will be one-upped by its 2013 successor) – but their sociopath central characters and their explosive ascents to controlling plastic pessimistic parodies of our own age ultimately ring hollow next to Marston’s dying West.

It’s been two months since Rockstar’s ambitious launch of Grand Theft Auto Online, and now that most of the big technical issues have been fixed, it’s time that it gets the ranting/raving it deserves from little ol’ me.

Let me start off by saying GTAO has all the potential of being a glorious multiplayer masterpiece of chaotic fun. It maintains all the grade A polish of the story mode and allows players the same freedoms of exploring the beautiful and gigantic world of San Andreas and then some. Just about every single vehicle can be found or ordered online, every building can be scaled, and every mountain can be traversed. Character customization items can be bought in all clothing stores with generous catalogs. The city of Los Santos has a wide selection of apartments and garages which can be purchased to store cars and bikes and act as safehouses. All the weapons you used to carry out crimes and cause mayhem in the single player are available.

To give players a sort of goal for continued play and to keep a level playing field, most of these tools aren’t immediately available. There is a leveling system that locks content to particular ranks, and plenty of items don’t come cheap. Ranking up requires players to take part in activities of various levels of legality. You can race on land, sea, or air, play golf or tennis or darts, boost cars, compete in shooting galleries, rob convenience stores, fight other players in deathmatches, fend off increasingly tougher waves of enemy AI in survivals, and take missions from specific in-world characters both familiar and new.

it’s GTA’s version of laurel and hardy but with more coke and gangbanging

I’ve certainly had my fair share of fun doing most of these activities, but the systems in place are for the most part never so deep enough to keep me coming back to them after a couple of playthroughs. GTA as a series never really focuses in on a particular gameplay mechanic, opting instead to give players a lot of nifty little things to do which all add up to its epic scope. The only element it really cares to put some emphasis into is how the vehicles handle (as it should considering its name).

But I can only zip through the same city streets in a supercar, get drifted from behind, and then pitted by insane drivers to spin out and lose control. Racing has never been my thing, so I was quick to get over that offering. Unfortunately, it’s the only mission offering where you can expect a sense of competency, ambition, and the variety that comes with strangers playing together.

As for the rest of the activities, you will rarely find any people who care to play them, and I don’t blame them for the most part. Shooting has always been merely functional for the series, so deathmatches are perfunctory messes decided by who can hit the auto-aim button first (i can count on one hand the times i’ve actually played in a free aim session, ladies and gents).

get as many kills possible just hiding in a corner while looking as douchetastic as possible is the only way to play gta online’s deathmatch mode

Survivals can be fun and definitely feel rewarding when you finish them. Unfortunately, the mode is structured in a way that has you hunkering down in one spot once you reach the third or fourth wave when enemies can kill you in a second and they spawn right behind you. Get in cover, pop out, pop heads, get back in cover. Repeat ad nauseam.

Golf is surprisingly engaging, but get more than four people in and it slows down to a crawl. Nobody else wants to play it either besides a couple of my PSN buddies. As for the rest, their novelty wears off after the third time you do them.

I was expecting more from the actual missions story characters give you, but aside from a couple of exceptional ones, they all follow the same tired formula of go to this place and kill these guys and/or retrieve the drugs/vehicles, none of which coming even close to the awesome set pieces you go through in the single player.

who knew being a drug runner could be so utterly boring

The cash and the reputation points (XP, basically) you get from finishing these missions have all been progressively lowered since GTAO’s initial release, with all money rewards currently slashed by half after playing through them once. When these missions have you traveling halfway across the entire game’s map, killing dozens of enemies that can wipe your entire team out in seconds and taking as long as 15 minutes to finish, there’s really not much incentive to do them again.

To gain access to all the weapons, vehicles and customization options much faster, many players have resorted to farming a handful of missions. Updates that nerfed payouts and RP rewards have made things even worse, as glitches to sell certain cars repeatedly were unearthed and abused. I can’t be too angry at them when Rockstar has made it such a gigantic slog to earn money and RP legitimately. There’s also the ironic twist of having players of a crime simulator exploiting all sorts of loopholes to gain the upper hand and flip off the developers pushing for microtransactions.

So now it’s not at all unusual to see players either roaming around in free mode with tanks and attack helicopters blowing low level players away, or camping out in Los Santos Customs flipping expensive cars over and over again for hours to get the millions to afford tanks and attack helicopters. Sure, having all these vehicles of mass destruction around can be fun to watch, but not when their cannons are pointed at you. It’s also very easy to get caught in a death loop when you get killed because you don’t respawn very far from where you died. Griefers working in teams can be rather merciless.

fuck you -xXxDaRkSaIyAn420xXx-

You can’t even hit back relentlessly with explosives, as Rockstar had the misguided attempt to curb trollish behavior with it Bad Sport system. Blow up too many vehicles owned by a player, and you are forcibly put into sessions strictly for players who’ve committed the grave mistake of causing too much carnage in a GTA game. Your character also has to wear a dunce cap and is stuck in those sessions for three full real-time days. No joining friends or crew members. Never mind the glitch exploiters and the spawn campers who are breaking the system and ruining other people’s experiences!

Then again, it’s not like free mode itself is that much of a blast. That is, if you don’t have any friends with you to screw around with. It’s a shoot-first-and-keep-shooting-no-questions-asked kind of world. Try to roll up next to a stranger to hang out, and you’ll be riddled with bullets or be smeared against the pavement nine times out of ten. Rarely will you get that magic moment when randoms will actually not put you down the second you get within a hundred meters close.

this has happened a grand total of zero times in all of gta online’s run

So you call Lester to have your character’s icon disappear from the map for a minute to sneak up on unsuspecting players or to make clean getaways. There are plenty of other services you can avail of once you reach certain levels from some of the story characters and organizations, all of which add to the unpredictable fun of free mode. Set a bounty on a pesky troll and watch most of the players in the session hunt him/her throughout San Andreas. Call on a helicopter to pick you up if you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere without a car in sight. Sic a team of Merryweather mercenaries on that guy who stole your car. Get the cops off your back after attacking an armored van and stealing its money bags.

