Skyrim — Review

I have explored the mountains, streams and tundra plains of Skyrim. I am the Archmage, Dragonborn, and almost singlehandedly decided the course of a civil war between the Definitely-Not-Roman Legion and the Stormcloaks. I am a promising member of the Thieves’ Guild, and have been of notable assistance to dozens of others.

In the months since Skyrim came out, I have enjoyed my time spent in the game. The quest lines have been pretty good, even if they’re held back by the barely animated appearance of the puppets delivering the lines. The landscape is often quite beautiful. But for all that, I feel that the world is actually quite bland. As far as the technology powering Bethesda’s games might have come, there are some serious problems emerging — and I’m not referring to the widely-reported bugs.

I have only rarely come across anything of note in the hours that the game has the player tramping across the world. No one ever really seems to want to talk to me in this world. I occasionally stumble across a fort. The inhabitants promptly start shooting arrows at me. I crest a hill, and a strange man in a full suit of dwarven armour charges at me with a sword. I have no idea why. Once or twice, small parties of drunks have stopped me to share a drink with them as they make a motion that I suppose is meant to look like dancing.

One of the game’s great accomplishments is the streamlined, minimal interface. Easy to navigate, clear and legible, the Skyrim interface is a major step forward from the previous Elder Scrolls games. Unfortunately, this minimalist streak also carried over into the dialogue options. Which are horrible. I never really formed a clear sense of identity for my character, I think in large part because there was no sense of consequence to anything that I said. The game gives you a couple of options, your pick one, and … then you pick the other, because, hey, why not. It’s not as though any of the options were particularly interesting in the first place.

The same issue plagues the quests offered by the game. My character describes an interesting arc through the game. I saved the world from dragons, and became the arch-mage. Noble. I played a moral, upstanding character who was a force for good in the world. Then I took a bit of time off. The hero of Skyrim vanished, for a time, I like to imagine. Finally, the hero returned, and in short order put down the Stormcloak rebellion. But now the hero has begun to fall from grace, descending into Riften’s sewers to join up with the Thieves’ Guild. Next up, a few quests for the Daedra, and perhaps the Dark Brotherhood. Because, well, again, why not? No one in the world really seems to notice, and no one really cares.

I will keep dipping back into Skyrim from time to time to poke around the edges of the world, and finish off a couple more quests — but I don’t really feel any attachment. I’ll keep using my character because there’s no real reason not to. She’s powerful enough to carry me through those quests quickly and without much fear of losing progress. And I’ll keep engaging with contradictory quest lines, because I might as well.

Uncharted 3 — Review

Uncharted 3 is a great game by almost any measure you could throw at it. It looks fantastic, it features more of the signature Uncharted set-piece moments. For pretty much the first time in the series, the puzzles are ‘just right’ — not so hard that you’ll be stuck standing in one place for hours, but challenging enough to make you think. Yet something bothered me about the game. Something was off.

There was a moment early in Uncharted 3 that sums up the problem: Drake, Sully and the new addition to the crew, Cutter, are making their way through an underground tunnel. Cutter makes a reference to Macbeth. Not even a tough one. “Lay on, MacDuff.” Pretty famous line. And Nathan Drake, typically a font of obscure knowledge and wit up to this point in the series, doesn’t get it. Uncharted 3 suddenly muddles the question of how smart Drake is. He can translate Latin on the fly better than any Oxford don, has to be one of the world’s foremost experts on the history of human exploration and archeology — but he flubs on a very common reference from one of the most famous works in the English language. Who is this man?

This is actually an intriguing question, which the game ostensibly seeks to explore. For the first half of the game, it seems like the answer is that Drake is just going through the motions, a highly damaged person. Characters ask Drake repeatedly in the game “Why are you doing this?” And tellingly, he never actually answers them. He just has to keep going. In this way he appears to be written as something of a metaphor for the series itself. Why does Uncharted 3 exist? Because it has to. It coasts through without a whole lot to say, because, well, there has to be an Uncharted 3, just as there will probably be an Uncharted 4. Drake pursues the game’s band of villains, because … that’s what he does.

