A week from tomorrow, and I'm heading down to Daufuskie Island (where I grew up) for 48 hours of top shelf chill time. And I need it. The monotony of my daily routine is starting to get the better of me. I've been writing, on average, 50k words a week like some sort of god damn...uhh... writing machine... Hey, I never said they were good words. See you tomorrow!
Ok Sega, what the fuck? To you, years of flogging Sonic’s long-dead corpse in hope of another ring popping out seems like a completely reasonable business practice. Yet, for some inexplicable reason, I can’t get my hands on a remake of the best series Genesis ever created: Streets of Rage. Oh, it’s not, you say? Just watch the opening sequence from SoR 1.
How does that not make you want to kick ass? Start screen and you’re already pumped like Vin Diesel. Yeah! Rage! Gonna fuckin punch somebody! And you do. Oh yes, you do...
God dammit that was awesome. Balletic. Visceral... Pwn-...uhh, -tacular. Leave me alone, it's been a long week.
Lately, I’ve been consumed almost exclusively with thoughts of quality gameplay. While it’s no secret that I wasn’t the biggest fan of the gameplay in Bioshock: Infinite, the world seems to have forgiven its sins. I haven’t. I’ll never forgive, Irrational. I’ll never forget.
I must need more coffee.
I just don’t understand what happened, exactly. For some reason I can turn on a Genesis beat-em-up that’s more than twenty years old and have a greater sense of impacting the game world than I do when I play Bioshock Infinite, or Kane and Lynch, or Fallout. Yes I’m lumping those three together. This is a discussion about gameplay. Don’t hurt me.
Taking it back even further, and the bad guys in fucking Double Dragon for NES reacted when I punched them. I drill a baddie in the chest with a machine gun in Bioshock Infinite or set him on fire and he seems not to give a shit until the moment all of his hit points vanish. This tangibility, this conveyance of task is fucking mission critical for immersion, and if games are going to tell the stories of the future, immersion’s an important aspect of achieving that goal.
How is a game more immersive than a film if there is no gameplay? How does it bring anything new to the table? How are games going to be better than film? And yes, that's a question we should be asking ourselves. They'll always be two completely distinct experiences, but until games are as respected as film is, the goal shouldn't be "let's be the movies," it should be "let's tell better stories than they do in ways that they can't." Bioshock Infinite doesn't do this. It's not the future of storytelling.
And it’s not just Bioshock Infinite. I’m just using it as a proxy for a myriad of games out there that don’t appeal to me. I am a gamer, and I like the gameplay in the video games I play to be a satisfying, entertaining experiences, not the afterthought to a story that could have been told on a movie screen or in the pages of a book.
If the purpose of the action is just to fill space between one story element and another, why not just skip the action altogether? Why not make a movie?
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