Smashing Their Stupid Shit into Tiny Pieces

Red Faction troubles me.

When not playing it I am haunted by visions of a trench coated hero standing amidst a pile of other people's property, hammer clasped in hand with said property reduced to a state approaching nothingness. Around me, overall clad rebels cheer at the fact that I exist and that I am hitting stuff. Continuously.

When I am playing it, I tool around smashing stuff up marvelling at how some people just get it.

I didn't use to think very much of Volition. Red Faction and it's sequel were so-so shooters and Saints Row drove me up the wall. Saints Row 2 on the other hand is a masterpiece. I use the term masterpiece in most cases as a subjective rather than objective term. When I say masterpiece it means I fell in love with something completely and then I have to explain the reasons why.

Saints Row 2 knows exactly what it is and then revels completely in the execution of this vision.

Saints Row 2 allows you to create a hermaphrodite who is tasked with throwing C4 at ninjas and pirates WHO ARE HAVING A TURF WAR. It never takes itself at all seriously and it is brimming with excellently crafted content.

Red Faction Guerrilla is another excellently crafted vision. It is more serious in tone than SR2 (but no less self aware) and Volition have obviously struggled without the ninjas and pirates and the excesses of crime comedy but have otherwise very competently filled a game world that feels coherent and whole.

I started out not having much fun as I was just running around, smashing stuff up and not really enjoying the combat and getting killed a lot. The gun play is lifeless and best avoided but the puzzle gameplay of demolishing buildings is fiendishly excellent. I found that to best enjoy the game I needed to knock it down to Easy so I could just run into a base, hit a bunch of fools with a sledgehammer and pick apart their buildings by identifying and crippling the most structurally important walls.

This post serves three purposes:

1. I felt like writing something.
2. I wish to evangelise RFG.
3. I want people to start engineering their games to cater to the player's needs.

Decide on a vision and stick to it. Make the core concept excellent and then deal with anything that you didn't have time to make amazing by providing options that allow the player to adjust their experience. Difficulty settings should be allowed to be changed at any point during the game. In RFG's case, I don't think this blocks any achievements either.

Red Faction Guerrilla is a brilliantly focused game that never strays from it's strengths and marries mayhem with very thoughtful destruction and it derserves to sell by the truck load.

I also want to talk about Fuel seeing as quite a few people are slamming it.

I love Fuel.

It isn't the best racer and it has a fair few flaws but I want to point a couple of things out:

1. It is beautiful and huge.
2. You race through the centre of a tornado.

Don't listen to the haters and give it a chance.

Over and out.

Outbursts Revisited

The last blog was pretty angry. I have been having a few outbursts recently. There are many reasons why but I feel bad about not properly explaining the Red Faction and Prototype comments (I stand by everything I said about that news post).

Note, the post this refers to has since been removed. Professionalism and what not.

Creating a great game is incredibly hard. For a studio aiming to produce triple A content on a current gen platform there are incredible and massive barriers to overcome. You have to create tech that is up to and maybe above a certain standard, generate a huge amount of art, get the backing of a publisher, create a solid and/or innovative design and then hone the gameplay. That is before the natural problems of dealing with a team of 100+ humans arise.

Prototype and Red Faction Guerrilla are both fantastic games. Their core concepts are exceptionally well realised and are amazing experiences. Special mention must go to the tech in each games. Wow, just wow.

Anyway, my problem with both games is that the difficulty curve doesn't match the game progression. Both games have a number of quirks that are incredibly unfair in certain situations and I specifically want to talk about Prototype in this regard.


For all their victories, videogames have never solved the super hero problem well. In a traditional videogame that has all of the trappings of a videogame (specifically a health bar in this case), super heroes often cause ludonarrative dissonance. How can Wolverine die? Why is Superman taking damage from things that aren't kryptonite?

Prototype runs into this problem as you play a character that is basically a god. He may not have the ability to create matter (maybe I didn't unlock that) but he outclasses every other character in the game. He has an overwhelming amount of powers and many of these dramatically change the game.

As a designer you are faced with a problem. How do you kill a god?

In this case they chose a high level answer and a low level answer.

For the high level they created an engine that can handle Godzilla. That is to say that at any time the screen can be full of fleeing civilian AI, military infantry and vehicle AI, zombie horde AI and monster AI all interacting. It is total chaos and it looks stunning. For the player it means there's probably one hundred things all trying to kill you at once. Therein lies a massive player weakness; chaos. Sometimes you just get overwhelmed, can't crowd control, get pinned and beaten to a pulp. It is frustrating but one of the few ways the designers can actually get you killed.

The low level solution (by which I mean discreet values or mechanics) is that in certain animations during which you have no control, you can be hit and killed. When hijacking a vehicle or consuming something for health you can be hit and knocked out of said animation. You can choose to enter into the animation but due to the zoomed in camera during the lengthy animations you cannot see what is going on and can be hit by the Hunters (which are really annoying as they have very little group AI to stagger their attacks) or missiles or tank shells and lose all of your health. This is really frustrating and eventually forced me to give up on the game.

Prototype is a great game and there is a lot of fun to be had but I am done with difficulty spikes and dying through no fault of my own.

I must reiterate though, Prototype is a great game.

On the subject of writing about games (last post), I want to link you to four of my favourite pieces of writing about games.

Ex GFW editor Sean Molloy talking about personal gaming.

Tim Rogers talking about Super Mario Bros. 3 as a memoir (read all 7 pages or die).

A review of Dead Space by Tim Rogers (I adore Dead Space BTW).

Leigh Alexander talking about the completely misguided Silent Hill Homecoming reviews.

I have also been wanting to pimp MC Lars for a while but haven't found a reason so whatever, here it is. He is one of my favourite rappers and it has been a joy to watch him grow as an artist. His new album is thoroughly excellent and it worth buying the physical CD for the emotional liner notes that catches you completely off guard. So here's a video (it's about videogames y'all).