Game Pitch: Rectifier

"It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."

The above quote from The Terminator is spoken by the character of Kyle Reese to Sarah Connor. It has in a way become iconic, the perfect descriptor for the terminator, the titular killing machine. In Rectifier, this quote describes not your enemy, but you.

Which Quake?

Quake II was never meant to be a Quake game. In the wake of Quake, a groundbreaking first-person shooter that suffered from a tumultuous development, id software viewed the final product as haphazard and schizophrenic. Its mix of Lovecraftian horror, the arcane and the occult, alongside the techno-futuristic, all wrapped in the mechanical devices of a shooter was seen not as a unique property to be celebrated, but rather a disjointed collection of ideas that needed to be tamed in order to better conform to expectations. Was Quake fantasy or science-fiction? Was it heavy metal or gothic horror? Of course id had been down this route before. Wolfenstein 3D combined the occult with more modern firearms to create an alt-historical take on the Third Reich. Doom more clearly juxtaposed elements with its admixture of an Alien-inspired used-future alongside the ancient horrors spilling out from Hell. But Quake was different. It wasn't simply fusing two different elements: it wasn't simply a peanut-butter and chocolate combination. It's elements were more varied and drawn with a looser brush. The cohesion between elements became subtler, and the abstractness of the elements themselves grew to fill the void. Quake was not merely different, it was odd.

Lo-Fi Games Seen Right

Or: Low Resolution and Low Frame-rate as Integral Aspects of the Art-style of Low-Fidelity Graphics

When one puts on one's NostalgiaVision (TM), one recalls how the games of years past seemed to wow with their graphical prowess. How they seemed so life-like at the time! Or rather how they provided a compelling and consistent simulation that was easy to become adsorbed in. When one returns to such games, one is amazed at how bad they look, it seems we are incapable of correctly remembering their low-fidelity. However, rarely are we actually properly returning to these games. Games intended for low-resolution CRT screens are instead played on high-resolution LCDs, where possible the rendering resolutions and frame-rates are increased, behind these changes is the implicit assumption that improving the clarity of the image can only be beneficial, that it is separate from and not intrinsic to the art. Here I would like to argue that this is misguided, and that the aesthetic of old games is only properly appreciated when they are experienced in their rightful context.

Thoughts On: Syndicate

In 2012, Electronic Arts published the first-person shooter Syndicate intended as a sort of franchise reboot of the 1993 title of the same name. Developed by Starbreeze Studios, the game shares many mechanical similarities with their prior efforts, chiefly The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay.

The story was written by Richard Morgan, perhaps best known as the author of Altered Carbon, a futuristic cyberpunk-ian tale where human consciousness is stored on a stack and the surrounding body is often regarded as only so much "meat". So devalued is human life (at least the aspects of life not contained on a chip) in the novel that murder not damaging the stacks of the victims is referred to as "organic damage".

The world of Syndicate is a cyberpunk dystopia where multinational mega-corporations (the so-called Syndicates), unfettered by such pesky considerations as anti-trust laws come to dominate and carve up the globe, becoming in effect new breeds of empires, complete with their own military might and consumer bases. Into this world Morgan seems a natural fit, but ultimately the story of Syndicate doesn't quite work, and I will attempt to articulate why.

Game Pitch: Grub

A distant planet.

Two competing species - predator and prey.

An unexpected visitor - man.

Game Pitch: Bewerewolf

You are the werewolf. You make trouble. Unseen, unknown, undetected - until it's too late.

In the city the skies grow black with the fumes from the iron furnaces, while the machinery of man scrubs away the last remnants of the wild. Man has grown overconfident, arrogant in his prowess, sloppy in his execution. Now the time is opportune, the nights grow longer, the winter approaches, what man has built, you can destroy. But time moves swiftly, and even now it may already be too late.

Game Pitch: The Proper Care of Humans

You play as a robot who manages a small ranch in a quiet frontier setting while taking care of the human(s) who live on it. The ranch must be made completely self-sufficient, including raising the animals used to feed the humans, who are both helpless and whiny without your constant attention. In the morning you may have to procure eggs from the hens, use them to create chocolate chip cookies, and milk from cows and use it to make whip cream, to serve a humans' desire for cookies in cream for breakfast. This must be done before daylight when the human wakes. Then you must set the table, wake the human, pull out his seat, arrange his meal, await his opinion.

Alienssssss

Since its release in 1986 there have been no shortage of video games based on the film Aliens, although one could certainly make the case that there have been a shortage of good video games. Most of those games were released closer to the franchise's heyday, so that in recent years the selection has been a little barren. Still, the idea of another video game based on the Aliens property with Aliens: Colonial Marines finally nearing release isn't entirely welcome. Even if games based on Aliens haven't been the most successful, the film has managed to permeate video games nonetheless, to the point that making an Aliens game seems like a retread, as if someone set out to make Videogame: The Video Game. Right off the bat we are assured of a quasi-realistic military shooter draped in a sci-fi aesthetic so often recycled it's become part of the tapestry of generic. Zealous over-use of caution strips? Check. Obligatory turret sequences? Check. Vaguely insectoid enemies that die easy and rush in waves? Triple Check. Climactic showdown in mech suit? Par for the course. At this point it's hard to think of an element, be it weapons, vehicles, even one-liners, that was featured in Aliens that hasn't since been wholesale lifted and re-used in a video game, Aliens related or not.

References:

Aliens. (1986) Directed by James Cameron [Film]. Los Angeles, Calif.: 20th Century Fox.

Gearbox Software (2013). Aliens: Colonial Marines [Video game]. Sega. 

Thoughts On: Borderlands Singleplayer

Borderlands does not strike me as a particularly well-conceived or well-crafted game. It is set on a mysterious planet, a planet so mysterious in fact that its only distinguishing features from earth are strange species of cacti and some alien (but not genuinely alien) fauna. A world with a day-night cycle lasting all of ten minutes seemingly designed to ensure that every player, no matter how short his attention span, will notice that there is a day-night cycle and yet serving no plot or game-play purposes (every night and every day is exactly the same). A planet called Pandora, although a more accurate moniker would perhaps be Planet Mad Max.