Specifically, in this case, Borderlands.

In order to start a multiplayer game of Borderlands on the PC.  I had to remember my GameSpy account.  And that was a pain.  Then there was something that I had to do on my end, either placing my game machine temporarily in the DMZ or port forwarding.  Then there was the bit where I had to double check windows firewall rules and it still didn’t work.  Eventually we figured it was the GameSpy network itself, because a couple of hours later, it was working.

I know it’s not the same, but the ability to send an invite in game and then just have the other person pop in is worth the $50 a year to me.  When I want to start playing a game with my friends, I don’t necessarily want to spend a half hour troubleshooting connectivity issues before we even get started. That’s what makes the xbox live work so well is the drop in and drop out functionality.  When you send an invite, it’s the same method for each and every game you play.  You hit the jewel, see if your friend is online and send the invitation.  They accept it.

I remember when that half hour troubleshooting was the first part of playing video games with your friends.  The half hour was spent was setting up the computers and configuring them to use the same network.  Additionally, they were all in the same room you were playing in.  None of this headset stuff, you just yelled at them for camping the spawn.

Or better yet, actually walked over and threatened bodily harm.

Ah, the good old days.

On the other hand, I picked up Torchlight which is basically Diablo, right down to the Soundtrack, much more streamlined, and not as annoying.

But, I’m going to talk about Borderlands now, and the references to Diablo aren’t completely apparent until I talk about guns and equipment.

Borderlands has four classes, 50 levels, and about 87 bazillion guns.  The equipment is procedurally generated, so there’s no real set list of equipment, merely modifiers for elemental types of damage, manufacturer, type of gun, magazine size, burst fire rate, melee damage bonuses—the list goes on, but you can see how you would end up with lots and lots of different guns.

Borderlands is so much fun that I have beat it.  And gone back to play it again on the harder difficulty.  I have 90% of the Achievements for it for the Xbox 360 version, including the ones for the Zombie Island DLC.  That almost never happens.  I’m also playing it again on the PC with some friends who only got the PC version.  So it’s kind of embarrassing how much I’ve been playing this game.

It does not have the most critical acclaim for the best story, nor game mechanics, nor the graphics.  What it does have is solid, fun, and engaging gameplay.  It’s well put together.  To be honest, I think they could have gone back and actually touched the main character’s back stories a lot more.  It’s just that once the main storyline starts, it’s just a rollercoaster ride because you finish quests quickly, and often.

But, back to the I get a follow (on twitter) from someone I don’t recognize, but don’t really think anything of it until I check out who it is.  Turns out it’s the Environmental Art Lead for Dead Space.  So he shows me a couple of things I missed and then I notice a name I think I recognize.  It’s the guy that lived in our group house for a couple of weeks, a friend of one of my roommates.

I do some additional research and well, he is the same artist that painted the triptych sitting in my bedroom, awaiting framing.  He painted them 13 years ago as a thank you for letting him stay.

And he did UI design for Dead Space.

Small world, indeed.

Compare the following scenarios.

Movie: While the main character is investigating a broken console, a shadow quickly flits down the hallway to the right, but the main character notice it.  Everyone yells, “What the hell was that on the right?!”  Character continues to repair broken console oblivious to their doom.

Dead Space:  While the main character is investigating a broken console, a shadow quickly flits down the hallway to the right, but the main character doesn’t notice it.  Everyone yells, “What the hell was that on the right?!”  This time, the camera turns and the actor actually investigates the hallway to the right.

The art in Dead Space plays no small part in the movie like experience. The USG Ishimura, while abandoned, is believable as a large spaceship equipped to house over a thousand people.  It has a work areas, living areas, engineering, and most importantly, a tram system and a zero G basketball court.  A shopping mall and even a virtual brothel are insinuated by advertisements that are strewn about the ship. There are trash cans and bathrooms.  Luggage is found near the flight deck but not near the mining facility.

In short, it’s a believable set.

Which is what makes it more unsettling for the audience when they find out that there doesn’t seem to be anyone on it.

If you look, really look at everything in Dead Space, the environment is telling you a story.  Literally.  The strange graffiti on the wall?  That’s all Unitology script that can be decoded because they created an alphabet for it.  Thomas Holt pointed that out to me and, I would have missed it because it was such detail.

I was avoiding Dead Space.  It came out in November of last year and I just was not sold on it.  I was done with the survival horror genre.  I had heard about it, and read favorable reviews, but then attributed those reviews to fans of Resident Evil.

Then, slowly, I was worn down by praise from people I knew and finally asked to borrow a copy from a friend.

I played three chapters on a Friday night, followed by a marathon session on Sunday because it was so compelling.  For the rest of the day on Sunday, I was accompanied by a friend of mine who was a fan of movies like Event Horizon.  She loved it not only because of the storyline, but because of the interaction and the feeling of immersion.

I’d like to see someone try, as a social experiment, playing Dead Space with an audience, a chapter a night say on a movie night.

For a long time, the control has made absolutely no sense to me.

Left stick moves.  Stand still to aim and shoot.  No sidestepping.

Dead Space controls make sense to me.  Left stick moves, right stick is the camera and aiming.  Not much to say about it, however there are a lot of comments being thrown about regarding the Resident Evil 5 control scheme and how it adds to the tension of the game.  The main contention here is that you cannot strafe while aiming.  I am not a big fan of this particular design decision.  I have played the demo and Chris Redfield is incapable of sidestepping while aiming a weapon.  This means he cannot ready a weapon while turning around a corner.

This is a weakness not only in the gameplay design, but in the writing.  What they are telling me, with their icy, necrotic grip on an outdated control scheme, is the following:

Chris Redfield is a paramilitary special agent who cannot aim a weapon down a corridor whilst turning and walking to go down it.

