How hard is too hard?

Ever had the Rage? That all consuming wave of anger that makes you tear the Stuntman disc from your PS2 and Frisbee it out of the window? This is a thing that has happened to me. Truth. The same anger made me stomp into the garden to retrieve the offending circle of plastic, roughly dust it off and then shove it back into the PS2 with my fingers crossed, hoping that it would still be readable. Thankfully it was, and I persevered for another two hours, remembering the route, traffic patterns, speeds and instructions that would give me the precision skills to finally beat a level that stretched to five minutes long at most. Two hours.

I learned something important that day, how to channel the rage. There are a lot of unforgivably difficult games out there and I have a bit of a weakness for them. I spend hours with them, getting ever more precise until I finally crack that one section that's giving me grief, before doing the same again on the next. Most infamous among these games at the moment for me is Trials Evolution, but the same thing applies to most of the really difficult games I've played through, from R-Type to Ikaruga, to Shinobi, Stuntman, Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, Vanquish, Geometry Wars, Comic Jumper or 'Splosion Man. And whilst I now rarely get to disc Frisbeeing levels of anger anymore it can still happen. 'Splosion Man's final boss in particular was so cheap it had me wanting to headbutt my way through a wall. But the rules still applied. Persevere, finish the game and then shout, "YOU LOSE!" at the developers, because that moment is what it's really all about. That moment of triumph where you feel like you've got one over on the twisted minds who have been torturing you for so long with their impossible yet oh so addictive game. There really is no feeling like it.

So in the right circumstances, difficulty is fun, if perhaps for a given value of fun. Or maybe instead, it's what is necessarily endured before you can enjoy the feeling of gratification that sweeps over you when you finally nail the level. If you're a gamer like me, who came up through the 8 and 16-bit eras, a certain amount of difficulty might even be expected, but there are times when the it can become a total turn off. Times when I'm not ashamed at all to say I'm playing on easy or normal modes. Those times are when story gets involved.

I still haven't beaten Final Fantasy X, a game known as one of the hardest in the series. JRPGs tell stories. It's what they are best at. As games, they mostly boil down to clicking through menus, but that's OK, because if you're anything like me, if you're playing a JRPG you aren't really there for the game. I was enjoying FFX to a point. It's a great story, beautifully told, but god is it hard. Being a book nerd, story trumps gameplay for me every time, I may like a challenging game, but I love being told a story. Sadly the difficulty of FFX started to get in the way of me enjoying the story around the point of the Zanarkand Cloister. I'd been trying all night to beat the boss there, and no matter what I tried, I couldn't. I put the game down and sadly, never went back. I know I'm right near the end, and weirdly, after all these years I've still not had the ending spoiled, so I have no clue about what happens next. I should probably pick it up again really.

Anyway, from then on I've consciously dialled down the difficulty of any games I'm playing where story is a major factor. I've just finished Catherine, and at the recommendation of the friend who lent it to me, I played it on easy. I'm not afraid to admit that. The game itself is still pretty difficult though, which makes me wonder about just how hard normal mode is. Crucially though, it's not so difficult as to get in the way of Catherine's downright fantastic story, and that's important. I'd much rather be digesting Catherine's musings on the nature of relationships than wracking my brains over it's complex block puzzles. The same applied to Bioshock Infinite, a game that I'm given to gushing over at every possible opportunity. I've completed it twice now, and even at normal difficulty (the level I played it at) it gets pretty hard pretty quickly. Finishing Bioshock once unlocks 1999 mode, which pretty much equates as, "the way games used to be mode." The thing is, I stayed away from 1999 mode, even though I was on my second playthrough. The reason was simply because there is so much to take in aside from the combat that the extra difficulty would divert my attention away from what I was trying to get out of the game. Namely, making sense of the game's events through the lens of a second playthrough. Now I know the story inside out, I may yet test my mettle against 1999 mode and let Bioshock's story take the back seat for a change.

Persona 4 is another good example of this. The game is continually demolishing me on the last floor of the second dungeon. The difficulty has got in the way of me progressing the plot, so I've stopped enjoying it and have had to put the game down and take a break. I really like where Persona 4 is going though, and that makes me want to see it through to the end, so I'm going to have to pick it back up eventually.