Where Uncharted 3 is most interesting is in the second half of the game when we meet up with Elena again. Here is a character who isn’t as willing as Drake’s usual band of enablers to just go along with his mindless forward charge. She is sucked into his problems, but only because he makes it unavoidable. And she isn’t happy about it. Uncharted 3’s story is almost singlehandedly redeemed by a few moments between these two characters. In a few lines, the game transforms itself from a mere string of independently impressive moments, into a probably doomed love story, with Drake as a very damaged person who draws people in with his charm, but it seems will always push them away again in an obsessive quest to fill a void in his soul. This could be a description foisted onto quite a few games, of course. If we were to look at the behaviours we create with most of our video game protagonists from the outside, they would not look all that healthy. Where Uncharted 3 becomes something more, however, is in that at a certain point it becomes aware of this.

Is Uncharted 3 the equal of its predecessor? No. While it does get there eventually, the story takes too long to realize what it is about. The game has internalized the expectations set by the other games, and you can often feel it trying to be clever. In Uncharted 2, Drake’s wit seemed to rise organically from genuine surprise at situations he found himself in, or the actions of characters around him. (“I’m sorry, do you have a plan to go with that grenade?”) In Uncharted 3, you can almost feel the writers pacing in the background, “How about that? That was funny, right? Right?”

I can only hope that the next time Uncharted comes around, Naughty Dog has a sense of what they want to say that lives up to the flair with which they can say it.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Deus Ex: Human Revolution calls back to a style of gaming not much tapped since the original Deus Ex in 2000, and Vampire: Bloodlines, back in 2004. The player is free to explore substantial hub areas, full of side-quests and interactive objects. Every computer can be hacked, every garbage can tipped over and searched. With the original Deus Ex consistently held up as one of the greatest games of all time, and even the infamously buggy Bloodlines transcending its technical faults to reach classic status, why has this genre languished for so long? Has time left this style of game behind for a reason, or does DXHR bring us back to the promise of a golden age?

Playing through DXHR I was struck by how little had actually changed in any meaningful way from the eleven-year-old original game. Naturally, it looks better than the first game, your energy bar now recharges over time, and there are now auto-saving checkpoints. But then the level of interactivity with the environment actually seems to have decreased. The environments are more detailed, and feel more open, but all in all, DXHR seems only the smallest, incremental step beyond its predecessors.

Why does the game feel so stagnant? Did the emergence of the open-world game, perhaps, relegate this more tightly scripted cousin to the dustbins? In the years between Bloodlines and DXHR, we got Oblivion, GTA 4, and the entire Assassin’s Creed series. These games have tended to trade in the ability to read e-mails on every computer you stumble across for the more compelling freedom of being able to truly tackle a situation from a broad range of approaches. In DXHR, you are typically presented with a path that would let you sneak carefully around enemies, or one that will walk you in the front door for a direct confrontation. You could crouch around, sneaking up behind enemies for a melee take-down, snipe from across the room with a tranquilizer gun, or just crack out a laser rifle. Compare this with the flexibility of even GTA 4. For one mission, I was tasked with breaking into a meeting on the top floor of a skyscraper. As far as I can tell, the default option would have been to walk in the front door, fight your way through, complete the objectives, and make your way back down. Instead, I stole a helicopter, landed on the roof, completed the objectives and zipped off again. The game was perfectly okay with this.

Could we someday dream of a Deus Ex game where the player is presented with a global conspiracy — and then simply allowed to explore the world searching for clues to solve the mystery? What if the game didn’t merely say, alright now you’ve reached the point where you go to Shanghai — but instead just gave you access to a helicopter?

With fond memories of the original Deus Ex, I was looking forward to playing through DXHR. I remember spending hours hacking terminals, reading e-mails looking for clues, and ferreting out side-quests. It turns out that in 2011, I don’t actually want to read any of those e-mails or pocket secretary entries. I don’t like reading my own e-mails. Why should I care about Adam Jensen’s? Sure DXHR lets me pick up every box, every fridge, bit of set dressing and dumpster. But why do I really want to? That isn’t the sort of freedom that I want in a game. Functional faucets in the bathrooms were a novelty ten years ago because games simply didn’t have that level of detail before. Game designers were experimenting with a new level of fidelity. Looking back, in many cases they didn’t actually know what to do with these new possibilities yet. As players, we were content to follow along, because we didn’t know what we wanted yet, either.

