Rant - Deus Ex: Invisible War

I never really cracked the original Deus Ex as I couldn’t get past the first level, and while this is just me making excuses for sucking at the game, I feel it failed on the same grounds as many action shooters. I’m asked to believe that I’m playing as some highly trained covert agent who’s also getting his badass kicked by random goons. This could be tagged ‘realism’ but it made it hard to find the game engaging, which is the point of the opening level. Fair enough I can choose what he is highly trained in but that just makes it stranger as he ends up either barely competent with one gun, clumsy with a handful, or completely useless with all firearms but pretty handy with computers. All this begs the question of what the fuck these guys were teaching him at government badass school. Apparently if I got over this hurdle the storyline is mind blowing but I find that hard to believe when the main character is the cyberpunk saviour of mankind named JC with his offsider, Paul, both of which are subtle as a bible in the face. I may get into this game one day and return to repent my sins, but in the meantime: Deus Ex 2.

The disembodied head of this first person shooter is Alex (if that’s a bible reference I didn’t pick up on it but I’m guessing it’s mostly just being versatile for the sake of the gender choice). Alex is a badass agent in training who is transplanted into a facility in a different city after his/her hometown was destroyed by an anonymous threat. This facility works well as the training grounds and has a good grasp of the player’s assumed knowledge, so it doesn’t waste too much time. As soon as I emerged from the ruins of this establishing mission I was asked to side with either a global corporation or religious extremists and clocked onto the moral of the story being ‘everyone is evil.’ However, while replaying, I discovered the game’s strongest storytelling element: the ability to kill anyone. If you blow a main character’s brains out as soon as they’re stupid enough to step out from behind bullet proof glass, the story will adjust itself to their absence. Suddenly instead of being a bitch to larger powers, Alex treated as a loose cannon with a “cavalier attitude towards human life”. While deciding which faction would ultimately save the day I even get a message from cyborg black marketers to the effect of “You hate them, Alex. You hate them. They are weak and made of flesh.”

Whichever extremist group you side with the ‘everyone is evil’ theory stays intact and there’s some solid dialogue in there, even if the flow of conversation makes any attempts at comedic timing clunky. The gameplay gives the player space and means to play either stealth or gung-ho and both are challenging and make good use of the biomods element. It’s a thought-provoking game that doesn’t slap me over the wrist if I decide to go clocktower on it, although I still can’t figure out why the box art went through three different episodes of Cyberpunk Makover.

Rant - The Zoo

The Zoo is probably my favourite live music venue. I’ve never been to a bad gig there. It’s closely followed by the Tivoli, which I’ve also not had a bad night at but is a bit more dependent on the big name acts it brings in. It doesn’t seem to matter who’s playing at The Zoo, whether it’s Aussie folk royalty The Whitlams or a local act I’m previously unaware of. Tim Freedman tastefully described it as “just the right size; like a finger up a bum.”*

Size wise its main competitor would probably be the Arena, who are more than capable of putting on a bad gig. However size isn’t everything as shown by the Brisbane Entertainment Centre which is an outright ugly venue, poorly located and gives the feeling that they’ve just put a pro wrestling show or the police auction on hold to let [international act] in for the night.

So there’s half my dream gig worked out, the Zoo as the venue and The Fumes as the opening act. As much as the Fumes are more than capable of headlining, if you’re not psyched up after bearing witness to how much noise these two can make chances are you’re that charming deaf guy who sells origami. Now I just have to work out the second opener/first headliner and headline act.

Really this place spews forth good vibes and indie credentials as if there’s a hint of morphine transferred when they stamp you. Drinks are reasonably priced and the ‘you have entered a please and thank you establishment’ at the bar makes me smile every time. It’s enough of something new to stay interesting and enough of something old to measure the guitar solos by how many audience members pick up an instrument the next day.

*Can’t remember if this is exactly what he said but he was more than a few wines into his set and it definitely involved fingers in bums with relation to the Zoo being a perfect fit.

Extended Rant - Mass Effect

When I first bought my 360 the salesmen’s exact sales pitch was ‘Get Mass Effect get Mass Effect get Mass Effect get Mass Effect get Mass Effect get Mass Effect get Mass Effect.’ Then it turned out that he didn’t actually have a console to sell me to play it on so I left wondering if his brain worked the way it was supposed to, but still, it was enough to pique my interest.

My only other experiences with Bioware were Balder’s Gate 2 and Neverwinter Nights both of which I really enjoyed. I overlooked Knights of the Old Republic as I never really got into Star Wars, but I was interested to see that with Mass Effect, Bioware had dropped the Star Wars universe for one of their own creation.