It seems that sometimes, difficulty can make or break a game. Personally I find that the purer and more pared back a game becomes, the more I'm willing to accept punishing difficulty and the more attractive the game becomes to me as a result. But when the game starts to deal with more complex issues, for example, relationships, commitment and oncoming fatherhood in the way that Catherine does, that same punishing difficulty can turn me off. I've spoken to a few gaming mates about this, and they feel the same. It's by no means a definitive study, but it does sort of confirm that I'm not just being fussy.

Not that any of that matters at the moment, because I'm back at the wall of pure and relentlessly difficult games, furiously bashing my forehead against a small, pink segment of bricks labelled Ms Splosion Man. I'm hating it for half of the time I'm spending on it. But I'm loving the other half.

Why on earth do I like doing this to myself?

Imagination-Land

This post first appeared on readyplayertwo.co.uk.



The right Bioshock Cover

Playing so much Bioshock Infinite of late has led me to a rather surprising conclusion. The level to which I connect with a game is in almost direct correlation to how fantastical or unusual the setting is. Put it like this. What sounds more appealing? Grey first person shooter set in a gritty rendition of modern day northern Waziristan or primary coloured first person shooter set in a sunlight flooded flying city circa 1912. Of course, I'm talking about Battlefield 4 and Bioshock Infinite, and for me, since games are all about escapism, my natural choice would be the game set in the early twentieth century flying city. Let's try another one. A racer featuring real world cars racing on real world tracks or a supersonic hovership racer running on tight rollercoaster tracks set in a bright post scarcity future? Forza or WipeOut. I own and enjoy both, but I only utter the L word about one of those, and it's not the one with the real world cars.
 
Games have an ability, unique in pretty much all media, to immerse you in the impossible. Titles like Fez, WipeOut and Antichamber can even take you to places beyond what a layman like myself would accept to be the normal laws of physics, let alone beyond the average imagination. And while a mega budget 3D movie can show you the impossible, only games can let you experience it.
 

This shot sums up the mess that the Spec Ops
soldiers have gotten themselves in to.

It makes me sad when some games seem to squander the worlds they're built in. Take Gears of War as an example. It's set on what's assumed to be another planet, it's antagonists erupt from the ground and sink entire cities in their wake. Yet despite all this, it's still for the most part a gritty urban shooter in which you're surrounded by burned out cars, lumbering tanks, helicopters, crumbling neo gothic architecture and lots of brown. Take away the locust and it could be a war zone in any European city. All of the Gears games are great and I've enjoyed every one of them, particularly the third, but it says a lot about a series' sci fi setting when it's most memorable moment (at least for me personally) is also practically the only nakedly sci fi set piece of the entire series; the section in which you kill a giant city devouring worm from the inside out. It's easy to forget, during the moments you're not chainsawing Locust, that Gears is set on a different planet at all. Conversely I find, Spec Ops: The Line's gorgeous sun drenched rendering of Dubai really compelling. Spec Ops' developers took the usually mundane idea of a modern day city, drowned it with a sandstorm and then seemingly made every reflective surface out of gold. It's a look and a location that is pretty much unique in gaming at the moment. The result takes what should have been just another brown shooter and polishes the brown to a blinding sheen, which is what gives Spec Ops' realistic setting such a kick.
 
What I'm trying to get at here is that a game can be much more interesting if it's framed in a way that's not often seen. Admittedly, Gears' success did set the formula for the brown shooter, but I've seen so many brown shooters since, that when Spec Ops came along wrapped in sand, bathed in blinding sunlight and drizzled with gold it felt like a breath of fresh air.
 

One of the most iconic shots in Dishonored.

