Disc 1

So I was fleeced. Voluntarily of course. But still fleeced.

EDGE Magazine may be one of the best publications available, but along with GAMEStm and RetroGamer, is one of the more...expensive takes on videogame journalism. I like it though, and every now anad again I feel the need to buy some class in. This month has a large report on Batman: Arkham City, so obviously I need to know all about it. It also has a nice article on 50 games that defeated by their own genepool (or something), high cult titles. There's also a page column about videogames and storytelling, with the recent L.A Noire as the example.

The cut and thrust of this column is that games cannot be a great storytelling medium. Anyone who has ever played a recent Metal Gear Solid title, especially with an hour and a half cutscene in MGS4 will have an opposite opinion. I too have a different opinion, especially after recent games. Well, except for the MGS schtick. I mean, seriously.

A lot of classic games have no story. Not really. The 'story' only exists in order to make the macguffin mean anything at all to the player; the best know formula goes like this: You, the protagonist (main character) must collect [item] and/in order to stop [bad guy] and rescue [whoever]. Let's roll out some well known action/adventure games and see how it compares.
In the Sonic the Hedgehog series you have to collect the Chaos Emeralds and stop Dr. Robotnik (or more recently Dr. Eggman) and save the world.

In any Super Mario game, you collect Stars/Shine Sprites/whatever (it is always stars) in order to stop Bowser and save the world/universe and rescue the Princess.

In the Legend of Zelda...You know what, I give up on this one, we all know how this works. Collect whatever mystical items needed to stop Ganon and save Hyrule and the Princess!

Metroid games see you repowering your suit in order to stop the Space pirates and sate your appetite for revenge/save the galaxy. That time you are the Princess. Ooops, SPOILERS!
Even HALO follows this simple and effective model...except I guess you don't collect anything that time. Right?

The story exists so you can keep doing what you're doing with an added difficulty curve. This is really what's missing from life, with no over arching plot to guide you (once you leave education anyway), and a difficulty curve that resembles a sheer cliff face, I often feel like a few scripted events might be helpful. But anyway, the true focus of the videogame is the player. It's why the protagonist is often silent, so the player can simply insert themselves into the action. Link has never had a voice actor beyond his grunting, and I for one hope he never will. As technology marches on, the ability to present a videogame in the style of a movie that you participate in every now and then has come to the point where people are even beginning to think of it as a viable option. Yes Metal Gear Solid, I AM LOOKING AT YOU.

Of course, at the beginning of the summer vac I purchased a copy of Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes form Fleabay for a buy it now! brand new price. I haven't played The Twin Snakes for years, having only borrowed a copy from a friend when it came out new, and haven played the original Metal Gear Solid for even more years since the end of my PlayStation years. This is the remix made for the Nintendo's GameCube, a system which sails on into its tenth year of operation. This MGS is nothing short of God damn freaking hilarious, with more slo-mo blurry cutscenes than a co-directed effort from Zack Snyder and the Wachoski brothers. I mean, talk about the cutscene that follows the Hind-D battle. Jumping on top of a missile and returning fire with the Stinger? And the Snow Field? Where our hero backflips and lands exactly on the butt of the PGS-1 in order to flip it back into his hands and land the kill shot. And the opening of the fight with Vulcan Raven? WHERE DOES HE EVEN KEEP THAT STINGER?! Phew. The dialogue at times sounds like a bad B-movie (hello MST3K), and of course, there's a Ninja. WHO CAN DEFLECT BULLETS. The amount of time spent developing the ridiculous story through text only codec conversations and massively long cutscenes is absolutely unbelievable! The pay off, of course, is listening to David Hayter as Solid Snake. His voice is brilliant, especially listening to the "I am a world-weary soldier who's just a pawn" delivery. Colonel becomes Kernel (say it in the voice). Wonderful.

The true story of Metal Gear Solid reaches far into the past of its own continuity, which is where MGS3 and its ilk comes from, with the 'Legendary Soldier' Big Boss, Snake's 'father', who Snake kills (but doesn't kill?) back in the 70's. And in the Jungle. But there are still the titular walking robots, just to reassure us that it is a Japanese game saga after all. Sadly the same problem afflicts all of the MGS titles, and it is the overblown cutscenes. The use of the player directing an already developed charcter is not problematic; you as the player (like I do) will probably identify better with this hero of cynicism as he is rather than if he were a Link style blank face. Snake's character becomes more moralistic as the game (and the sage) progresses, as he understands that he is nothing more than a pawn in a cataclysmic nuclear wargame. He's just this guy, you know? A great plus for this first 3D title is its sheer believability. The Shadow Moses Incident (as the common parlance has it) takes place in 2005. Everything except for the titular Mech is existing technology. And the Stealth Unit. This is the thing, it could be true.