DXHR isn’t a bad game. It has its frustrations — the universally panned boss fights coming in highest on the list — but it has its charms, too. The story was engaging enough to carry me through, and the game’s costume design is unique and interesting. (The shoulders though … am I alone in thinking they look about four inches too wide?) But for all of that, the game seems like a final trip down a dead-end in the evolution of gaming. Eidos Montreal put a fresh coat of paint on the old model, and let us see whether it holds up. This time around, I was curious enough to follow along. Next time, I’m not so sure.

Lord of the Rings — Blu-ray Review

For the past week or so, I’ve been working my way through the new Blu-ray set of The Lord of the Rings extended editions. Along with the forthcoming Jurassic Park and Star Wars sets, this has been the one everyone was waiting for. So how is it?

I suppose I’m happy with the set, but I wish I didn’t have so many reservations. The movies are great, but I already knew that. They look fantastic on Blu-ray, revealing the rich texture that went into every costume, set and landscape better than ever before. But, as on the DVDs before, the movies are split across two discs. Sure, these are enormous films, but two Blu-rays each? In fairness, the intermission is a welcome breakpoint to go stretch your legs, but in my anticipation of this set it never even crossed my mind that they would still ship on two discs.

The ‘appendices’ that shipped with the old DVD set remain simply the best collection of special features ever put on disc. They are a font of knowledge and inspiration for any filmmaker. Again, though, I was hoping that this set would collect all of them on one Blu-ray per film. Instead, they appear to have been lifted straight out of the old set, still on DVDs. In this case, I wouldn’t even care if they kept the original resolution unchanged — the convenience of smoother Blu-ray menu navigation and less disc swapping would have been wonderful. The films themselves each clock in around four hours long. I can accept might have been a squeeze to get them on a single disc at Blu-ray quality. But surely the six or so hours of dvd-quality documentaries from the appendices could have made it?

Finishing out the set are the behind the scenes documentaries that appeared previously on a re-release of the theatrical cuts. These provide an interesting collection of fly-on-the-wall footage, but in the end are much less compellingly put together than the appendices, amounting to just a bunch of tape cut together, rather than a viable narrative of their own.

So in the end, this new set doesn’t really offer anything new at all beyond the films in high-def. As I said, that’s not bad — but I after all this time I was kind of expecting something more. No ten-year’s on look back at the films? No new docs?  The collection remains the standard for film documentation, but it only remains so. It doesn’t push forward at all. Every part of this box has been available previously, and in most cases not even the format has changed. I’m left a little puzzled about what took so long.

Those Blu-rays do look really good though….

A Less than Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

I’m not quite sure what happened to hip-hop. I just picked up the new Kanye Westalbum, and was initially impressed. The album opens strong with “Glorious,” featuring Kanye in his intelligent mode, laying clever and insightful rhymes over a great beat. “Monster” is fantastic, with Nicki Minaj’s verse balancing out Jay-Z’s ‘the world is out to get me’ weak-spot.

But then, about half-way through the album, it feels like Kanye gets tired and turns into a twelve-year old, trading silly braggadocio stories with his friends. Tracks like “So Appalled” are just, well, ridiculous. This is the big event in 2010 hip-hop?

Just before listening to the album, I went back to Ice Cube’s 1992 The Predator. Interestingly, there are echoes of tracks like “When Will They Shoot?” in “Glorious,” with their reflections on race in America. But Ice Cube’s album played out these questions across the entire album, expressing the anger surrounding Rodney King’s beating and the spirit of the LA riots with clips from NPR interviews. Kanye just doesn’t seem interested in much other than the women throwing themselves at his feet and limos.

Much of the strength of hip-hop, even gangsta rap, was its political and social commentary. Over the years though, the concerns of rap got more and more locked into money, fame, and dealing with the hangers-on chasing after the same. I’m interested where hip-hop leaves the explicitly political and just talks about life — but Kanye can hardly manage to talk about life on an interesting level for more than four tracks an album. The level of discourse here is stuck at the level of something like Louis XIV for half the album. If hip-hop can’t equal the intelligence of an average rock song, there’s a problem.

Am I being too harsh based on a couple of weak tracks? Maybe, but half of this album is sufficiently promising that its lows are all the more infuriating. “Blame Game” has a great beat, and begins as an interesting story of a dysfunctional relationship — but by the end it degenerates into an offensively bad Chris Rock sketch. I wanted something better.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is the best produced hip-hop album I’ve heard in a while, but too often it makes me wish that Kanye would just shut up until he actually has something to say. Probably not going to happen, is it.