Bulletstorm - Balm for the Wounded Hypermasculine Egos Out There or Just a Fun Game?

This entry will not contain any pictures. Most of you will know what it looks like anyway and I can't be arsed to dig through websites and trailers to grab pictures.

The first trailer of Bulletstorm that I was shown was the one where you blow the guy's asshole out. I felt a very strange sensation. Normally I absolutely relish in defending videogame designers' and developers' rights to practice their art and design whichever game they want to design. Every time an election draws near (and might it be just a small one) it is my favourite Saturday morning passtime to go up to the info stands of local politicians and start a little bit of hell there. Many of you may not know it but together with Australia Germany has the strictest standards when it comes to videogame violence in the whole world (at least out of the "democratic countries", I don't know if videogames are being censored in China, Afghanistan or the like). Even a lot of games that can only be sold to adults in the first place are only available in a censored version in Germany. I just don't think that is right (why the hell censor Portal??) but more on that later.

So with my mindset that you should never try to restrict the recreational media that any adult in any country would like to access in their freetime, I was suddenly faced with a very strange sensation when I witnessed the first trailer. I didn't like it at all. Something about the sexualised violence made me extremely uncomfortable, which did open up a deep conflict within myself. I guess this is what all the conservative people out there feel when they see pretty much any videogame. "I don't like it, I think it is harmful, it should be banned!" However, I'm too smart to come to that conclusion. And in a way it also relieves me a little bit that some form of videogame violence can still make me uncomfortable. That's good, right?

Anyway, I have been thinking about Bulletstorm. Something that I purposely haven't done was checking out the old media coverage of the game, since I know from countless instances in Germany that reports about videogames are routinely chock full of false facts. It is very noticable that the journalists themselves have apparently never touched the videogame they are talking about and are instead relying on some kind of contorted hearsay. But yeesh, to make it onto Fox News, I think Bulletstorm must have caused a kind of ruckus.

I did read some quotes from the developers of the game, talking about how it was just supposed to be a fun game and that they were in a situation where they could just make any game they wanted to make without much restrictions and this sounds great indeed. The mock-game Duty Calls, which is a parody on all kinds of military shooting games shows that they are really self-aware as videogame developers and that they have a great critical knowledge of the conventions of the genre. There is nothing about these guys that says "dumb" or "violent" to me.

However, what I have seen of the game so far reminds me a lot of one of my very first gaming experiences, which was Duke Nukem 3D. The hypermasculine protagonist that spews witty lines and taunts while killing enemies seems to be largely the same in the two games. Now where does hypermasculinity come from? Hypermasculinity that expresses itself through violence against other people is a sign for two things: 1) neurosis, 2) neurosis because of marginalised masculinity. Marginalised masculinity is what happens when a male gendered person realises that they do not fit the standards for what is in their society regarded as hegemonial masculinity, more often than not being 1) heterosexuality and reproduction, 2) strength to defend oneself and their family and 3) the ability to sustain a family as a breadwinner. It is often observed that male gendered people who do not fit these standards make up for this by making use of a hypermasculine image for themselves, which might in cases depend very much on the use of violence against other, weaker people to demonstrate strength. Now, choosing the protagonist for your new game as that kind of person can indeed be seen as a clever sarcastic element to the game that doesn't take itself seriously anyway.

On the other hand, I do know the gaming community. And this is where I get back to my purposely sensational title for this blog post, because I am trying to make a point here: Whether Bulletstorm is balm for the wounded hypermasculine egos of losers out there or just a fun game for a well-adjusted person is ultimately decided by every individual themselves. In a free society it is common to trust in adults to consume products of popular culture in a critical and aware way and I believe that the majority of people is absolutely capable of that. Thus I see next to no harmful content in Bulletstorm, provided it is consumed by people of legal age. However, I have also seen my fair share of dumb, misogynist and homophobic assholes in the gaming community, who will not consume the game in a critical way but instead enjoy the (sexualised) violence for what it is. "But it's just a gaaaame!" Come on, I always look at all kinds of media from a critical and also a gender viewpoint and it would be stupid to not do it for this game just because it is a videogame.

