Blue Man Sings the Whites

I put off writing about Grand Theft Auto 4 for a while, partly because I wanted to finish the story missions before I tried to put my impressions into words (and, as I mention later, there was a bit of a delay in doing that), partly because Yahtzee’s review came out a couple of weeks after the game’s release and covered an awful lot of what I wanted to say in a much more concise and funny way than I’d have said it. The bastard.

I’ve never let complete redundancy stop me in the past, though, so let’s give this a whirl.

Here’s the main problem with Grand Theft Auto IV, the slavering supturating Great Unclean One squatting in the game’s dark heart, from which a swarm of little Nurglings ooze forth infecting every corner of the game: It’s a “next-gen” title.

What in God’s good name are you gibbering about, Blue Man?

The arrival of the series on the newest generation of consoles has allowed a new ceiling for world-building and graphical fidelity. The game’s script similarly seems to have been turned up to 11, with a scope and ambition beyond anything seen in any action game before. Unfortunately, this seems to have brought on something of a personality crisis - GTA IV can’t seem to decide whether it wants to be gritty and authentic or a cacklingly OTT cartoon. Too often the balance isn’t right and the game tilts alarmingly to one side or the other.

By way of example the glorious crisp, unashamedly arcadey car-handling of GTA III and its stablemates has gone leaving in its place a bit of a mushy mess. It’s undoubtedly more “realistic” but at a stroke it renders about half the cars in the game almost undrivable and, more importantly, a lot less fun. Combining the cars’ generally shitty brakes with the various unsatisfactory flavours of camera angle - “Too Close”, “Much Too Close” and “What Did I Just Hit?” - means that a lot of your time early in the game will be spent reversing back to the corner you just missed. You might think that judicious use of the handbrake might help. You’d be wrong. GTA IV’s handbrake is more correctly labelled the “Spin Out Button”, with even the lightest dab at anything approaching a respectable speed seeing your car suddenly travelling backwards. Things improve a bit when you get a crack at traditional GTA faves like the Banshee and Turismo, but even then the slightly stodgy handling means that your days of cutting through traffic like a turbo-charged knife through lukewarm butter are gone. Everything has to be approached slower and more carefully than you used to, which is a bad idea because roughly the only human activities which are rendered more fun by the participants being slower and more careful are bomb disposal, shark fishing and oral sex.

The graphics suffer in the same way. While it’s technically leaps and bounds ahead of the last-gen box-o-vision, GTA IV doesn’t seem to have quite the character and charm of the earlier games. Liberty City isn’t without its highlights - in particular the game’s analogue of Manhattan is an absolute triumph and there are some utterly lovely weather and light effects - but for every gorgeous moment there’s an hour of slogging around the unrelentingly samey far-too-easy-to-get-lost-in grey-and-brownness of Bohan and Alderney. Nothing in GTA IV came close to knocking me on my arse like cruising down San Andreas’ recreation of the Las Vegas strip or Vice City’s version of Ocean Drive did.

But the area where GTA IV’s suffers most in its uncomfortable attempt to straddle the line between fun and realism is its writing. Every early review of the game described it as having the most sympathetic protagonist of any Grand Theft Auto game to date in Niko Bellic and that’s true, but it’s a bit like saying that Revenge Of The Sith is the best of the Star Wars prequel movies. The problem is that the game keeps swerving between depicting a character struggling with the weight of a past he can’t leave behind and the morality of his actions, to showing the same character gleefully gunning down dozens of people of varying levels of innocence.

Even for someone like me, who plays GTA in a pretty “fluffy” way and goes out of his way not to mow down pedestrians or bystanders, it’s pretty jarring. The problem isn’t just in the disconnection between the cutscenes and gameplay, either.

CAUTION! SPOILERS!

At several points in the game’s story, you’re given a choice whether to kill or spare an NPC, or to side with one group against another. Near the end of the game, Niko is brought face-to-face with someone who Did Him Wrong back when he was a solider in Unnamedistan, and you get to decide whether to kill the guy or walk away. I chose the latter and, as I drove home from the mission Niko told his brother that he’d come to realise that violence only beget violence, that he was going to get out of the life he’d found himself in and maybe try to make himself a better man.

“Oooh,” I thought. “Now I’m going to get a bunch of missions showing me getting out from under and trying to repair the harm that I’ve done. What a wonderful storytelling twist!”