By comparison, Isaac Clarke is a communications engineer in a space suit wearing grav boots who can.

An engineer.

The producers of Resident Evil 5 claim that their control scheme adds to the tension.  They claim that if a player can just run away easily, it destroys any pretense of immediate danger.

Dead Space absolutely destroys that argument.

Isaac, while not a ballerina, handles like a third person shooter persona should.  Left stick strafes, right stick aims.  Left trigger brings up the gun to aim, and the controls remain the same.  He can aim a weapon at a corner and then carefully, very carefully creep up around the corner until he can see that there’s nothing there to be afraid of.

Before being eviscerated by the necromorph that has silently climbed up the railings behind him.

I would like to state that building tension in a game should not generated via an artificially difficult or non intuitive control scheme.  What you are building with that design choice is frustration.

Resident Evil did start the current survival horror renaissance, but it over five (well, more than five really) iterations, it has yet to truly evolve it.  Which is funny, considering that a lot of the storyline of the Resident Evil has to do with an evolving virus.

Really.

I’ve finished Dead Space and I’m on my second playthrough, and while I’m doing that, I’m thinking about how it does a lot of things right, how it brings innovation to a stale genre, and how the survival horror experience can be enhanced as a social activity.

First the game is fun.  There are a lot of elements to this, but first and foremost, the game is a good time.  It grabbed me from the beginning with the cold opener, with Isaac and the crew of the Kellion quickly realizing the straightforward repair mission is turning into something bad. The story, while nothing groundbreaking or thought provoking, is on par with a good science fiction suspense movie.

The UI.  I don’t really talk about the user interface in games.  Mainly I’m a happy person if the UI is out of the way, or subtle in some fashion so it doesn’t detract from the gameplay or the immersion of the title.  I’m going to say this now, when I saw that they were telling the story through the user interface, that was the moment when I decided I was going to purchase Dead Space.  It’s a singular moment, early on in the game where one of your fellow crewmembers contacts you over the radio.  In typical sci fi fashion, this is a video call.  In atypical video game fashion, it’s part of the UI.

Isaac is wearing a RIG, which simply, is a “space suit.”  The RIG has a holographic UI, so whenever Isaac needs to access anything in game, it projects a hologram into the world so he can see it.  This is hard to explain, but is incredibly awesome once you see it in action.  An innovation in storytelling immersion that really only works here in the space horror genre, but very well done and executed in Dead Space.

I’m going to see how many times I can say, “surprise” in the first ten seconds.  Here’s the Tournament Edition Fightstick for Street Fighter IV.

It’s rather large.  I’ve been sitting on this video for a while, I actually got the stick a week before Street Fighter IV dropped at my place, so I was using it to play Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix on the 360.

Actually using it to play SFIV is amazing, and I feel like I’m back at the Yellow Brick Road in Mission Valley on a Friday afternoon with the rest of Honors English IV.

I know, everytime I say I’m done with World War II as a setting, they come out with another WWII game and I pick it up.  This one, I picked up because it was on sale, and it has a cooperative game mode wherein you fight an unending horde of zombies until you are overwhelmed.

There is no “winning” this mode.  Eventually the undead will outnumber you and you can’t hold them back any longer.

Impressed that it took CAPCOM five whole iterations of this franchise to realize that their control scheme was broken, and finally fixed it.

Downloaded the demo on the 360, and to be honest, was not expecting too much. However, once I got into playing the demo I found something I didn’t expect: decent controls.Resident Evil is one of those franchises you love or hate.  It’s a cheesy sort of game, where the plot is ridiculously convoluted and the horror is cliché after cliché, but the first two were fun.  I don’t really remember three.  Code Veronica i remember very well.  4 I remember playing and then putting back down, and then I picked it up again on the Wii, but then put it down again.

For some reason the first two were the most compelling.  I guess it’s because they were novel at the time.  (RARRR!  ZOMBIES!)

After the third iteration, the main thing holding the series back was the gameplay.  While the graphics had improved, the control scheme had not.  Player characters piloted like tanks, only able to rotate and then move forward in graceful arcs.  Survival horror at times meant not that you were out of ammo, but the fact that you couldn’t move your character away fast enough, or even sidestep to dodge a zombie.

And never mind aiming.  4 fixes the aiming issue by incorporating an over the shoulder third person view, but the main character still drives like a tank.

Which brings me to 5, which is fixed.

Now they drive like tanks that can also strafe left and right.  Major improvement when you’re trying to run for your life.

The demo features two stages, “Public Assembly” and “Shantytown.”  These two set pieces serve to showcase the  hot, spicy racism new worm headed enemies.  Of which there are legion.

So now the tension comes from the situation, from the sheer numbers overwhelming my characters.

Which is a great change from the tension that came out of frustration at the game’s limited control scheme.  I’ll definitely be watching for this one in the next month or so.

Please.

And I agree completely with offworld on this.  Easily my dark horse candidate for game of the year, whichever year that Microsoft gets around to releasing it.

How this never made it to the United States is way beyond me.  I think, on the whole, that it may have been too high concept for American audiences.  There’s just no appreciation for the fine artistry and contextual subtlety that composes a game like Metal Wolf Chaos.

Ha.  Subtlety.

I mean for gods sakes, it’s the POTUS* in a giant robot suit kicking ass and destroying everything.

What part of that does not say, “AMERICA” in all caps?  Which of course may or may not be followed by “WHATEVER-EXPLETIVE-YOU-DEEM-APPROPRIATE YEAH!!”

So anyway, yeah, Microsoft, bring it on.

* True story:  I worked in the State Department for six months before I learned what this meant.  Pronounced, “poh-tuss.”