That does not mean I endorse censorship of games at all. But if I have come to the conclusion that I do not wish for a movie like A Serbian Film to be censored, even if I see no point in it and think the director might have done better by getting a deviantart account to convey his message through "art" instead of subjecting hundreds of unsuspecting festival goers to that, I of course also do not wish for Bulletstorm to be censored. Let's be frank here, that's not my choice at all and it will be censored in Germany anyway (if it even comes out). But that does not mean I have to like the game myself or personally see much of a merit in it. I don't even want to try playing it. Of course, the huge monster in the trailer looked really cool but the moments of violence just weren't my cup of tea. I am glad that games like Bulletstorm exist, so that even the more liberal people amongst ourselves might have to say "I don't like this, I think it might magnify harmful tendencies in some people, but I see no reason why this should be censored at all". We should all at some point be in that position, reviewing our positions and reevaluating our principles.

That still doesn't mean I won't give you the side-eye if you are one of those people who don't question the dimension of violence and the perpetuated gender images in media like this at all and are too dumb or lazy for critical thinking when it comes to their own free-time.

The Depiction of Videogames in Novels

There is something quite unfortunate about the depiction of videogames or pretty much anything having to do with computers and internet in novels.

The starting point always seems to be a quite self-conscious conception especially from authors of children's literature that videogames keep children from reading books and in essence produce dumb people. That is a harsh prejudice that is simply not justified. Children these days will read books or they won't. Videogames are not going to change that, you might as well blame TV for the decline in sophistication. And true enough, when TV was at its advent the older media had a very critical view of the new media on the block.

Furthermore, even though I have to admit it is only a small exception, some games are in their narrative and psychological framework just as brilliant and sophisticated as a good movie or even a novel. Sadly, these works of course remain in the minority but if you have a look at any medium you might find an overabundance of trivial narratives and flat characters anywhere.

But even if you disregard the very sceptical and sometimes downright condescending point of view of the author, oftentimes the depiction of videogames is ridden with silly mistakes that make it very obvious the author probably has never touched a videogame with a ten foot pole. I vividly recall one instance where a new game was installed on the pc by putting a new microchip on the motherboard. Ridiculous.

Then I remember a novel series that was entirely set in a bleak future in which social power is earned by successfully fighting in a MMO type of game. The depiction of the MMO game within the novel was actually very accurate, so much that it poked fun at typical behaviour of MMO players, such as grinding or power gaming. On the downside the narrative soon lost itself in the most terrible and dumb Mary Sue characterisation. If I want to play an MMO game, I go and play. If I want to read a book I do so. I do, however, not see a point in reading a book about people playing MMO games, assumed that the narrative doesn't offer any other interesting points, which it sadly didn't in the admittedly brief time until I lost my patience with the book series.

I have yet to read a believable and also interesting depiction of a videogame in a novel. Most of the time the author tries to cram in some kind of message about how videogames are evil and are programming the young generation to be killing machines. Sadly, even Terry Pratchett's novel Only You Can Save Mankind seems to be one of those novels and even though I usually love reading Pratchett I can't bring myself to give that book even a try. Maybe once videogames have become a respectable enough medium, such as it happened with film, people are able to write about them in a reasonable and realistic enough way.

RIFT: First Impressions

One of the nicer things I brought home from Gamescom last year was a RIFT beta key. I registered quickly but it took a long time until I heard back from them, so I thought they had forgotten me after all. Some time ago however, I finally received the actual beta invitation and could try out the game.

It is a bit difficult to say anything about this game when I'm not really a player of MMOs at all. The last MMO I played? Ragnarök Online! I never played any MMO of the 3d kind, so navigating my character and especially selecting the enemies was challenging at first. I really liked the way the characters looked. They all had such broad hips and broad shoulders, at first it really threw me off but then I grew to like it. Until I took a screenshot and looked at it outside of the game. Turns out: My resolution ingame was a bit stretched and made everything look broader than it was. But strangely, I found this deviation from tall and slender characters, especially females, really refreshing! Oh well!