And sure enough, Niko’s next mission had him… er… kidnapping and slapping around an innocent woman. The one after that, taking money in exchange for helping someone hide the body of his wife after he’d murdered her in a jealous rage. Despite the fact that earlier in the game I’d proved to him that his wife wasn’t seeing anyone else.

Call me precious, gentle reader, but that was too much for your humble correspondant’s stomach. I switched the game off and went to do something less stupid and horrible instead, only going back several weeks later out of a grudging sense of duty to finish the last couple of story missions. I haven’t had the slightest urge to return to Liberty City since.

CAUTION! NO MORE SPOILERS!

I don’t mean to imply that the writing is universally bad or even always lacking in emotional impact. As an example, and in as spoiler-free terms as I can manage: driving around the game’s previously-mentioned amazingly gorgeous pastiche of Manhattan one evening I got a MMS message from [a former ally who’d betrayed me - Ed] with a picture of [one of my loved ones - Ed] tied up in a warehouse with a bunch of gun-toting mooks. I called [former ally - Ed] back and left him a message of screamed obscenities and threats, stopped off at a back-alley weapons shop to buy myself a flak vest and enough ammunition to end a small war and set off for the warehouse, heading for a fight in which I knew was likely to be a trap and in which I doubly knew I was going to be massively outgunned.

Just as I was turning onto the suspension bridge that leads across the Hudson into the game’s version of Queens, the heavens opened and the radio threw up Mama by Genesis which, cheesy as fuck though it plainly is, was an absolutely perfect choice for driving through the rainswept night fuelled by righteous rage but with death very possibly awaiting at my destination. It genuinely raised the hairs on the back of my neck.

No game’s given me that “You’re Going Fucking Down, Sunshine, Even If I Have To Go Down Too” frisson since discovering that bastard Corginaad had poisoned our party to force us to help him get the artifact he needed to be transformed into a dragon in our old Dark Sun campaign.

The radio stations are also pretty much as good as they ever were, with a line in vicious, pointed humour that reminded me of nothing so much as South Park on its best days. Plus, bonus points for having the Sisters Of Mercy on the soundtrack.

Too often, though, the game seems uncomfortable in its own skin. It presents you with a bunch of supporting characters who’re largely massive comedic clichés in the same way as they were in the previous three games, then tries to have its cake and eat it trying to get you to emotionally invest in these ciphers. That being said, with reservations I thought that GTA IV generally straddled the line between satiric portrayal of racism, misogyny and homophobia and hubba-hubba exploitation of stereotypes better than any previous game in the series, although once again this is slightly damning with faint praise. Yes, the “usable” prostitutes and strippers are regrettably still present, but in the main every time you ran into an NPC spouting reprehensible views it’s pretty clear that you’re supposed to see them as an idiot, a wanker or an idiotic wanker.

Oh, and talking of the supporting characters - whose bloody bright idea was it to get them to hassle you every thirty seconds to take them down the pub? Yes, it’s “realistic” to have to keep some contact with your social circle, but I play games to get away from the tedious chores that arise from the unreasonable demands placed on me by my friends, not to be stalked by a new gaggle of unreasonable virtual parasites.

(Love you really, guys! xxx)

If I really wanted to stretch my central theme of “game vs. realism”, I’d lump the control problems in there as well. GTA IV wants you to be able to do anything a person might “realistically” be able to do in a given situation - climb ladders, swim, dive for cover, punch, kick, check your phone, call a taxi, vault over a wall - but in the attempt to cover every base you’re left with a pretty clunky control system that takes in a million billion buttons all of which you forget in the heat of the moment. Even when your desperate mashing at the controller does connect with the right button there are implementation problems. In particular the cover system doesn’t quite work, with the game either chucking you behind the wrong bit of scenery or not being able to understand when you want to enter and exit cover a good percentage of the time. Oh, and while now allowing you to go back and re-try a mission at the press of a button is a definite step in the right direction, the fact that it doesn’t restore your armour to the level you had at the start of the mission, and that a lot of the missions involve a long, tedious drive at the start make the retry option less useful than it might have been.

It’s not that Grand Theft Auto IV isn’t a good game. It is, it really is. Quirky controls aside, the combat system is a big improvement over any previous title in the series and gives the firefights an excellently cinematic quality. Liberty City has a real sense of place (even if it’s largely a pretty boring place), and the weight of incidental detail that’s been crammed in is astonishing - 40+ hours in, I was still seeing things I hadn’t seen before, hearing things I hadn’t heard before and doing stuff I hadn’t done before. Despite a largely forgettable cast there were one or two utterly brilliant characters, and for all the story’s foibles I genuinely wanted to see how it ended.