But like with most things in GTAO, you gotta spend some cash to access any of these.

Did I mention that you also lose money every time you die? And if you want to fool around in free mode, you will probably die a lot getting into random firefights, crashing jets, chasing bounties, running from the police, backstabbing friends and getting stabbed in the back in return. Not an hour in and you’ll have lost tens of thousands of dollars to hospital bills and calls to Lester and Merryweather just trying to have fun.

Want to get away from all that violence and just cruise around San Andreas? You’ll have to pay in-game money to enter Passive Mode, making you invulnerable to bullets and bombs while also keeping you from using your weapons. Unfortunately, that doesn’t keep you safe from players who want to run you over, and it doesn’t even work when you’re in a vehicle. You know, the thing you’ll be using 99% of the time to get around anywhere?

“now no one will ever kill me as i make my way across the desert and down the highway for a good 30 minutes to get back to my shitty apartment in los santos with no protection whatsoever from supercars going 200mph and fighter jets divebombing the roads”

What makes things even worse that applies to all these activities is the way Rockstar handles the things in between. Just about every activity has you going through loading screens before and after you play through them. When the bare minimum of players needed to start an activity is reached, a timer will count down till it starts automatically. If you’re the host, you can extend time but only by 30 seconds. You will have to do the trick of changing the matchmaking option to reset the clock, and it’s not something many people will just figure out.

There are multiple voting sessions once you finish an activity to rate it, to continue to the next screen, and to select whether or not you go straight to another activity or back into free mode. Because of the wonky cloud server issues, there’s always the chance of people getting split up when you choose to go straight to another activity. If you and your friends didn’t come from the same session when you started the activity, you will get split up into different sessions when you do choose free mode.

What turns these minor hassles into a desk-banging headache is the loading screens take forever, and you’re always going to be crossing your fingers in the hopes that the loading actually goes through. I can’t count the times I’ve failed to join a job, been put in my own activity hosting lobby separate from my friends, and even get kicked out of GTA: Online entirely and back into the single player.

nah i don’t think so

Rockstar’s reliance on its cloud servers have already burned many players in the past, with character progressions and purchases not being saved on numerous occasions and even entire characters being lost. I’ve only experienced having a couple hours of my progress going to waste once, and it was enough to turn me off playing for a full week. I can only imagine the rage and frustration of those who’ve lost weeks worth of time put into the game.

I can’t say I didn’t have fun playing GTAO. Killing 10 whole waves of angry rednecks, stealing a cargo plane from an airport only to have it crash in the landing strip, knocking off liquor stores in a crime spree, and hosing down random people with a firetruck among other shenanigans with my crew were all memorable experiences. However, I felt like I had all that fun in spite of the game’s best efforts of curtailing it with mostly uninspired missions, lousy rewards and hefty penalties to nudge me towards paying real cash, unstable server issues, and a community satisfied with the cheapest thrills and obsessed with leveling up and making money fast.

If you’re not one of the millions who bought Grand Theft Auto V and haven’t taken the plunge online yet, I can tell you with much certainty that you haven’t really missed out on anything. If you still wanna try it out anyway and be another guinea pig for Rockstar’s online beta, you better bring a friend along or join a crew if you plan on staying long in San Andreas unless you’re up for an early retirement from being a career criminal.

2013 was a good year for me to get back into games. Due to certain financial realities, I had to be more of an occasional gamer for most of the 7th generation of consoles, playing old games that the home laptop could run and visiting the voice of our generation‘s house to get my Batman fix.  Finally getting a good job after graduating college allowed me to fully immerse myself in my first favorite hobby (in more ways than one!), that I can actually come up with a top 10 list of games I played that came out recently and in one calendar year.

What’s even better is that the list turned out to be a good mix of AAA and indie titles. I’ve long had my fill of the blockbuster games that major developers and publishers release, so discovering just now what the independent game scene can offer has been a refreshing eye-opener to the potential the medium in general can reach. That’s not to say that the big-time players have run out of cool ideas and fun systems even as we welcome in the new generation of consoles, as this list will show.

With that I can definitely say that I’m very much excited to see what the future holds for the industry at large. Bring on 2014!

Before I do get started on my list, I’d like to rattle off a couple of honorable mentions.

Papers, Please for tapping into my OC nature that I didn’t know I had and making me feel like crap for doing my job.

A Dark Room for showing me the importance of fire and bone spears before embarking on an adventure.

Gods Will Be Watching for preparing me to make the hard decisions in case I get stranded in a harsh alien world.

Icarus Proudbottom Teaches Typing for reintroducing me to the joys of typing.

Proteus for accomplishing synesthesia and making me appreciate life.

Ibb & Obb for proving that I do in fact am ambidextrous and making me hate life.

Bubsy 3D: Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective for making me question life.

Quirky little titles and web-based games are fun! Now on to the list of the BEST GAMES OF 2013.

10. The Stanley Parable

I’ve already made my point on how games treat player choices in their narratives, but this HD remake of a 2011 Source mod explores all sorts of possibilities the issue of agency affecting story and is pretty fuckin’ clever and at times downright hilarious at it.

Comedy hinges on delivery, and thanks to Kevan Brighting‘s droll voice work as the Narrator commenting on every decision the player makes, I found myself smiling and laughing at just about everything that came out of the Narrator’s mouth.

What’s even better is that his tone as well as the level design invites you to challenge the Narrator’s authority, pushing you to find out all the outcomes of your choices. And boy are they inspired.

Obviously, there is a limit to the results you can get in decision-making, and it’s unreasonable to expect any game to deliver everything such a premise promises. It’s just that once I had seen the endings, I had no reason to ever go back to the game.

Still, the novelty of experiencing The Stanley Parable and the discussion it opens up regarding choice in video games is well worth the time that it cracks my top 10 games of 2013. Play it if you haven’t. Or not. It’s up to you.