The gameplay was fun enough; even questing takes a rather intuitive route and you never really feel forced to do anything, which lets you play on and on for hours, obviously. What really impressed me was the wealth of different combination possibilities for your character's skilltrees. I can't even begin to think up which combinations I'd still want to try. So if you start a new character, you never feel like you are "stuck with them", because once you get bored you can choose new ways to skill your character and play them entirely differently! Lots of fun.

The implementation of rifts that suddenly open in the countryside is well thought out and carried out in a very atmospheric way as well. The countryside itself looks really nice, too. I still prefer Oblivion's graphics but that was a single player game. Imagine a near Oblivion-pretty world in an MMO game, that's really something!

Now onto the bad sides I guess, but those aren't really the games' fault at all. It's the players. Granted, you can turn a page in the chat or turn it off altogether but if you are looking for a group you can't help but have to endure the conversations of people ingame. My server was mostly filled with players that constantly talked about World of Warcraft and compared the two games. There is something about the random chatter of MMO people that annoys me. The tone of the conversation is always derogatory, it all serves the single objective to compare e-peens and it seems like people are always looking for fights.

I also realised that people like me probably aren't the target group of the game at all. I at least know my fair share of MMO terminology and thus I can fufill basic group functions but most of these people seemed to be permanent MMO players for whom this was just a different software to carry out their standard way of clicking. That is also a thing that will probably keep myself from playing the game when it comes out. I just don't feel like dealing with rude people like that, who seem to be navigating a whole different world than I am. If it means never getting ahead in an MMO and staying low-level then I'd rather do that than making my way through a dungeon with a group of rude guys for hours.

Even so, having to deal with very frustrating people, the game kept me interested enough to keep playing for hours on end. I don't really know how to write a review for an MMO since I am so obviously not accustomed to all their quirks and unwritten laws, so all I can do is give my view as an unfamiliar person. If you've never played an MMO before and you try to play any MMO you will probably get yelled at at first. Maybe if you can find a group of friends to show you the ropes you will be lucky but with so many MMOs out there and MMOs having developed into their own little niche kind of games, extremely different from the singleplayer RPGS that they once came forth from, it would always be tough to find your way into the system.

Rift at least is a new game where perhaps the minds of people aren't set into stone all that deeply and even for me it was really fun at times. I guess it would be a good choice to try out. For now, having played the game so intensely for the last three days I guess I can say I will never become an MMO player. There seems to be too much to learn just to have a little bit of fun. When the beta ends I think I will just go back to putting up with rude people in League of Legends. At least in League of Legends I can really kick ass if I'm lucky. In the end my overall impression of Rift is a highly positive one, while my impression of the players is an overwhelmingly negative one.

The Silent Hill Movie that never was - Shutter Island

Personally I think Shutter Island was DiCaprio's best movie last year. Better than Inception. (And it should go without saying but there are spoilers to the ending of both Shutter Island and Silent Hill 2 in here!)

Shutter Island is a classical psychological horror movie that is simply a pleasure to watch. Starting out in line with a tradition from the crime and mystery genre - an investigation taking place in an isolated sphere, thus limiting the possibilites and culprits - it quickly becomes clear that this will be no ordinary criminal investigation.

DiCaprio's character, U.S. marshal Teddy Daniels, is asked to investigate the disappearance of a female patient from a mental hospital located on an island. As the investigation continues he is faced with unhelpful hospital staff and a resurgence of his own war trauma. We, as viewers, first start to be suspicious of everyone on the island, then of the marshal himself.

The thing that pleased me the most in the movie were parallels that I could see between the plot and also the visual design of Shutter Island and Silent Hill 2. Some passages are very similar in overall style and development.