Thankfully, once you've pulled your eyes away from Call of Battlefield, you don't have to look too hard to find game worlds lavished with a wealth of creativity. It goes without saying that if you want to see the most creative and original games available at the moment, then you need to look at the Indies. Titles like Fez, Antichamber, Bastion, Dear Esther, Machinarium, To the Moon, Dust or even Minecraft are unlike almost anything you'll find in a box on the shelf of your local games shop. But even if for some strange reason you only limit yourself to boxed games, there is still a wealth of creativity out there. There's the aforementioned sun drenched turn of the century vintage futurism of Bioshock Infinite, or the deep-as-the-ocean green tinted decopunk of Rapture of that game's progenitors. Don’t want a dystopia in the sky? Then why not tour the bright yet totalitarian city in Mirror’s Edge. If you want to pass on dystopias altogether, then try a post apocalypse. If you think every end-of –the-world is the same, then might I point you in the direction of the criminally under rated, and exceptionally leafy, Enslaved or Naughty Dog's forthcoming The Last of Us. Alternatively if like your post apocalypse a little bit grimmer, yet still crave something that feels fresh, then may I present to you 4A Games' Metro; bleak and dark as the Moscow underground that shelters the last remnants of humanity in all its tunnels. Too dark? Perhaps we can lighten the mood in the collapsing laboratories of Portal 2. Too light, or not escapist enough? How about a visit to the charmingly English land of Albion in Fable, or the icy blue tundra of Skyrim. Too much fantasy? Then why not visit the crumbling, and entirely fictional, yet surprisingly plausible whalerpunk city of Dunwall, the place that accounts for at least seven tenths of what makes Dishonoured so great. If you're feeling more adventurous? If you haven't already, look no further than the Uncharted games, whose fabled lost cities, once they are revealed, dish out the most lavish and awe inspiring vistas of this generation. What if you want the fabled cities but less of the shooting and more of the journey? Obviously you want to visit the golden deserts and the desolately beautiful crumbling lost civilisation of the genuinely moving Journey. I could go on and on.
 
And I haven't even mentioned Final Fantasy yet, whose designers, Square, are the undisputed masters of creating richly imagined worlds. Worlds dense with culture, history and story, that feel lived in and are a pleasure to inhabit. Final Fantasy VII wouldn't have been the worshipped game it has become without that kind of imagination. It takes a special kind of mind to come up with a concept as out there as the Lifestream, but without it there would be no Mako, no Shin-Ra, no Soldier, no Materia, no Cloud, Sephiroth, Avalanche. The Ancients, with whom the Lifestream is intrinsically linked, would not have sprung from the mind of Yoshinori Kitase and with no Ancients, there would be no Aeris. Without the Lifestream, Aeris wouldn't have died, because she would never have existed, and a whole generation of gamers would not have experienced 'that' moment. You all know the one. Square still have that wealth of creativity. Say what you like about Final Fantasy XIII as a game, you can't deny that the twin worlds of Pulse and Cocoon make for one of the most compelling gameworlds of this generation.
 
Games are always better when game designers can let their imaginations run wild. That's why so many indie games are so great. With fewer concerns about shareholders or appealing to the mass market, indie devs can really cut loose. But there could be more of this sort of thing if the publishers were daring enough to indulge the experimentation of developers. Would it not be great if publishers weren't as commercially cautious? I like to think that if they weren't, we would begin to see fewer gritty modern world war games, less dystopian cyberpunk and less stone-faced post apocalypse. Of course, every now and then a game will appear that will turn your expectations on their head. Spec Ops' Dubai proves there is room for maneuver in the modern day shooter and the forthcoming Remember Me's Neo-Paris does some really interesting things with cyberpunk.
 


This is London on wheels, note St Pauls perched at the summit.

Personally, I'd like to see more of the punk suffix flying around. Bioshock-the-first may have been first out of the blocks with decopunk, but there's a lot more that can be done within the realms of 1920's art deco futurism. In fact there's more that can be done with retro futurism all round. For instance, who wouldn't love to see something based around Retropolis? Or how about an adaption of Philip Reeve's far future world of Mortal Engines? Whilst the novels are not strictly steampunk, their vaguely Victorian cast iron and brass aesthetics, rich back story, airships, unstoppable ancient warrior cyborgs and predatory mobile cities (yes, you read that right) could make for a pretty compelling experience. Steampunk has become almost a subculture in itself, and is pretty ubiquitous at a certain kind of real world convention, but I'm yet to see a full blown steampunk game. Dishonoured came close, but it wasn't quite there, which is why I knocked together whalerpunk to describe it instead.
 