9. BioShock Infinite

I wasn’t that big a fan of the original Bioshock’s combat and how it played out in these very restrictive corridors, so Infinite opening things up with the wide arena-like environments was a breath of fresh air… up to a point.

Because of how large the battlefields are, the logical conclusion is to fill them up with wave after wave of enemies. This makes for frenetic fights that are fun for the first half or so thanks to the cool vigors you can experiment with, but then get pretty tiring by the back end.

Infinite makes up for that with its incredible sense of world-building and mind-blowing story revelations. The way it does handle some heavy thematic issues (the three R’s of race, religion and revolution) leaves a lot to be desired, but my one trip through Columbia and uncovering its secrets was memorable enough to earn its spot on the list.

8. Guacamelee!

I had to train myself using save states just to finish Super Mario Bros. and 3 on an emulator just this year because of how bad I am at platformers. Hearing the praise Guacamelee! received and the premise of you playing a superheroic luchador got me over my initial reluctance to try it for myself (the PSN holiday sale also helped).

No regrets getting it for $3.49, as I had a delightful time piledriving, Rooster Uppercutting, and Goat Flying across a colorful fantastical Mexican world that worships the art of lucha libre and its Land of the Dead alternate dimension.

Although I respect the tension created by losing a life when falling off into an abyss in most traditional platformers, I don’t have the patience for that in intricate level designs that need precision timing to complete. Guacamelee! avoids that problem entirely by just resetting the masked player character Juan to his last position instantly when you slip up. Removing consequence let me focus on getting the jumps and special abilities just right, and it still feels good when you pull everything off cleanly to complete a platforming segment.

The brawling part of the equation holds up surprisingly well, too. The fighting skills you pick up can all be strung together almost effortlessly, letting you rack crazy long and satisfying combos on legions of the undead.

Everything is tied up neatly in an eye-popping aesthetic that perfectly encapsulates the whimsical atmosphere of a straight-up fun brawler/platformer. If only it were longer!

7. Grand Theft Auto V

Two months before its release, I had zero hype for the biggest release of 2013. A month before it, I was sold, not because of any exposure to marketing, but because of word of mouth. Everybody online and the people I played with online just kept asking if I was going to get it. I got it on September 18, but had to put off playing it till the weekend to finish Rockstar’s only current-gen masterpiece and its horrifyingly awesome DLC.

I was floored by its scale and the amount of visual polish put into making the state of San Andreas feel real, that something so huge and something so good-looking can still be generated by aging consoles. Like all the other open-world games Rockstar made, it featurea a diverse cast of characters bursting with personality voiced by A+ talent that lent more credibility to the world the game constructed.

Having played through a series of other similar games within the months before and after playing GTA V, the contrast in graphical fidelity and presentation was all the more apparent. It’s a technical marvel, server issues in its online component notwithstanding.

The real highlight of the game though are the heists. From the setups to the planning to the execution, you feel like such a (crime) boss getting through each one with millions of dollars in hand. It also justifies the new 3 switchable characters feature as a rewarding gameplay mechanic. Never mind not getting actual rewards for most of them, I wanted more of those in the game.

The story, while intriguing, didn’t really grab me though, and its relegating of Franklin (the black main character) in the third quarter of the narrative to resolve  Michael and Trevor’s issues is problematic. There’s also a lot of missions that just have you driving from Point A to Point B, and masking it with character dialogue can only go so far. I’ve already said my part on GTA Online, so taking the entire package into consideration, GTA V can only go so high on my  list.

6. Tomb Raider

While I greatly enjoyed my time playing Tomb Raider: Anniversary, I’ve no special nostalgic connection to any of the PS1 classics nor have I gotten into the other well-received sixth gen titles such as Legend and Underworld. Having very little attachment to the series–but an attachment nonetheless–helped me both enjoy the game for what it is and be disappointed that it could have been more.

It is one of the most mechanically sound games this year. Traversing the varied and gorgeous environments feels smooth, whether I’m climbing up rock faces, zipping up and down rope bridges, or making leaps of faith across crumbling ancient architecture.

There are hundreds of collectibles both immediately apparent and well hidden, and a good majority create a sense of space, inform character motivations and supplement the solid plot. The ability to fast travel to all areas, the treasure maps, the item highlighting system, and the unlockable skill to see the goodies through walls make finding all that additional content accessible and adds up to the entire experience.

Engaging enemies is either a fluid action-packed experience or a tight sneaking segment that makes me feel like a jungle predator. The freedom with which the game allows me to choose how I want to build up Lara’s skillset to match those different scenarios is appropriate, and differentiates it enough to keep it from being an out-and-out Uncharted clone (this is the snake eating itself considering the inspiration that series took from the original Tomb Raider).

With all that said, it does feel a bit too much like Nathan Drake’s PS3 adventures when it does the cinematic action sequences, without being as excellent a thrill ride. There’s the entire ludonarrative dissonance problem that it only slightly addresses with Obi-Wan-like “remember your training” lines and Lara making snarled threats at the hundreds of enemies she mows down throughout the game.

There’s also a great shortage of tombs to raid with only one giving me real trouble to solve unlike the countless platforming puzzles Anniversary threw at me!

I can look over all that stuff because of how much I did enjoy the game, and I do look forward to future iterations where Lara’s innocence won’t be a storytelling hindrance, but the flaws do keep Tomb Raider from my top 5.

5. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

Coming out of the jumbled mess of MGS4 and the troubled development cycle, I wasn’t expecting much to come out of a hack-n-slash take on the Metal Gear universe with the silver-haired pretty boy Raiden as the lead. Tried out the demo, had a real hard time with the boss, and thought to myself that while I see how this could be enjoyable for some, this kind of game just wasn’t for me.

I borrowed the game anyway from the blood god high priestess Villalon on a whim. Fighting LQ-48i was still a pain in the ass, taking me somewhere around fifteen or so times to beat, but I forged on because everything before that promised a game that would make my jaw drop in amazement and hurt in laughter. And thank goodness I forged on.