I rolled a female soldier and got stuck into it. Right about the time the combat was about to get started I was waiting for a tutorial to pop up and tell how to point at the enemy I wanted to kill and watch the game do the rest. Then an odd thing happened: nothing. Gears of War being the last game I’d played and game play looking fairly similar I reverted to gung-ho instincts and aimed at an enemy and tried to shoot it to bits. Oddly enough, that bloody worked. The combat isn’t turn based. Sweet mother of Betsy it’s not turn based! Maybe they figured out that all the RPG fans who love repetitive mundane tasks were now on MMORPGS, whatever the case they’re now making real time combat so I’m prepared to look over a few first time insecurities and clumsinesses. There’s a cover system you’ll never use, and if you want to take a weapon out there are four buttons to help you (if it doesn't happen automatically), while if you want to use any of a stack of powers you have to pick from a wheel or a hot key all controlled by the same shoulder button.

As far as the story goes, it’s very Charles Dickens. Not to say it’s about poverty and has vivid descriptions of ugly people, I mean that it’s full of well developed characters and the plot is just an excuse for them to be there. The storyline borrows a lot from The Matrix Reloaded with the actual matrix replaced by the Milky Way, and manages to avoid the generally overdone ‘could we/should we’ sci-fi theme. For the most part, the major characters are deep, believable and conflicted, with the exception of one roughly man-shaped piece of cardboard with a name and some character traits written on it. Kaiden McCardboard aside, the characterisation only hits one major wall. Meet Liara, proof that the departments involved with game play and characterisation never really collaborated. In the cut scenes she’s the embodiment of compassion, in the combat she goes FUCKING BERSERK, going spell crazy and trigger happy in a manner that’d make Vikings blush. Once this crack has shown others start to pop up and I realised that one of the races of aliens look a lot like space bunnies and another are just toads in armour. After that the game had this creepy, space-age Wind in the Willows feel to it which thankfully wore of in time to be saved by the game’s best characterisation element, the hero himself/herself. In each cut scene you’ll be given the choice of how you want to go through it, usually polite, bitchy or too spineless to go either way. It mostly works to the same end but what makes it impressive is that none of it breaks character, which is a props to the voice actors more than anything. Here Bioware have proven that games can make a pliable protagonist without just making them a blank fucking pallet.

So if you play this as a solder it’s the sandbox(ish), story driven shooter that so many others have promised to be that still holds its ground as an RPG. The final level is like nothing else I’ve played, working itself up to the end boss fight by making you feel like the hardest badass in all Hardarseia in a merging of game play and narrative that’s raised my expectations of interactive storytelling.

Hearts and Diamonds

So I have these word documents on my computer entitled Rant – [rant topic] for getting my verbal diarrhoea on for various reasons. Collectively they’re now 3614 words so I’ve decided to turn self indulgence into self importance and put them on a blogspot. I’ll have to trim some down as I don’t want to post more than 500 words and I’m being indecisive about which one to kick off with but here’s ye olde intro post. I’ll introduce myself as a gamer first as Rant – Video Games takes up about 2411 of that total word count.

My first memory of games is of playing Street Fighter II at my neighbours' place. Not that I got this as a four year old button-masher, but this game was Chun Li’s debut. If you believe everything on wiki she’s one of the first heroines in the gaming world and these days I’ll generally write, play and read female roles, so I could credit that to Chun Li but it could also be that I find male hero’s fucking boring, which I could put down to Blanka. To a young boys eyes there really isn’t anything more awesome than a bright green man with spiked red hair who electrocutes people, and every hero less than that just wasn’t making the effort.

By ten I managed to save enough on $10/wk allowance for a Nintendo 64. This held two more bench mark games: Ocarina of Time and Turok 2, with the former being the first story driven game I played and the latter being the most unapologetically violent game I’ve played to date (Bear in mind that these were the nineties when we knew that nothing in a TV set could hurt you. Some years earlier I was worried that Doom would give me nightmares and my Dad basically told me to harden up). As much as I played Goldeneye I didn’t fall for it in the same way as Turok. It had a creepy darkness to it that stuck with me but my main memory of this game is having an enemy jump up through a bridge at me and through pure shitting-myself-reflex I fired my shotgun. Next thing I knew he had a giant, gargling hole in his chest. On reflection that probably explains why my default favourite weapon in shooters is the shotgun.

In grade twelve I bought a GameCube off a mate for $90 and it pretty much went obsolete that day. Resident Evil, Metroid and the new Zelda stopped it from getting sold but I felt burned enough to make the switch to X-Box by the next round of consoles. At the moment I’m swapping between Oblivion and Mass Effect for absolute escapism RPGs and just spent the few sober hours of the long weekend opening The Orange Box.

Outside gaming I’m a third year creative writing student who thinks astrology is a bit of a copout but apparently that’s a very Sagittarian viewpoint. The title Red Goes Faster I thought would be a great name for an indie band who sing about their sexuality but I don’t look good enough in skinnies to pull that off and $15 for new guitar strings is money I could spend on beer and save my neighbours’ ears.