If all that seems a bit overused already, then there is also dieselpunk and atompunk to check out too. The best way to describe these would be to tell you to watch Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and check out the Ratchet and Clank series' various robots. Or I could just say that it's futurism that respectively focuses on the aesthetics of the thirties and the fifties. Or you could check out the Wikipedia page here. I'm barely scratching the surface really.
 
Games tend to focus a lot on sci fi and fantasy, and all this punk stuff is just my own narrow vision. There are hundreds of talented game designers out there with incredible imaginations whose ideas are broader than mine will ever be, who can produce out-there concepts that I couldn't dream of. The games that come from that kind of imagination are the kind that I always love most. I’m hoping that the success of Bioshock Infinite can convince the cautious corporate sorts who have the say in the game industry that a triple A game doesn't have to be grey, brown or a combination of the two to be successful. Hopefully they'll begin to allow those designers to set their imaginations free. The results could really be spectacular if they do.

 

Bioshocked

As you likely saw, there was no blog last week, because I'd done something amazing. I preordered a game to pick up on release day. Specifically I preordered Bioshock Infinite. This is a significant occurrence, it's the first game I've actually gone out and ordered since Final Fantasy VIII, which was also, incidentally, the one time I've ever gone out of my way to get the collectors edition of a game. Anyway, the stars aligned for me on the runup to Bioshock Day. I got some interest on my savings the week before release, and the review on IGN appeared a couple of days after that. The score was amazing so I ordered.

I was slightly thrown by the actual release day. When did games start being released on a Tuesday? I've clearly missed something here. I thought games got released on a Friday so you can ignore all your friends and play all weekend. Not anymore it seems! Nevertheless, it was fortunate that I also had release day off. I played all day, again, something I don't do often. It was wonderful.

If you haven't played it yet, I urge you to do so. Go out in your lunch hour, pick it up tomorrow. It doesn't matter what format you choose. It's beautiful in every possible way. It's light is blinding, it's colours deeply saturated. It animates beautifully. Columbia feels lived in, a world held up by the sheer force of belief of it's inhabitants. The voice acting is stellar. The use of it's licensed music is unique. Elizabeth is utterly, utterly wonderful, the most believable AI companion I've seen since Alyx Vance. She will stir genuine emotions in you. The villains are memorable and the Songbird is terrifyingly powerful. Best of all, the story is fabulously dense, covering a myriad of themes, building to a melon twisting gut punch of an ending. Basically I'm saying if you don't play this, you are missing out on what will probably be the best release of this year and in all likelihood the best game of this console generation.

The first thing I wanted to do when I finished it was start it again.

There's so much buried in Columbia you'll never find everything on your first playthrough unless you use a guide. Do yourself a favour, play it like a real gamer and leave the guide in the shop. Take pleasure in the exploring, the discovery. If you buy a guide, you're basically buying spoilers, the screenshots will steal the
awe from every new area. I will be buying the other companion book however. The Art of Bioshock Infinite, a near 200 page hardcover full of concept art from the game. If you decide to do the same, wait til you finish the game. You don't want spoilers, the game has so much impact when you see it with fresh eyes. (Update: The book arrived today, and it's beautiful, chock full of amazing art. Best of all is the cover under the dust jacket, a shot of Elizabeth and the Songbird embossed in what might just be gold leaf. As you can probably tell, I'm very pleased with it. As a both fan of the game and a book nut, I can honestly say this is an essential purchase.)

So again. Buy Bioshock Infinite! It means Irrational Games will make a ton of money which they can plough into making Ken Levine's next opus. The world needs more games like this, and gaming as a whole needs more men like Ken Levine. He's like a gaming Chris Nolan, somehow making the unapologetically high concept suitable for the mass market. Just as film has it's easily recognisable auteurs, gaming is starting to gain a few of its own too.

Make sure you stay for the credits too, there's a nice little surprise from around the midpoint.

Now go buy it!