As the basis for doing well in the game, finally getting the parry system to click by the second proper chapter made the counterattack-focused combat a pleasure. Controlling crowds of sword-wielding gun-toting cyborgs, halting mini Metal Gears with just your high-frequency blade, perfectly timing parries, entering Blade Mode and cutting enemies into a bazillion pieces then pulling out their electrolyte-fueled spines to crush them with your hand and absorb their nutrients to replenish your own energy all within a couple of minutes is so. goddamn. satisfying.

And good lord are the boss fights even better. As one-note as they are, the personalities they do have are over-the-top enough with some good one liners that had me smiling as I dodged, blocked, and counterattacked my way through their crazy and powerful movesets. The balls-out ridiculous ways the QTEs play out and how the raging metal/electronic/dubstep soundtrack kicks it up a notch in the right moments make them all the more memorable.

Speaking of bosses, the final boss is one of the best characters introduced in 2013, hands down. Amazing reveal, amazing monologue, amazing fight, amazing conclusion.

The only thing holding this back from rising higher up the list is it’s just way too short for a full-on $60 retail game that really could have used more boss fights. 4 hours and about 15 minutes was all it took for me to finish it. Granted, that’s not counting the cutscenes and the amount of times I had to repeat certain areas. Still, going through it again on Hard difficulty showed a lack of content anyway when I breezed through it to completion. Definitely going to keep replaying it to unlock stuff and get better at killing things.

4. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

Of all the games on this list, this wonderful little gem chiseled out by Starbreeze Studios and award-winning film director Josef Fares lives and dies because of its gameplay mechanic. Controlling two separate characters at once sounds gimmicky. However, the way the platforming puzzles are solved and, more importantly, the direction the narrative takes with it validates the choice of control scheme and makes a tremendous point of the unique storytelling only video games can do.

Rounding it out as a complete video game that nets the fourth spot on my list is an art style that manages to be both charming and sumptuously grand. Brothers has settings straight out of fairy tales with a grim undertone that react organically, and a plot filled with small moments of warmth punctuated by a tear-jerking ending sequence that will stick with me for a long time.

3. Gone Home

Aside from knowing that people were talking about it, I dove into Gone Home with no expectations. Five minutes in, dread had gripped me that I was so anxious just entering rooms but curiosity had pushed me to keep going and going to uncover the mystery of the Greenbriar residence.

The game is so adept at creating such an immersive atmosphere that the exploration never once feels dull. Pieces of paper are chock full of plot bits that all come together to tell compelling individual story arcs and form a strong unified narrative. Everyday items you’d see in a middle-class household in the 90′s grounds the world in a reality eerily and endearingly familiar. The very house itself and the rooms that make it up evoke distinct feelings that build on the atmosphere and complement the characters.

The emotions I felt throughout the game and the expectations it built and then boldly defied carved out a special place in my heart and third place on my list.

2. Saints Row IV

I had just finished Saints Row: The Third when I got Saints Row IV. The gleeful absurdity of wailing on people with a giant purple dildo, burning zombie hordes with a flamethrower at the behest of Mayor Burt Reynolds, fighting a full-blown pro-wrestling match with a larger-than-life masked ganglord while tagging with a character voiced by Hulk Hogan, and skydiving onto a high-rise apartment and shooting shit up as Kanye West’s “POWER” blares in the background among a host of other insane moments are very much fresh in my mind.

There was so much for the fourth entry in the criminally underrated Saints Row series to live up to. Thankfully, it does.

And it does so in the only direction Volition could take it after the laugh out loud spectacle of the third – by becoming the ultimate empowerment fantasy. By the hilarious end of the intro sequence, you become the president of the United States of America. After making super important world-changing decisions such as choosing to sign either a bill that cures cancer titled “Fuck Cancer” or one that ends world hunger titled “Let Them Eat Cake”,  aliens blow up Earth, enslave you and your staff, and you gain access to superpowers to run buckwild in the virtual simulation of SR3′s city of Steelport.

It’s more ludicrous batshit insanity from there on out that one-ups just about everything from the previous installment. Why drive vehicles when you can run faster than cars, leap over entire city blocks and glide across the sky? Set enemies on fire with flaming bullets or call down an airstrike? Pffft. Try shooting out black holes that suck and crush anything nearby or blasting badass dubstep to get people dancing while blowing everything up. Hell, why even use guns in the first place when you can freeze alien scum and then shatter them by throwing one of their hulking spaceships at them WITH YOUR MIND?!

None of the powers would be as gratifying to use without the many challenges presented in the short but sweet side missions and the smartly-written and sometimes gut-busting main quests. The former puts your skill with each power to the test with a grading system, while the latter lets you experiment and occasionally robs you of them to keep you on your toes.

Its biggest strength still lies in the aplomb with which it tackles its zany subject matter while having a surprising amount of respect for the series’ lineage that dates back to when it was merely a parodical GTA clone. Having never played the first two games, I still appreciated how it handled the callbacks to those installments with full confidence in the path it found itself heading from the third.

Simply put, Saints Row IV is the most pure fun I’ve had in 2013.

It’s just that after all is said and done, I don’t have much to say about it other than that, and that’s why it’s second only to…

1. The Last of Us

What more can I say for a game that grabbed me from the start with one of the most powerful prologues in video games and never let go even after the end with its unforgettable heart-breaking closing dialogue?

And for a game that leans heavily on its characters and story-telling, it’s gameplay actually avoids the schizophrenic break most other narrative-centric AAA titles fall into. Instead, it reinforces the bleak, tension-filled, and at times quiet and hopeful plot strengthened by immediate and long-term consequences to your in-game decisions. The multiplayer being a huge surprise further proves how fun the core mechanics can be, too.

It doesn’t innovate on anything, but what it does is take every single aspect of modern blockbuster gaming, pushes them to the limit, and brings it all together to make a technically and artistically beautiful masterpiece I won’t ever forget.

That’s why The Last of Us is my game of the year.

I’ve made myself perfectly clear  how I feel about The Last of Us. I would have been content just having the story of Joel and Ellie be done with when it ended. Like many other hardcore fans who were pulled into the little stories TLOU’s post-apocalyptic world sprinkled throughout the game, I would have liked to see a new narrative from the other characters that lived and died during the main duo’s trek from the one and only planned singleplayer DLC.