We start by entering a foggy and cold world. A mysterious and vaguely dangerous place. But Shutter Island continues to have its world inhabitated by people. Even if they are unhelpful or downright hostile there is no direct sense of isolation. In Silent Hill 2 you spend most of your time alone, only sometimes coming across a handful of people that are wandering the town as well, but never meeting more than one person at a time.

Then the imagery of movie and videogame crisscrosses again when we enter the prison world. Both Shutter Island and Silent Hill 2 contain a prison sphere, which signifies physically by the descent into the hidden and deep and visually with the darkness and ugliness, the travel of the protagonists into the abyss of their own souls and coming face to face with their own monstrosity down there. But yet, they are unable to believe and it is only during the final moments of the movie or videogame that they are able to face their past.

Two different interpreations of the end of Shutter Island - Daniels choosing to revert back into his delusions because he can not cope with his past and Daniels pretending to revert back into his delusions because he hopes to find oblivion in the impending lobotomy - correspond to two different endings to the videogame: James leaving the town together with the manifestation of his own delusion, Maria, her cough at the end signifying that there can be no happy ending; and James deciding to commit suicide because he can not live with what he has done.

I don't think there ever will be a good movie adaption of Silent Hill 2. But I don't belong to the people who claim videogames like this are unfilmable. Shutter Island shows us what could have been a perfect movie quite like Silent Hill 2. It is not impossible to do it. People just need to realise the essence of it. Silent Hill 2 draws on a number of works by David Lynch, among them Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks and these came from the medium film to begin with. So creating a movie that is true to the essence of Silent Hill 2 should not be impossible at all.

On the other hand, when people think of (survival horror) videogame movies, they think of Resident Evil and Uwe Boll and Silent Hill 2 couldn't be further from those sorts. So for the time being I am completely content with pretending that Shutter Island was in fact Silent Hill 2 The Movie.

A look at League of Legends

Who likes free games? Me! And it's not just a boring browsergame either, it's a legit game: League of Legends.

Inspired by the Warcraft III scenario Defense of the Ancients back in 2005, League of Legends has become a stand-alone game but still works by the same basic principles. You control your own hero, or Champion, and try to keep the opposing team from destroying your defense towers, while also trying to destroy their towers with your team. Simple, easy, fun! Even though strategy games usually aren't my area of expertise it was easy enough to get into League of Legends and win a reasonable amount of games. The learning curve really isn't as steep as is it the case with some games in the strategy genre. After a while you are familiar with the biggest nonos and basic moves to ensure victory.

However, there are also a bunch of things that WILL get on your nerves in League of Legends. Thus I compiled this short list of tips for successfully getting started with the game:

First: Don't ever listen to anybody who starts yelling noob. Only the stupidest people use that word, there is absolutely nothing you can learn from these players. Ignore them completely, no matter what they are trying to tell you. Unfortunately a lot of people are like that until you reach, say, level 10. On the other hand they are easier to ignore than a bunch of raging teenagers over microphone as you might encounter frequently in games like Left 4 Dead. Fortunately since League of Legends doesn't support voice unpleasant people are easy to ignore.

Second: Don't start a game if you don't really have at least half an hour of uninterrupted gaming time available to you. It's hard to tell how long a game of LoL will last, my average is somewhere between 35 and 45 minutes. If you join a game, you should be able to play without interruption as much as possible to not let your team down. Even one missing person from the team makes it almost impossible to win the game, so kindly think of your teammates.

Third: Pretty much connected to the second fact, don't leave the game. Once the game is running nobody else can join, so your team will suffer a harsh loss when you leave. Plus, once you join the serious games, every leave will be counted in your profile and when you're in the lobby of a game waiting for it to start people are able to see that, which might result in them kicking you from their game.

Fourth: Finally, an actual gameplay tip! Always be careful, try to keep minions between you and opposing Champions. Not dying has the highest priority at least in the beginning of the game, because a kill will earn the other team money to equip themselves with awesome new items. Even if you feel like not much is happening in the beginning of a game, not dying should be considered a great achievement already!

