COMPUTER GAME HATE!

This one time, an Italian killed some people. Not only that but he scrambled up and down famous architecture like an Italian capable of scaling buildings and also strutted around while ensconced in a protective womb of whores that rendered him – naturally – invisible to the authorities.

I talk, of course, of Assassins Creed 2 – henceforth known as Ass Creed, because that’s awesome; a game that is fun.

Of course, what follows (and what’s above, I guess? Probably not, but hell) hinges entirely on whether you agree with me or not. If you do, mazel tov, if you don’t…then you don’t agree with me. Oi vey, I guess. Either way everything is pointless because ‘fun’ is a subjective term with a different meaning to everyone and we’re all going to die when the Sun teabags us on Wednesday. Fuck, fuck and ass. Ass Creed? No.

Moving swiftly on.

Mindless, profanity-laced rambling aside let us focus on the matter at hand: Ass Creed 2 and why it is – in my mind at least – a ‘fun’ game. I might even call it ‘good’ if you call a game that is ‘fun’ ‘good’.

‘Apostrophes’

Okay, in the game you are an assassin and you follow a creed. You are also a man in the future stuck in a ridiculously stupid plot that makes sense but the sense it makes is hurtful on a personal level. Actually, the plot when you’re assassin isn’t much better either, but it’s got less sci-fi bollocks so it’s marginally easier to swallow. Marginally.

This, hwoever, doesn’t matter because about five minutes into the game I have forgotten why I am doing anything. Normally this is a bad thing but in this case I oddly don’t care. Each story mission is a new excuse to do something ridiculous such as follow some guy (for some reason); pilot a flying machine over a series of fires (naturally); help Leonardo Di Vinci to safety via the medium of a thrilling horse and cart ride while shaking off armed men (I remember that famous episode). All of this strung together with controls I will go out and claim are at least semi-robust.

The ‘hold trigger to switch from low-key to, uh, high-key’ mechanism works well I feel and toning down the guards maddened reactions of the first game was a wise move (eg, a man riding a horse is no longer going to be murdered if he moves too fast).

But yes, in meandering fashion allow me to stumble up to the bar – so to speak – and say this: I like the combat in Assassins Creed. Both of them, in fact, but it’s better in the second one.

Now, for one reason or another, people don’t seem to share my opinion on this. As I recall, the combat was maligned as ‘repetitive’ and this struck me as odd. Any action is repetitive if you notice it, really. Walking is simply the action of putting one foot in front of the other until you reach your destination. Terrible, isn’t it? The combat was repetitive in the way combat – or anything – in any game ever is repetitive; and therefore subject to, uh, subjectivity.

So to sum up that particular spiel, I liked the combat while many didn’t. I liked the blocking, the countering, the moving around, the different weapons and more besides. It didn’t have much to do with assassinating half the time, but it was enjoyable. Enjoyable in this insance being a notorious synonym of ‘fun’.

Other such fun activities include the aforementioned scrambling up buildings. Now to some you might just be holding a button and pushing forward, and that is exactly what you are doing. But in doing so you are compelling your little guy to zap his way up that fancy Italian building and that he does. A simple action has a nice, satisfying result. Alternatively, you may be nothing more than a fleshy tool designed to operate a tiny little cut scene where a man climbs a building.

This is rapidly turning into – in my head at least – more of a treatise on the subjective nature of everything and how trying to objectively state any one thing about a game’s quality is foolhardy.

That, of course, is bollocks. But hell, there you go.

I’ll come back to all that doggerel later. For now, let us be content in the following knowledge:

Assassins Creed 2 is a stupid, stupid game wrapped up in the trapping of fun. It’s fun to look at, fun to play and fun to ignore the story to. It is also now, I hope, cheaper and a fine way of wasting time. You can stab people; poison them so they go crazy and also get to hug Leonardo Di Vinci.

Frankly, I want more games where the only quick time events are to make bizarre comments in conversations.

Yeah!

KRAZMAZ

So I sat on the toilet the other day and picked up a copy of Wired, being as how I like to view word while my biology does its thing below me. Picking a page at random I am confronted with an article, as you may well expect. Desirous of words to devour I swept my eyes across the page, taking in the pictures of men whom I have no idea the identities of with nice little blown out quotes like ‘Technology!’ and ‘Streamline the wotsit to make the thingy fancy’.

It’s Wired, so yeah.

Anyway, I thought this article was the article I had semi-read previously about wireless electricity so I started reading again. Abruptly, I realised I was wrong. No, this was an article about the Kinect.

I stopped reading immediately.

I’m not entirely sure what it is about the Kinect exactly but the mere mention, whiff, sight or any other form of sensory response related in any way to it immediately causes any and all traces of anything approaching interest to immediately exit my body via whichever orifice seems most open at the time.

Maybe I’m not really the market they’re aiming for. Most likely, in fact. Then again, who are they aiming for? I don’t really care; I just don’t like the damn thing.

It’s hard to explain exactly why this is so. It’s probably because I enjoy sitting down so much. Not just on toilets, either; sofas, seats, beds – I’ll sit on all of them. The overriding features of all of these modern ‘motion capture malarkey’ games – for want of a better term – is that they involve me not sitting down. Clearly, this is intolerable.