Instead, we got a closer look into the history of everyone’s favorite foul-mouthed switchblade-wielding would-be savior of the human race, Ellie, and her relationship with her favorite person in the world before she met Joel, Riley.

Unfortunately for some, it was too close a look that they just couldn’t accept.

[There will be major spoilers for The Last of Us and Left Behind, and a very minor spoiler for Gone Home.]

With all the great moments in the 2 hour DLC, from Ellie first receiving the infamous book of puns to the watergun fights, all the attention was on ~the kiss~. Yes, if you still haven’t played the DLC and are still reading this, there’s no way for me to talk around it. After busting a couple of moves with Riley on top of a counter (which turned out to be a really bad idea), Ellie drops all pretensions of being fine with Riley leaving and tells her to stay. Riley was waiting for those words all along, and takes off her Firefly pendant with a smile.

Then Ellie kisses her on the lips for a good second.

I already saw it coming, but it was still a powerful scene. Here are two young girls finding whatever bits of happiness they could in exploring a mall during lockdown hours at the end of the world. The only thing pulling them apart is one’s desire to become more than what was offered to her in the government controlled city. But like the end of the main campaign, they decide that what’s best for them is to be together.

It’s sealed by an act of romantic affection that had been building up with their frustrations and flirtations playing hooky for the past hour.

Being realistic about the general makeup of the AAA gaming audience, I wasn’t surprised at all at the people who found it offensive and thought it ruined Ellie, the DLC, the main story, Naughty Dog, their lives, their children’s lives, video games, and life in general.

There are bigots in the world, and some of them play video games. That’s reality.

What I really find disappointing are the people who flat out deny any romantic implications from the scene.

“It was strictly a platonic peck from a best friend who didn’t know any other way to express her feelings of relief and joy!”

“She’s only a young teenager going through a phase overwhelmed by her emotions!”

“The world is totally different by this time, and kids aren’t sure what to do to communicate friendship in extreme situations!”

Never mind the hint of sensuality in Riley reintroducing herself into Ellie’s life, all the tension between the two over Riley leaving and the struggle to be straight with the questions and answers, all the longing stares and awkward looks to the side, the end of the carousel ride, the coaxing into the dancing, the entire premise of Riley showing Ellie all these surprises and gifts through their tour of the mall to have a good time with the threat of death lurking in the corner, and the immediate reactions after the kiss.

Never mind the Valentine’s Day release or the word of god.

What is worrying is that the possibility of Ellie being lesbian or bisexual, that a teenage girl can have serious romantic feelings for another girl, is just brushed off and not given any sense of importance by some gamers. I’m reminded of one specific journal entry in Gone Home wherein Sam’s parents are in denial of her sexuality, and it just breaks my heart that it’s being realized in Left Behind’s case.

There would be a portion of those who would rush in to say that Joel’s decision to get Ellie out of the Firefly base was completely understandable because that’s what any father would do. There is a specific label for the relationship that Joel and Ellie develop, and it’s touted by many as to what makes TLOU’s story so strong, much like the bond between Lee and Clementine in Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead Season 1 and Booker and Elizabeth in Irrational Games’ BioShock Infinite.

And yet when it comes to this particular pairing where the romantic signals are flashing, it’s suddenly just a story about “love transcending the perils of a world gone crazy”. I don’t have a problem with that perspective, as it can make for a beautiful thesis for the stories that make up TLOU’s universe.

However, when you outright ignore that one aspect of the relationship, you’re removing a core element that makes the entire game such a multi-layered piece of art that touches people on all emotional levels. Romance is a part of what makes life so interesting, and with Naughty Dog exploring it with TLOU’s trademark restraint and nuance, its inclusion creates a richer experience.

And if it helps bring more acceptance to minority views in the AAA blockbuster space by recognizing the very human relationship between Ellie and Riley, the more variety and the more challenging narratives we will get. All the while satisfying our appetite for technical and visual wizardry.

We are not always defined solely by our gender, or our race, religion, career, or taste in video games. But we cannot overlook these identifiers that come together to help make us the complex beings that we are that get angry, laugh, cry, fear, and fall in love.

It was 2003 when I first discovered the malicious joy of committing virtual crimes just because it was fun.

Gaming had long been a favorite hobby of mine by then, and I was no stranger to violence. But as fun as it had been to overcome enemies through simulated acts of aggression, there was always a sense of purpose in gunning down or slicing open or beating up foes in the games I played that went beyond killing for fun’s sake.

There were princesses to be rescued, lands to be united, and worlds to be saved.

Possibly the only exception to that would be Rampage World Tour, a side-scroller where you play as a giant monster (literally) stomping through cities across the globe with the goal of causing as much destruction as possible. It’s presented in an entirely cartoony style, removing any potential weight to the violence and making it palatable to my 9 year old self who enjoyed it immensely. It carried over the design of its arcade predecessor, as the high score is your objective and your reward.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City was a different beast.

It introduced me to the concept of scaled-down genocide!

I’d already heard a little about the “mature content” it contained before playing it, but I wasn’t so aware of the bigger issues regarding the gaming industry back then. Video game news about how Grand Theft Auto III was decried by mainstream media in the States and other first world countries didn’t really have much reach over here in the Philippines. All I knew was that the cool kids in my freshman year had played it and its direct sequel.

My parents hadn’t been screening any of our video game purchases since the first PlayStation, and the reality of pirated media in the country means no uniform regulation as to what can be sold to “innocent young minds”. Having consumed and understood the adult-leaning themes in the fictions of Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy Tactics, 14-year-old me was sure that he could handle all that this trip to the 80′s could offer.

I mean, come on, I was born in that decade. What could I have possibly missed other than big hair, women in suits with shoulder pads and a revolution at home?

Apparently, a lot of coke-snorting.

Drugs, prostitution, armed robbery, assassinations, racketeering, extortion, counterfeiting, race-fueled gang violence, street racing and plain old mass murder were all laid bare to me in exaggerated realism, and I had complete agency in enacting each of those crimes.