Once you take heed of those basic rules there is not much to stop you from enjoying the game. Within every game you will level up your chosen Champion to level 18 and you earn gold by killing enemy Champions and minions. With that gold you can buy a variety of equipment. If you don't know which ones to choose, there are always items suggested individually for your Champion but as you level on and become more experienced you might choose different items altogether, finding new ways to effectively play your chosen Champion.

There are 65 different Champions to choose from to date. Per week you can however only choose 10 of them for free. They're always on rotation, which is actually a nice feature since I am still relatively new to the game and haven't had a chance to play all the Champions I wanted to try out yet. You can also unlock Champions in the shop by either using Riot points (which can be bought with cash) or Influence points (which are earned by playing games). So even if you want to unlock some Champions you don't have to pay any money. You have to pay money for special skins for your Champions however, but I'm fine with buyable alterations to games as long as they don't give the player who spends money a notable advantage over the player who doesn't.

Overall League of Legends is a very fun game and considering that it is absolutely free, it's very nice that they do keep adding new Champions and new content. You can play the game completely free of charge or you can choose to spend your money on little boosts, a big selection of Champions and fancy skills. It's a great game to play together with your friends because communication and teamwork can very much tip the scales in favour of victory! If you've got some time to kill, I definitely recommend checking out this fun little game.

Penumbra Trilogy

One of the things that I really regretted the most about attending Gamescom 2010 was not being able to go to Paradox Interactive's booth! Sadly, they were only in the press area and not in the entertainment area, so as a mere mortal, I was not allowed to go by their booth and say hi or whatever it is I may have done. I have to admit, out of all the fun and innovative games that they published I only really know Penumbra. Penumbra is a trilogy consisting of Penumbra Overture, Penumbra Black Plague and Penumbra Requiem and it mainly takes place in an underground mine and later an underground bunker in the remote icy plains of Greenland. We don't get to know a whole lot about our protagonist named Phillip, except that he inherited a bunch of files from his father, who apparently had been declared dead for 30 years already, and who asks him to burn all the files and ignore the undecipherable information that is hidden inside of them. Naturally, Phillip indulges his curiosity and while he cannot crack the code and find out what it is he is supposed to burn and destroy, he finds a location marked in the notes: The above mentioned abandoned mine in Greenland.

Penumbra is one of the very rare games that I have not actually played myself. My boyfriend and me played it together, which means, he takes care of the controls and I occasionally pipe up when he is stuck somewhere. Because Penumbra does contain a bunch of really interesting riddles! You can't even really define the genre that Penumbra belongs to because to me it is a game not quite like anything I have ever experienced before. If pressed, I'd also group it under Survival Horror and Adventure Game. I'm mainly going to talk about Penumbra Overture here because that was the part that I enjoyed the most. We also played through Black Plague and liked it well enough but we were a bit disappointed with Requiem and didn't even finish playing that one.

Anyway, the first thing that probably springs to mind is the quite special controls of Penumbra. Penumbra actually has a working physics engine and the game also makes practical use of that engine, as opposed to "only" using it for realistic effects. Which means, as only a few games have fully made use of the physics engine before, you will have to block doors with barrels or stones that you will actually have to haul all the way over to where they are needed, by dragging them with your mouse. The controls of Penumbra are much less coded than it was the case with games of the same genre in the past. When you want to use a key, you don't just select it in your inventory. You take it into your hand and have to guide it to the keyhole. When you want to fight you actually have to swing the weapon around as opposed to pressing or holding an attack button. And maybe most memorably, if you want to open a door, you have to grab it and pull or push it open with your hand. The fact that doors aren't opening by themselves when you interact with them in a certain coded way is probably one of the things that makes the game the most immediate and creepy. Because the interaction with the game is much more direct and demands of you to actually perform motions such as attacking and opening of doors, everything feels much more real.