It’s just that it’s not a great game. To be honest, it’s not even the best free-roaming sandbox total bloody chaos simulator with slightly dodgy driving bits on the XBox 360. Grand Theft Auto IV’s repeated ill-advised flirtations with grey and gritty reality undermine the anarchic joy that was always the series’ calling-card and the result is just… less fun than it might otherwise have been.

I don’t want reality. I want magic.

1 Comment »

1. The actual lyrics to Blitzkreig Bop. For the last 20 years or so I’ve been singing something like “Keep hopping in a straight line / We’re going through a tight wine / The geezer’s in a landmine / Blitzkreig Bop!” Oh, and Gimme Shelter goes “burns, like a red coal carpet”, not “burns, like a redwood dolphin”.
2. Deep Purple hate bass players.
3. My daughter can really bloody sing. I’ve no idea why she felt the need to conceal this for the last seventeen years by sounding like a terrier in distress, but there you go.
4. Leather jeans, a ruffled poet shirt, a huge bouffant mullet tied up with a bandanna, an Earl Hickey moustache and an eyepatch is a sweet combination. AND IN THE GAME.
5. Run To The Hills by Iron Maiden and Judas Priest’s You Got Another Thing Comin’ will be first-ballot inductees to the So Terrible It’s Actually A Bit Awesome Hall Of Fame (to join the rest of their class - Big Macs, Passenger 57 and of course William Shatner).
6. Everybody loves the chance to hit something with sticks.
7. The bit at the start of Ballroom Blitz where Brian Connolly talks to the rest of the band - “Are you ready, Steve? Andy? Mick? Alright, fellas - let’s goooooooooooo!” is comfortably the campest moment in the history of rock.
8. If you’re playing Epic and you get to the bit where the lyric repeats “It’s it, what is it?”, the singer won’t be as pleased as you’d think if the rest of the band take it in turns to shout helpful suggestions as to what “it” might be (”A penguin!” “Your face!” “Custard!” “The 1979 Bulgarian Women’s Shot-Put team!”).
9. You haven’t seen heroism ’till you’ve seen your drummer hit himself in the eye with one of his sticks, drop it and STILL complete the Unison Phrase he’s in the middle of to get the rest of the band a badly-needed energy boost in the middle of Enter Sandman.
10. The only thing worse than nu-metal is French nu-metal.

1 Comment »

I can’t remember ever having pre-ordered a game in my life before.

This month, I’ve done it twice.

The first was Grand Theft Auto 4. All the previews I’ve seen made me a little leery of it at first. I was a little worried tht the game seemed to be veering toward tedious realism for the sake of realism and away from the anarchic fun that’s made the series so iconic and widely-imitated.

Then I remembered that it’s Grand Theft bloody Auto, for crying out loud. There’s exactly no chance that Rockstar will fuck it up, and the game’s website seems to indicate that its predecessors’ nihilism and cynical, none-more-black sense of humour has survived intact. Sold.

-

Secondly and seemingly more controversially, there’s Rock Band. I can’t remember a game I’ve anticipated more eagerly. My enthusiasm for the Guitar Hero games has recently been boosted by thrashing through them in co-operative mode with my last-born, and I’ve even gotten a fair amount of fun over slightly broken, crappily-designed hateful misogynyfest Guitar Hero III. So the thought of being able to get all the kids together and form Garston’s answer to the Patridge Family… well. It’ll even be worth having to be the sodding bassist.

I’ve been waiting six months for news of Rock Band’s European release and I’m far from the only one. Which goes some way towatd explaining why the Internet exploded when it was announced that it would launch with an RRP of £180 - pretty much just substituting a pound sign for the dollar on its US price tag.

“Sheer greed!” cried the masses. “Rip-off!” “Buy real instruments!” “Boycott the game!” “Boycott EA!” “Boycott EVERYTHING in the WHOLE WORLD!” Teeth were duly gnashed, garments were duly rended and the uncaring sky was duly howled at by hundreds of hacked-off would-be customers.