No, the problem is that the player can, and often does become disconnected from the game by being forced to sit back and watch rather than play so much of it. Even Hayter himself described MGS4 as an "18 hour immersive movie" rather than a game. Who the hell wants to sit through an 18 hour movie? I can hear something about Wagner's Ring Cycle, but this is no place to debate videogames as high art. The issues of genetic engineering and nuclear danger are well handled by MGS though. Presented in this believable context of a theatre of a modern, cold war, could one successful Black-Ops insertion end the threat like this? We'll never know. That's the point of Black-Ops.

But games cast in this fashion will never succeed in telling a story like this. Too much is out of the players' hands. Theres so much political waffle behind it, not to mention real film cut into the rendered scenes. I like it. It's a good story! It's very importantly plausible. Who the hell knows what happens up in Alaska if the US Government are behind it and don't want you to know about it? But sometimes it's almost as if the sneaking sections are unecessary. Or just breaks between the next marathon cutscene.

Tune in next time for my poster child of games as a valid storytelling medium. There's a lot of politics behind that one as well, but I think it's expressed better.

And anyway, it's all a matter of opinion, right?

TL;DR oh shit.

Industrial Action

So, in a week of rioting and economic uncertainty, I instead choose to write about my failing technology. Mainly.

I managed to keep out of the riots, neither participating nor being attacked. Looks like I missed out on a new pair of trainers, or a new telly, or anything else that has been lifted by the pillaging hordes. The closest I got was a phonecall off my brother on Tuesday saying there was "a massive police presence in Derby", and that "there are a load of idiots coming from Nottingham on the buses, on the trains, the police are getting ready for trouble"... And then there wasn't. The copycat riots in derby consisted of two lads running into Argos, committing theft, and then running back out again. This caused the staff of Argos to panic, and close the shop early, which had a knock-on effect of the surrounding shops. And...that was it. Then in the early hours of Wednesday morning, there was a gang roaming around Alvaston smashing cars up, which is pretty usual for Alvaston anyway. And then that was really it. Thankfully there was no wholescale looting, no firebombing of police stations, no mugging...Well, no more than usual. Town's been quiet for the whole week, which isn't especially bad for Derby. A few peaceful nights have probably helped the general atmosphere. Now, I'm not getting involved with the politics of this situation. Not here, anyway. Having friends who have memberships to both the Labour and the Conservative parties, I have heard quite enough from both sides to convince me that we're all doomed, doomed I say, to die screaming as the future ceaselessly arrives constantly in our faces.

Anyway. I finally bit the bullet and backed up my personal files and had my computer hard drive formatted. That's right. I've finally got rid of that awful plague that is Windows Vista Business edition. Turns out that there was a little bit more than just Vista wrong with my system, as well. Something about viruses or some such, I don't know. Instead of just reinstalling Vista again, my dear and most helpful mother has instead introduced Windows XP to The Boiler, and I can say that it's been like this for not eve 24 hours and I'm very pleased with how it ticks now. I was initially worried that the new (old ?) OS wouldn't recognise the touchscreen, but actually there is an edition of XP for tablets and that's what I've got. Nice. I can flip the screen around without the machine screaming "NO NO PLEASE I CAN'T COPE" and instead just rearranging the icons nice and quickly. The keyboard dock is activated from the task bar, and switches on and off without shouting at me, and the handwriting recognition is pretty good for saying mine is barely legible. It is running rather a little hot at the moment though. I wonder.

What I would really like to get installed in this though, is of course Windows 7. I can't afford a new computer with it pre-installed, but hopefully it can cope. If not, I should think that XP can perform all the vital functions that I employ, such as surfing the internet (already using Opera 11.50, a little sluggish but a billion updates are streaming in as I type), word processing, keeping up my library of ripped CDs/downloads etc. Hopefully with some stable processing, I might be able to do some more, such as musical composition, editing tracks, and keep my blood pressure lower than the steam pressure requirements. HAR HAR.

Actually, if I can sort out this computer, I might be able to sort out my phone. Ah yes, my next essay in my love of clapped out technology. I have the poor luck to be in possession of a defective handset, a Sony W995 to be exact. Poor show old chap. Other than that, I'm pretty happy with what I have, because I like having an old Sony Ericsson phone, thanks, and I don't care how much you may or may not like that. Anyway, I wanted to sort out a new theme with a lovely flash menu...but couldn't, due to one or another thing. It's a bit boring, I won't go into it. However, to correctly implement the theme, I would need to get into the phone firmware. When I'm in the firmware, I can do almost anything I like. Update the software version, change the camera and speaker drivers...and if I mis-step, I could ruin the phone. If I sink about three days into the forums, I can learn how to do it properly, so I will. I might wait a while before doing so, because if I can get the Windows 7 upgrade, I'll do it after I reinstate my data, but at this rate, I'll be filling my HDD on the XP Tablet OS.