Then you have to mention that while the graphics aren't completely amazing as you might expect from super expensive games it is a very clever play with atmosphere and setting that makes up for any graphics shortcoming that you might experience. Penumbra Overture is a game that has the balls to never have you interact with another human shaped being face to face. You enter that abandoned mine in Greenland and soon start to feel that complete loneliness and isolation from the rest of humanity. There is no going back, there is only going deeper into the mine to finally chase down the information about your father and why it was so important to burn the files and never have the information contained in them known to mankind. After a while, you really start to feel the pressure and between big spiders, flayed dogs and mutant rock worms little breaks between game sessions are definitely advisable.

But after a while you also stop thinking so much about the reason why you have entered the mine in the first place because the strange ongoings in there and the meeting of a new "friend", which is only present through a staticy voice over a radio, you just start wondering what the hell has been going on in that mine. Penumbra is very subtle here. While some games would quickly point the viewer to the popular and quite overused trope of "Nazi superscience", Penumbra leaves it at subtle hints like supply sacks with "Thule" written on them and a typewriter from 1933. We always hope to find more information to what has been going on in the mine, what the research was for in the end and we are especially looking forward to the meeting of our only "friend" within the whole game, an ominous person named "Red" who guides us through the labyrinth of tunnels and caves, never quite knowing what he wants us to meet him for. The combined effects of the very involved physics engine and the psychological impact of constant isolation and imminent danger are guaranteed to grip you and make Penumbra Overture a trip that you won't forget quickly.

Apart from the general action of the game it is noticable that Penumbra is a game that has been made with a lot of love and out of the raw desire to just create a fun videogame. The voice acting is sometimes funny in a way that the voice acting in the first few Silent Hill games was slightly off in moments as well, but fans will grow to love these little quirks most certainly. Then there are some sweet little easter eggs to be found, one being a little sort of Space Invaders style game on one of the PCs in the abandoned shelter. Another one being a cute reference to a certain wellknown hero with a crowbar. Any game that makes a reference like that is cool by default.

Some people might find the ending of Penumbra Overture to be really disappointing. You could say that Frictional Games has been making this up as they were going along, especially when you consider that Penumbra Black Plague throws your protagonist into a completely disconnected scenario, having gone from the abandoned mine into a seemingly abandoned shelter and thus entering a whole different plot line. Fear not, the resolution of Black Plague is much more satisfying, but looking back I just can not help but be sad that the ending of Penumbra Overture has been kind of anticlimatic.

Still, Penumbra is a game that I can wholeheartedly recommend to anybody who is even slighty interested in Survival Horror or just a really well made game, different from most that we find on the market these days. Since the game has been out for some years already it's available for quite a cheap price at amazon so it's definitely worth having a look at, even if you, like me, turn out to be a bit too chicken to play the game yourself. It's the perfect game to play with a friend to keep encouraging each other to go on, go deeper into the mine. You're gonna have fun and will feel very glad that you aren't alone.

Cross-Overs... always a good idea?

Recently I heard that Eminem and Rihanna are apparently doing some music thing together and I started wondering about the phenomenon of "crossovers" in general. I can't say that I really know what Eminem's songs are about and I am not sure I have ever listened to a single song of Rihanna but I wondered what kind of effect a collaboration of these two would have. I repeat, I don't actually know in which relation the work of those two artists stands, I just couldn't help but wonder: Hey, wouldn't some fans of Eminem boycott the single because they don't want anything to do with Rihanna or the other way around? In the end I thought that two large fanbases would be combined by a collaboration and even if a portion of those fans boycotts the product, then there is still the combined fanbase which ensures more profit in the end.

I guess crossovers or collaborations are always profitable for every party in the deal, but are they always good?

