Pop-Culture Bullet Points
Yeasayer’s “Ambling Alp,” the first track from its forthcoming LP, Old Blood, may be the best single I’ve heard all year: If Willy Wonka grew a beard, moved to Brooklyn, and started a band, this is the sort of music I hope he’d make.
After a slow start, it’s turned out to be a rather good year for video games. I’ve thumbed-away dozens of hours (at least) on Borderlands, Modern Warfare 2, Uncharted 2, and Batman: Arkham Asylum in recent months, and the small bits of Assassin’s Creed II and Dragon’s Age: Origins I’ve played suggest excellent things about both.
I want to single out Batman: Arkham Asylum because it’s not just a great game — it’s a great licensed game. Typically, video games based on other properties are just out to cash in on name recognition. And even when otherwise visionary creative types get involved in game adaptations — Cameron’s Avatar game or the Wachowski’s Matrix game (which even went so far as to tell part of the story covered by the second and third films) — the results are frequently underwhelming. Arkham Asylum, on the other hand, is both an engrossing game on its own and a nearly note-perfect adaptation, capturing everything that’s essential about its source character. It is, for all practical purposes, a Batman simulator, with smartly balanced stealth, action, and detective elements and a solidly pulpy script by Paul Dini, the longtime Batman scribe who created the excellent 90s cartoon, Batman: The Animated Series. What it offers is exactly what a game about the Dark Knight should offer: the chance to be Batman, and to play around in his world.
Meanwhile, on the world-creation front, Modern Warfare 2 suggests what’s ahead for the medium: Infinity Ward’s sequel, part action movie and part military simulator, is easily the best-looking game I’ve ever played, and the single-player campaign is thoroughly epic in a way that many games attempt but few achieve. In particular, the missions that occur in a war-torn downtown D.C. beset by foreign invaders are really spectacular. Shooting your way from the lawn of the White House into the Oval Office and through the West Wing adds so much to the game in part because it’s the sort of experience that only a top-shelf game can provide. Grand Theft Auto IV showed that it’s both thrilling and possible to create a detailed — and surprisingly alive — alternate-reality city; with its White House battles, MW2 takes real-world-replication further, pushing it into the world of first-person action and zooming in on a specific building and its surroundings. The game’s commitment to detail and accuracy is really impressive.
And indeed, I suspect we’ll see a fair bit of emphasis put on simulating (and modifying and destroying) real-world environments in future games. Imagine: If game designers can convincingly recreate iconic real-life locations, we could see games in which players play detectives in L.A. murder mysteries, hunt down mobsters in Depression-era Chicago, fight off terrorists at the Eiffel Tower a la Superman II — the possibilities for pulp mimicry are endless. Movies, of course, are much better at telling stories, but games, at their best, are most effective at creating a sense of place — complete and compelling virtual worlds that give players fantastic experiences they’d never be able to have otherwise.
I’m not typically much of a fan of live albums, but Nirvana’s Live at Reading is an unexpectedly powerful document of the band’s breathtaking energy at its peak. If you’re a child of the grunge era, do find the time to listen.
Agreed through and through on Modern Warfare. I zipped through the solo campaign over one night, and it’s a very impressive game.
I’d be curious what you think of Assassin’s Creed II. The first Assassin’s Creed was wonderful, but n°2 is just incredible in its depth and richness.
— PEG · Dec 5, 11:20 PM · #
ACII is sitting there on my game shelf, waiting for the day when I have time to really dig in. I’ve played maybe 2-3 hours so far, and it seems to have fixed (or at least improved) the majority of the issues I had with ACI — but I’m waiting until I play more of it to comment further.
— Peter Suderman · Dec 5, 11:56 PM · #
Look Suderman.
You’re an aging Freedom Works wonk with MPB onset that is married to a glibertarian.
You don’t get youth culture, or gamer culture, or film culture, or music culture or pop culture at all…..
And how dare you crit Weezer,
— matoko_chan · Dec 6, 02:08 AM · #
Watch out for frequent cheapness in Dragon Age, like when a huge group of guys take out your healer in the first half-second of the fight. Save often.