Conquering cocaine-fueled sleazebag-infested Vice City to carve out my own criminal empire was compelling, especially to a teenager who had only seen video game stories through the lens of a “hero”.

I went back to 3 soon afterwards to see where it all started, and it still hooked me despite being a step down in just about every aspect. Got San Andreas when it came out, but its promise of “bigger and better” only really lived up to the former and not the latter for me (the mandatory flight missions didn’t help). When my copy and the PS2 conked out about 2/3 of the way through, I didn’t feel the need to go back to it when the PS2 was repaired.

Finances didn’t allow me entry into 7th gen gaming at home until this year, so I skipped out on all the open world crime games from that time span. Any maniacal tendencies were put to rest for about nine years, until it was reawakened by Saints Row: The Third.

Those tendencies waking up personified by this giant man-baby being freed from his prison and fucking everything up while his dick flops around in all its pixelated glory.

Structurally, the game is still similar to the fundamental mechanics set by GTA3. You’re dropped into this sprawling city where you can interact with it in all sorts of violent ways like hijacking vehicles, shooting rival gang members and cops, and ramming cars off the road in high-speed chases just to name a few familiar felonies.

There are main missions to take to progress through the story, and you’ve also got your requisite side quests which you can choose to engage with or not for bonus perks that will help make the ultimate goal of taking over the city easier.

As I pointed out, the plot itself shares the recognizable overarching narrative of conquest through crime. In these basic aspects, there isn’t much in the way of innovation.

What Saints Row: The Third does to break out of the “GTA clone” box the series was originally put in is accept absurdity.

Boldly breaking barriers with a big purple dildo bat.

The feats you accomplish in the GTA series to rise up the ranks of the criminal underworld taken at face value are already patently ridiculous. You’re a one-man army bulldozing through waves of incompetent AI thugs on your way to becoming a legendary lawbreaker. But within the context of the fiction the GTA games tell, it’s all still grounded in a self-serious story. This also informs the rules that limit what you can do when interacting with the worlds lovingly created by the Houser brothers. When important characters still closely follow the archetypes of a gritty crime saga set in modern times, you don’t expect them to create clone armies of a Russian giant, hire ninja packing assault rifles as their bodyguards, or run and star in their own pro-wrestling event as a killer luchador.

And when these characters can die from being run over by a car or getting caught in an explosion, you can’t have your player character jumping out through the cockpit of a falling airplane and kill scores of bad guys with rocket launchers as they all plummet through the air without parachutes.

When Volition’s Scott Phillips, the design director of Saints Row: The Third, and his team mocked up a “tone video” with clips from movies like Hot Fuzz and Shoot ‘Em Up to help set the feel of the game itself, they carved out their own niche in the open-world genre both in terms of narrative and gameplay.

Probably looked something like that.

Saints Row 2 had already begun the separation of brand identities when Rockstar decided to go further down the “realistic” route in GTA4, but the contained wackiness in some of the missions in SR2 was still playing off the short displays of insanity seen in GTA: San Andreas, and its apparent schizophrenia on whether or not it should play its story straight showed Volition was not yet ready to fully embrace the madness.

By the time the third installment rolled up in its purple pimp coupe de ville sporting wheel-popping spikes, and carrying submachine gun-toting bikini-clad strippers, the divorce from the tired old gangster movie scenarios and drive-from-point-A-to-point-B-while-escaping-the-cops encounters was palpable.

Playing through the main quest alone was revitalizing my forgotten lust for wanton chaos. Parachuting onto a penthouse party and blowing away every Syndicate member with pistols akimbo and grenades a-poppin’ while Kanye West’s POWER blares through my headset is an experience that none of the GTA games have made me feel, and that’s just one of the early missions. In any entry of that acclaimed series, you’re probably still playing in that same time frame as a glorified nanny to some NPC who’ll get killed before the 2nd act.

Even the extra city-takeover missions have their charms. Seeing your player character ragdoll through the air as he gets struck by high-speed traffic, or scoring points by killing fur-suit wearing mascots with a laser rifle on a Japanese-inspired TV game show is engaging in its own weird way.

Having character upgrades that basically make you invulnerable to any sort of bodily hazard would break tension in most action games. SR3 says “fuck you” to that nonsense and makes it work. The fun is in experiencing the insane circumstances that demand you whip out your Reaper drone controls and rain down missiles on unsuspecting enemies or call your pimp lieutenant who speaks through an auto-tuned voice box and ride a VTOL fighter jet for air superiority.

It’s crazy how I enjoyed myself much more when I could focus on doing a running spinning DDT on a random pedestrian, dropkicking my way through a windshield and onto a driver’s seat, and calling an airstrike on a crowd of goth gangsters decked out in Tron-like fashion, without ever worrying about dying.

As great a story the Rockstar’s modern sandbox masterpieces can take me through, letting loose in these open world environments has always been the core selling point for me in this particular slice of the genre. I still definitely appreciated Grand Theft Auto V (its online component not withstanding) feeling the weight of a twisted sense of responsibility and camaraderie it espouses. In contrast, the over-the-top approach of Saints Row: The Third and its successor managed to bring out that crazy little kid with a thirst for simulated mayhem. It accomplished that lofty goal by entrusting more agency to me and letting their gameplay and narrative work in perfect harmony.

First person shooters have never been my jam, with a handful of exceptions that prove the rule. There are the narrative driven atmosphere heavy single player focused Half-Life and BioShock series, and the balls-to-the-wall cooperative multiplayer action of the Left 4 Dead games that have truly gripped me in the polarizing FPS genre.

So what exactly had me playing Bungie’s Destiny for almost an entire day that I had it on my PS3?

For those who missed it, Bungie closed down the public Beta for the always online sci-fi shooter Destiny on July 27, presumably having received all the data and feedback they needed to get it ready for its September 9 release on the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, and the XBONE. I only managed to get my hands on the Beta when they made it available for everyone with subscriptions to PlayStation Plus and Xbox Live Gold on July 25, and I only had free time on Sunday to really sink my teeth into it.