God – or more specifically – people who make controllers and sofas (so not God at all, I guess) made these things for a reason; chiefly that sitting down on the latter whilst holding the former is one of the greatest combinations that can be conceived.

The world is not a safe place for buttocks. Everywhere you go you are confronted with such malign, malevolent forces such as ‘gravity’ and ‘hard surfaces’. In this climate of arse-terror the welcoming, comfortable embrace offered by the cushiony bosom of a sofa is to be relished, and any task that masquerades as entertaining that requires you to extract your cheeks from said bosom is clearly approaching the matter in the wrong way.

A curious invention is something known as the ‘controller’. Amazingly, it allows you to perform a wide variety of actions using only your hands in a fashion that has been described as ‘convenient’. This may come as a shock to many, but it’s true.

Joshing aside, I am fully aware that many people find controllers somewhat confusing and simplifying a game down to madly flailing an imposing, unblinking electronic eye perching atop your television like some sort of digital-vulture/voyeur does rather make it easier than remember which button out of the five hundred makes your robot in Steel Battalion drop its trousers and pinch one out.

For example.

But still, that’s not the point; this is supposed to be bitching about the death of controllers. I probably should.

Fact is, controllers aren’t really going to die, they’re just going to stop being the only way to interact with games. Instead, we’ll be getting more and more of this ‘you are the controller’ bollocks. Which is fine, I guess; this whole thing is probably just me lashing out at the irritating marketing and the constant bleating that the Kinect will somehow revolutionise videogames in some non-descript way.

Like the way Spore did, remember? Good times.

 Where was I? Oh yes; I blame Christmas.

No wait, that wasn’t it.

Well maybe it was part of the problem; fancy new toy aimed at people with a product that I own but who aren’t really in the same demographic as me has been launched and it is nearly Christmas – hence ad saturation and me being annoyed. I suppose that makes sense. That, and Christmas songs have long stopped being nostalgic for me and have now started being physically painful.

Also, painful.

Also wrong.

But yeah, uh, the Kinect. I don’t like it, basically. I have no intention of getting one whatsoever. I like to play a very particular kind of game and I won’t be ashamed to admit that it generally involves the colour brown, regenerating health and shooting things. I also have a sideline in running up buildings and possibly magic. None of these – except maybe the magic – can or will be made better with the Kinect as none of them involve prancing around like a prat instead of sitting down and being comfortable.

I whine a lot, it seems.

I don’t care. My 360 – and I’ve had one since the day the damn thing came out (agreeably a bunch have broken since then, but hell) – is for games where I shoot things. My PC does that too, but it also does more. My 360 is there so I can languidly take a break from wasting time on my desktop to turn around, waste time shooting people for five minutes, pause and then return to the PC. Repeat ad forever-um.

However, if I got a Kinect as a present I wouldn’t shun it. Why? Because it would be free, and that’s awesome.

So, in summation:

Sitting on nice sofa with controlling making man on screen do something with violence = good.

Having a seizure in front of a screen so an uncanny valley exile on the screen can do something febrile relating to dancing/sport = waste of time. Or bad. Or whatever.

Or whatever.

KRAZMAZ

That’s right; saving is absolute shit and should be stricken from the record of gaming.

Now I’m not one of those hardcore retro nutjobs (guess what, modern games are better. It’s called evolution), and I don’t want to go back to the old Metal Slug system of ‘you died? Well fuck you, put more money in and start again, bitch.’
I will say, though, that the idea of saving pisses me off, not in and of itself, but because of it’s aftermath.
If you save to late, like autosaving when you’re about to experience the final hit by an enemy of your life, then it’s annoying. The worst, however, the blood-vomitingly rage inducing is when you save too early.
I experience this in Fallout 3 a lot.
You’re almost to your destination after a long walk. A long, boring walk and a Yao Guai jumps you without you seeing it or having time to use a stimpack.
Bang, you’re back where you saved, MILES AND FUCKING MILES away from the place you were trying to get to. Controller hits wall, Xbox shuts off and you, god forbid, go ouside or talk to someone.

Now, I understand in a game like Metal Slug or R-Type it’s too hectic to let you save whenever you want to and the levels are quite short anyway. Plus the idea is to prove you can make it through without dying. Lives are a bullshit idea too., if I die, I’m fucking dead.
But in games like Fallout 3 or Dragon Age or even something like Assassin’s Creed wouldn’t it make more sense to, when I die, remove the enemies and put me back where I died? With consequences, obviously, reduced stats or very few HP. I just don’t see the point in making me trek for ten minutes through featurless backgrounds to get to where I just was. It’s not a punishment, it’s pointless, it doesn’t make me think ‘wow, I’d better be more careful’. No, what it makes me think is ‘what!? I have to do that AGAIN? Fuck that, this game is shit.’ Even if it isn’t.

Saving is bullshit in story-centric games because it detracts from the atmosphere. It stops me suspending my disbelief when I have to have the same conversation twice or trigger the same set-piece twice. ‘Last time I was here I did X and it killed me, so this time I’ll do Y’ is not a normal thing to think.
Basically, I want infinite continues in story-centric games or rock hard, ‘fuck you’ run-and-gun games. Those should be the only two categories.

I also want them to play themselves but still be fun, I want them to give me money, I want them to be free, I want them to cook me dinner.
I want them to hold me and tell me they love me.

Is that too much to ask?

Fortune.