— Chet · Dec 6, 03:05 AM · #
Bah. Those are the gaming equivalent of Michael Bay movies, all. (Well, perhaps not Borderlands—I haven’t played it—but I’m in the mood for sweeping generalizations). I’m impressed that someone finally made a good Batman game, sure, but otherwise these guys are just noodling at the surface of gaming, polishing (which is great) but not doing anything terribly meaningful for the craft.
Kick up Steam and try some games with some guts:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!: A Reckless Disregard for Gravity
World of Goo
Trine
Light of Altair
I hope you’ve at least played one or two of those. (And if you’re not a PC gamer, you’re off the hook… but only if you immediately download Trine off the PlayStation Network.)
Also, give your trigger finger and your lizard brain a rest and try Dawn of Discovery (AKA, Anno 1404). I’m just one guy, but it’s easily the best game I’ve played all year. How could I pick something else, after 70+ hours logged (probably longer then all the games you mentioned combined, and I haven’t tapped it all out)?
— Chris Floyd · Dec 6, 04:52 AM · #
I quit PC gaming in college, but now that I’ve got a PS3 (I’ve had it for a little less than two months, so I’m still catching up), maybe I’ll try Trine.
— Peter Suderman · Dec 6, 05:58 AM · #
This is my favorite game. It’s engineering for 7 year old girls.
— cw · Dec 6, 08:34 AM · #
CW — If you like that, I bet you’ll LOVE World of Goo. It’s also in the “bridge-builder” school, but it goes from there to do some amazing stuff.
— Chris Floyd · Dec 6, 05:05 PM · #
Dragon Age is indeed very difficult, but from what I understand the console version are much easier than the PC version, so it might not be an issue for a console gamer like Peter.
— Freddie · Dec 6, 06:46 PM · #
I actually have the console version (Xbox) and the difficulty is frustrating. On “casual” mode fights are a faceroll. On the very next level of difficulty (“normal”) the game feels like its cheating.
There’s actually a lot about the game that disappointed me (but, not so disappointed that I didn’t basically play through it twice and watch my wife do the same.) For instance, why did I pick a character voice during creation if my character never speaks during dialog scenes? It was amazing to me that BioWare developed a revolutionary dialog system in Mass Effect and then basically ignored it for Dragon Age.
I’m looking forward to ACII, especially if it’s such a marked improvement on the original. I had a lot of fun with ACI but never finished it, for some reason.
— Chet · Dec 6, 06:54 PM · #
Chet — yeah, I’m like 8-9 hours in, and it seemed weird to me. But maybe they’re saving that for ME2?
— Peter Suderman · Dec 6, 07:00 PM · #
we could see games in which players play detectives in L.A. murder mysteries
L.A. Noire, with a full pre-freeway Los Angeles, in production at Rockstar.
— Senescent · Dec 7, 08:58 PM · #
Doubtless, but why save it? I don’t see why the same system couldn’t work in another game. They billed DA:O as the “spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate” but I didn’t know that meant “by-the-book generic Euro-fantasy RPG”. I guess they’re really proud of the world they’ve created – proud enough to offer it as a table-top RPG setting, even – but I was disappointed in how generic it turned out to be. Is there a single thing unique or interesting about the world of Dragon Age? After two whole playthroughs I’ve seen nothing to suggest it’s not just an exercise in fill-in-the-names fantasy worldbuilding.
— Chet · Dec 7, 09:38 PM · #
If you’re not playing Torchlight, you’re not playing one of the best games of 2009. And you can play it on a netbook. So there’s no excuse.
— Erik Vanderhoff · Dec 7, 10:09 PM · #
I would be very interested in what Peter Suderman thinks about Dragon Age: Origins, particularly its lack of a “Good/Bad” morality system.
— Noah Kristula-Green · Dec 10, 07:52 AM · #
Correction: the new Yeasayer LP is entitled “Odd Blood.”
— Andrew · Dec 11, 06:40 PM · #