Character creation was a simple process that had enough options for me to make my character stand out without bogging me down with hundreds of sliders modifying nose hair length or the type of belly button the avatar would have.

Instead, you get to waste time debating yourself as to whether or not a robot can be black, white, Asian, straight or gay.

I chose the Warlock class, as it had the most promise in giving me powerful abilities that would look super cool on screen. Like other games that give me the option to choose a class, I go for the one that lends to a more exciting approach in terms of combat and character progression.

Not that it would end up mattering too much for the limited scope of the beta, as I would soon find out.

Nevertheless, I also made the design choices for my character that would best fit the the more mystical aspects of the Warlock class to really commit to the role.

Kinda like this but instead of being beautiful black, she’s sickly pale and looks even more Xtreme.

Upon deciding on how my magical high elf… erm… magical space elf looked, I was greeted by a number of great-looking cinematics explaining in the plainest of ways the barest threads of what a high-schooler might call a “plot”. I could get into more detail, but I’d end up having to talk about “The Traveler” and “The Speaker” and “The Darkness” and more of the blatantly lazy stock figures Bungie seems to be using for its attempt at gravity in its world-building.

I’m not going to pick on the story too much, seeing as it’s still just the Beta, but what taste I was given did not really make me hunger for what’s to come if it’s going to be more archetypes and vague pronouncements of supposed significance.

And even with the effects layered onto Peter Dinklage’s voice acting work as your mechanical companion called the “Ghost”, it does very little to hide the complete apathy the renowned actor has for the lines given to him. Whether it’s really Dinklage just taking a big payday or the VA director not doing his/her job, it certainly turns the narration for the events that already sound hackneyed feel even flatter.

Peter Dinklage upon being told to improve his line deliveries for the video game Destiny, and his immediate reaction knowing he already got paid.

In spite of all the disappointment the story department in Destiny , it managed to hook me in anyway in just about every other area.

Knowing full well that the version I was going to play would be on the lower end of what Destiny could really look like, I was still very much impressed with the visuals the PS3 was able to pull off with its aging system.

On a technical level, it did as much as it could possibly do rendering sharp character models, enormous and detailed landscapes, scenic lighting, and a stable framerate amid hectic battles, faltering only on the horrible aliasing in the shadows cast by the players. I understand that the interplay between shadows and light are important in setting the mood for the game, but having these blocks of black appear on screen lessens the tension Destiny expertly ramps up in the dark interiors of Old Russia. I wouldn’t really mind if they just got rid of the dynamic shadows for the player characters in the full release of the PS3 version.

Making you jump in fear of your own shadow is an admirable goal in building tension, but this is the exact opposite way of accomplishing that.

The contrast of the sleek and futuristic and the dank and ruinous make for striking art design, managing to lift the promising parts of the greater narrative out of the muck the burdensome expository elements sunk them into. The rousing soundtrack of soaring horns and strings and breakneck industrial beats echo the clashing combinations of the visuals and the results are just as compelling. I guess if there was anything good to come out of the head composer being fired in April, it’s that he’d already done the necessary work to make the world of Destiny feel more riveting.

Speaking of sound, there’s also a distinct sense of power through the audio feedback in every weapon fired and every melee hit landed. The gunplay itself feels rewarding, but that’s no surprise coming from the studio that revolutionized FPS controls on consoles. Nothing particularly revolutionary about the type of guns you have, but there’s no denying the simple joy of popping enemy heads with precision shots from the semi-auto and sniper rifles with the mobility allowed in your character.

I could talk about how awesome the Sparrow (your hoverbike, basically) controls, but just watch this video to see all the crazy shit you could do with:

Considering the number of missions available in the beta, Bungie did a great job showcasing how the different terrains factor into your fireteam’s (the two other players that can join you in missions) engagement of the marauding alien forces. Wide open battlefields dotted with cover spots bring that sense of scale possible in the game, while the cavernous lairs of the enemy instill a feeling of dread in the narrower spaces where fewer advantageous positions exist. Even then, you can still find yourself constantly moving to survive the waves of enemies the game throws at you, injecting each encounter with much needed energy that kept me pushing through tough segments.

The RPG mechanics do play an important role in incentivizing you to keep going in these kinds of games, but it was pretty easy to get most of the content available in the Beta. The level cap is at 8 which I had no trouble reaching in about 4-5 hours of non-stop playing, and the loot drops were reasonable in missions’ pacing, although there were yet to be any standout armor or weapons that could be used in-game. Just checking the equipment only accessible by reaching level 20 in the “shops” does lend me hope for the latter parts of the game where kickass gear should be the norm.

Unlocking skills for my Warlock was a linear progression, but there were options in what type of a particular ability I could use, such as having a grenade that could do continuous damage to enemies stuck in its impact zone, or a grenade that has a bigger blast radius but only does damage once. You can still spec your character in that one class with the skill modifiers to a role that’s more tuned towards different kinds of play styles, but I couldn’t help but wish Bungie let us try the other subclass as well.

god bungie why tease us so with your level caps I WANT TO SING SUN

Not much variety was shown in the actual quests you could do, and that’s probably my biggest worry come September 9. With my experiences in the span of around 8 hours spread throughout the day, I still greatly enjoyed taking on swarms of enemies and defeating the higher ranked bosses with the aid of the different people I met throughout the game, both strangers and friends alike. The public events where everyone in the “overworld” section can join in on the fun of trying to defeat a super buffed up enemy were thrilling side activities, seeing up to 16 players all converging in one area to fight a bad guy before it can make its daring escape.

I’m not expecting dialogue-centric missions, as the game doesn’t even look like it supports that system, but strikes on bases and wave-based survival scenarios could wear thin halfway through if they intend to make this game as big as they claim it to be. My concerns could very well be addressed with the new planets to explore, the story sequences that could provide epic set pieces, and all the skills and weapons within my grasp for unique battle experiences.