My initial reaction to the crossover of Ace Attorney Phoenix Wright and Professor Layton was: Hell to the no, this has to be a joke, what the fuck were they thinking?! I mean, those two don't really fit together at all. Fine, the genre is sort of similar. In Professor Layton you solve a case by solving puzzles and in Ace Attorney you sort of solve a case by finding clues that help you defending your client. Yet, one of the big things that attracted me about Professor Layton was the very distinct setting somewhere in the early 20th century, strongly influenced by French music, some almost steampunky elements and a general old European feel. Ace Attorney on the other hand isn't even set in a similar timeframe, it doesn't sport the same drawing style or colour palette. It's set in present day and drawn in your typical Anime drawing style, while Professor Layton, at first glance, seemed very much like having come from the pen of a francophone comic artist. They are just so different! The trailer also didn't reassure me, I thought the different styles clashed wildly. I bet that there is going to be a plausible explanation as to why both protagonists and their sidekicks find themselves in the same world but I am not so sure I might buy it.

What about crossovers like Marvel vs. Capcom? Sure, I can easily imagine characters like that beating each other up, no matter where they came from. It has been a little treat of fighting games to have unexpected hidden characters that don't really fit into the universe of the game but are nevertheless available to choose as your avatar for a long time now. Thus, it's not really unusual to have two worlds of superheroes or fighters clash with each other at all. However, to put Professor Layton and Phoenix Wright against each other makes them clash in a way that not everybody might find to their taste.

I just don't know. Marvel vs. Capcom, sure! That's a fitting cross-over game. Eminem and Rihnanna making a song together? Why not, people will buy it for sure. But Professor Layton and Ace Attorney, I am not so sure about that. I just think it clashes too much and in a way that I don't find aesthetically pleasing. If the story will prove to be good enough to captivate people who were thrown off my the cross-over at first remains to be seen. Either way, so far I can see that fans of both the games are happy about the announcement. So in the end both parties will at least have a financial gain from this crossover.

Plus, you have to get a Nintendo 3DS for it? Is that why you combined your mighty powers of successful franchises, to boost the sales for your new console, Nintendo? Hmmm? Well, experience shows that Nintendo's console sales hardly ever need boosts and I expect the same will apply for the Nintendo 3DS. I, however, am still sticking to my old trusty Nintendo DS Lite. I have never even touched one of these Nintendo DSis and they are already bringing out the next console. Always one step ahead, Nintendo, eh?

P.S.: Layton kicks Wright's butt!

Videogame Industry done right

Next week (hopefully) we will get the new (and completely free on the PC) release of another campaign of Left 4 Dead / Left 4 Dead 2. I will take this as an occasion to use Valve Corporation as an example of how video game companies can do it right.

Valve Corporation is probably best known for their long-running franchise Half-Life, which maybe became even more famous through the fanmade mod of Counter Strike. I don't think you can call Valve an ordinary game company. Because of them we have invented terms like "Valve-time", coined after lots of delays in production and release of new content. But even though Valve isn't always the quickest in churning out sequels (like SOME companies) they do make sure that what they publish will fufill certain quality standards.

Valve hasn't released a lot of games but all of them are really good. Half Life, Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead, Portal, all of those games are wellknown with gamers for a reason. To go into detail of the awesomeness of each of these games would be too much for a single entry, so I am going to focus on the way in which Valve perceives their task as a game developer and thinks about the desires of their customers.

One of the best things about Valve are their free updates (at least if you are on the PC) that keep games alive even years after their release. Probably the most changing updates were those made to the game Team Fortress 2. Since the game came out in 2007 (eight years after its predecessor, by the way), all character classes have received new specific items and also funny little collective items like hats have been added to the game. Furthermore, the game started out as a game with a rather cryptic (some may say non-existant) storyline of two companies that are for some reason fighting against each other, having to deliver bombs and capturing points. Through the years its storyline has been fleshed out through comics and character videos, being a story of two feuding brothers and the motives of another force in the background (the Announcer) still unknown. The overall tone of the game seems to have changed a little bit as well, with items like a brainslug, a fake beard and a monocle, an Elvis-esque hairdo it now comes across as rather amusing.