There’s an entire competitive multiplayer arena to delve into, but playing that with randoms didn’t hold my interest for too long. I’ll definitely be checking it out some more when the full game does come out and I have more time.

The core gameplay by itself already sold me with how tight it controlled, how fluid it moved, and how gratifying successful team-ups felt. I try not to get sucked up into the hype, demanding that this be the Game of the Year material just based on what the astronomical marketing push for its 10 year plan is saying. As long as it has more meaningful content to keep me in the loop, I’ll be happy to give it more of my own precious time to shoot aliens in the face with my buddies.

That, and if my Internet connection holds out.

If you were to tell me that a game about one of the bloodiest and most horrifying atrocities that humanity has inflicted upon itself turns out to be such a memorable experience with only a handful of instances of cartoon violence caused by you as the player, I would have slapped you to wake you up from the fever dream that you would have been suffering from to even string together those concepts.

And then after playing said game, I would have apologized to you profusely for lacking faith in the ability of game developers under a AAA publisher to create something so confoundingly compelling within the backdrop of a freakin’ world war.

Perhaps Ubisoft Montpelier’s decision to set Valiant Hearts: The Great War during, well, The Great War (that’s World War I, for all of us ignoramuses) was enough of an initial push into new territory that helped ease me into taking the chance at the game. There have been countless titles, not just in video games but in TV and film as well, that explore all the dimensions of the second World War. So just having this quirky little gem shine some light onto the less glamorized major global conflict of our species’ sordid history gives me one reason to nod my head in approval.

What’s more immediately gripping though once you actually start the game is the visual style. It’s the UbiArt Framework engine put to good use in creating a charming hand-drawn comic book-like world with lovingly crafted caricatures for you to control and interact with.

Instead of trying and eventually failing to further describe the graphical splendor of Valiant Hearts, just look at it.

For a game that tackles such a serious subject matter, it’s quite the surprise to see an artistic direction used for the game most would associate with children’s storybooks. This decision proved to be a good one. Not only does it mark a distinct look for this puzzle adventure game, it also draws the player closer to the characters on a surface level with how visually appealing they are. It’s easier to get attached to them when they take on a more universal appearance, as Scott McCloud would argue in his seminal work Understanding Comics.

With the exception of narration and read out letters, there is a complete lack of comprehensible oral dialogue. The visual cues then become all the more vital to relating to each individual’s personal struggle in context with the larger conflict that has swallowed them.

As stirring as the original musical compositions are, the pieces that probably make the longest lasting impressions are those played in the car chase scenes. Whether you’re blazing past French soldiers in cabbies rushing to the frontlines or escaping the mad bombings of a German zeppelin, you’ll be weaving through obstacles to the tune of some classical music’s most popular pieces. It’s an oddly satisfying soundtrack that gives some urgency and light humor to the situations, and in one specific transition, leads up to a chilling punctuation.

The way Valiant Hearts plays with your expectations is done so well not just in its presentation but also through its mechanics juxtaposed with the overarching narrative. In the theater of war, it’s so easy to resort to placing a gun in your protagonist’s hands, and let him massacre his way to some moral victory. Here, you’re dragging out survivors stuck underneath piles of rubble and noxious mustard gas, making a daring escape to reunite with your family, and patching up soldiers on both sides of the conflict.

You still get your fair share of armed assault, and there must be a statement somewhere in having you actively engage with it as the burly no-nonsense American volunteer Freddie. His story also goes down the most traditional route, featuring a dead lover and a mustache-twirling vaudevillain. It could be said that these parts are the weakest in the game, as they fall victim to tired tropes. I agree with the criticism on most levels, but I can understand the developers wanting to include the real aspects of personal loss that leads to vengeance and the opportunistic cruelty of megalomaniacal leaders. It just veered off too much into trite territory that it was hard to get invested in that particular storyline.

Although I guess this one moment truly felt liberating.

Another stumbling block appears in the form of arbitrary puzzle segments that only seemed to pad the game’s length. The mechanics play out like classic adventure games where you need to fetch certain things for NPCs, and you do that by using other items in the area to solve basic puzzles, completing them in such an order to get past the area. With the exception of one or two puzzles, advancing throughout the game is fairly easy, so puzzles that require running back and forth and timing item usage can get tedious, especially when your efforts turn out to be for naught.

Softening the blunt impact of these minor problems are the hidden collectibles scattered throughout the story. These aren’t just your generic shards or audio logs, though. Instead of gating powerful abilities and items or important character motivations with stock items, each collectible in Valiant Hearts is unique in its form and narrative function. You’ll pick up a urine-soaked rag, a piece of German propaganda, letters from soldiers to their loved ones, and a host of other tokens from the time that inform you of the horrors that threatened to snuff out humanity and the hopes that kept it alive. They are stashed away in the most appropriate of circumstances, so discovering them leads to greater insight in the events currently taking place as you play. However, they are never so necessary that you would feel lost if you were to miss them.

And yet reading about genuine articles that tell of an officer’s grave concern about his family’s well being or a conscript admitting fear of dying alone in a foreign land is haunting, enough to make you want to scour each level to find every single one. Accompanying these items are history cards found in the pause menu. These tidbits of information that read with the collectibles paint a fuller picture of the tragic events of World War I, bringing more weight to the individual plots of the main characters. My only issue with this element is that it could have been integrated with the interactive experience, although I can imagine that would require an even defter hand considering the delicate balance the visual storytelling tries to maintain with as little text as possible.

Remembering that it’s the innocents who suffer the most in times of war.

Despite such faults, Valiant Hearts manages to deliver a 5 hour emotional tug of war and a heart-rending conclusion, thanks mostly in part to the strengths of the main cast, the way their relationships develop, and the refreshing modes of play more focused on saving lives than taking them. If only the earlier acts of aggression were entirely removed, the one final stroke of violence might have had more weight. Nevertheless, I was all choked up by the time the credits were rolling.

The saying “war is hell” is easy for your typical shooter to spout off, but to say it in earnest with no inkling of glorification demands more effort. Valiant Hearts struggles to accomplish this, but eventually earns the right to declare that statement.