The free updates for Left 4 Dead are much more epic. Entire new chapters are revealed that drive the story on and recently Valve has started using comics for storytelling in L4D as well. That comic really is surprisingly good. If made into a movie, I think it would turn into one of the best zombie movies out there. A twist that has been foreshadowed but never in a too obvious way is slowly being revealed: The survivors, which we know to be immune to the zombie virus, are actually carriers of the virus and thus, highly contagious. Now where can they go to escape the zombie apocalypse if even the safe zones won't want them? This is where The Sacrifice seems to start out.

Also, when it comes to content, Valve is very innovative. A lot of games require shooting in some way shape or form but Portal, for example, is pretty much violence-free and was a big hit when it first came out, as a refreshing new genre: first person puzzle game. The famous companion cube quickly became a meme, just as the saying "The cake is a lie". How many people are even aware that this saying came from Portal? Another thing that I think is really worth mentioning is the portrayal of female characters in Valve games. None of their videogame females are scantily clad or the inappropriate attention magnets that videogame girls usually are. In Half Life 2 you have the sympathetic Alyx as your main sidekick. She's the person that Gordon Freeman interacts with the most and plays a big role in the story. Portal even sports a female main character, you play as the test subject named Chell. Based on the same face-model, the character Zoey from Left 4 Dead is probably my favourite female character made by Valve. She is a young college student, majoring in film studies but already on the way to dropping out. She stayed in her dorm for the majority of the previous semester and watched zombie movies, which in the end were a nice preparation for her facing the zombie apocalypse. She also has a strong relationship with her father, with whom she used to watch those movies together and who keeps defending her even if her mother criticises her for dropping out. Zoey, to date, is probably the character that I can most identify with. Left 4 Dead 2 also sports its female character, Rochelle, a tough reporter girl from the South who was supposed to do a report about that new flu when the zombie apocalypse decended on them. I really think that Valve does good, probably better than ANY game company I know, in the portrayal of females in videogames. I can easily identify with all their female characters.

Gabe Newell once said that videogame pirates are nothing more than unsatisfied customers, people that you have to win over by offering a good product. This is the most constructive approach to the issue of videogame piracy that I have heard of to this day and Valve seems to be the first company that actually understand what they are doing. When their games come out, they sometimes can be little more than bare bones (as was the case with Left 4 Dead 1) but the loyal customer buys those games because they know they can rest assured that Valve will keep on supplying them with new content soon. That's why people were extremely upset when they heard about the sequel, Left 4 Dead 2, so soon after the first installment had been released. They feared that Valve would stray from their reasonable path and I have to say I was highly suspicious of this new game as well. I have to say though, that I have been completely blown away by the trailer and all my doubts were erased when I finally got to play the game. It really was more fun than its predecessor and worth buying in every regard.

Now with the next update Valve assures us that they aren't abandoning L4D1 as a game. They have developed new content for it for the second time now and continue to do so free of charge. Recently they also released a whole game for free, Alien Swarm, which is a nice little 4 player co-op game about shooting aliens. There have also been periods of time when Portal was completely free and you could get yourself a permanent copy of that, or weekends where Team Fortress was free to play or drastically reduced in price (3€!!). I think that was especially done as an experiment to see how a videogame company can profit from making their products much cheaper and their sales shot through the roof. Even though the individual unit price was lower, they did make more money in the end because of the sheer number of copies they sold.

Valve thinks about what customers really want, what is fair to them and they keep their promises. That is why I still trust Valve, even after I was highly suspicious of their business with Left 4 Dead 2. When I attended gamescom 2010 it also became obvious which videogame companies were generous and which weren't. Valve gave away free t-shirts of Portal 2 AND free codes for full-price, full-version games and not just one but one for you and one for a friend that you could invite. How awesome is that? In the end I can say is that I support Valve and the way they are working and I think they might probably be my favourite videogame company ever. Even if I am not that interested in Portal 2, I will continue to support Valve in whatever they do.