(Incidentally, there are very few internet discussion participants more annoying than the smug fucks who turn up in Guitar Hero or Rock Band threads and tell you you ought to spend the money on a real instrument. Just fuck OFF. Do you go out of your way to tell people talking about Pro Evo Soccer that they ought to play real football? Do you go out of your way to tell people talking about Outrun that they ought to spend the money on a real Ferrari? Do you go out of your way to tell people talking about Call Of Duty that they ought to join the real army? No, of course you fucking don’t. “Buy a real guitar!” translates to “How dare you enjoy this game! How DARE you even get a hint of a taste of a suggestion of what it might be like to be a guitar God without putting months of frustrating joyless practice in first. I play the guitar, nyah nyah nyah, I play the guitar so I’m better than you, I’m better than you, I’M better than YOU!”

Fuckers. Anyway…)

Personally, I always thought that the people expecting a sub-£100 price were living in denial, and was anticipating paying something between £120 and £150 given a) the game’s manufactured in the US and shipping a big box o’instruments over the Atlantic is pricey, b) VAT, c) generally higher costs in Europe leading to pricier warehousing, distribution and everyhing else, d) that EA can’t bank on the dollar mantaining its prodigiously weak value against the pound and e) yeah, a certain amount of greed. So the £140 (£133 with a sneaky discount code) that Play are offering the game and instruments for is pretty much exactly what I was braced for.

Don’t misunderstand, I’m genuinely embarassed at paying a hundred and thirty quid for a game. I can’t escape the feeling that I’m emblematic of Western society’s fall into shameless greedy consumerist depravity. You watch, it won’t be long before I’m heading down to the vomitorium to watch two monkeys have a knife-fight in a vat of cornflour pudding.

On the other hand, I really want to play Wanted Dead Or Alive. So, you know.

Plus, I’m not really paying for it - it’s actually a gift from the good people of Pacific Poker’s $1-$2 no-limit hold ‘em ring games. It’d be positively immoral to spend gambling winnings on anything but selfish gratification and bored lazy depravity, wouldn’t it?

So yeah. It’s an obscene amount of money to spend when there are millions of people in desperate need. But what’s the point of being in the top 10% of the planet’s population that hold 90% of the world’s wealth if you can’t play a plastic drumkit while Rome burns, eh?

I’ve already booked the 23rd May off work. So if society could put off imploding until after the end of the long weekend, that’d be awesome.

6 Comments »

“You’re only writing about games now, aren’t you?” said my mum when I was over there on Sunday. “I like it when you write about other things.”

Sorry, mum.

Call Of Duty 4 (Xbox 360)
I’m not much of a first-person shooterer in general. I’m really, really not much of a console first-person shooterer. But CoD4’s set-pieces, clever narrative tricks and brutal difficulty level + surround sound = something a bit special. I realise that sandbox games and offering the player freedom to wander are in vogue just at the moment, but personally I’ll always take a well-crafted linear game over an aimless, sprawling one that offers several equally-dull choices. There’s nothing here that compares to the brilliant Arnhem Bridge or Stalingrad levels from the original Call Of Duty, and its single-player campaign is pretty short, but it captures the essence of what you expect modern battlefields must be like – messy, scrappy, confusing, vicious and largely fucking terrifying.

I’m pretty sure I mean that as a recommendation.

Chessmaster (DS)
It’s chess! But on the DS. The AI plays a decently strong game (although it’s a shame that there’s no way of forcing the computer to use or avoid a specific opening), and the minigames are quite compelling in a thoroughly boring way. I’ve no idea why I’ve played this every lunchtime for the last couple of weeks, but I have. So there you go.

Team Fortress 2 (PC)
Two things have been instrumental for rekindling my love for Valve’s beautiful-looking, beautifully-balanced Team-Based Online Shooter Of Champions. These two things are the Control Point podcast and my belated discovery of the “Switch To Previous Weapon” key. The former is just a bunch of likable blokes being enthusiastic about something that deserves some enthusiasm. The latter gives me half a chance of surviving in those situations where a certain amount of regrettable violence needs to be handed out to someone in my general vicinity.

I’m a Medic by trade, y’see. Not for me the glory-boy solo-effort flag-capping nonsense of the Scout, nor the shifty, skulking, duplicitous death-dealing of the Spy, Engineer or Sniper, nor even the wholesale slaughter and mass destruction of the Heavy, Soldier, Pyro or Demoman. No. Instead, you’ll find me diving into the midst of battle with only my healing ray to protect me, selflessly risking life and limb to keep my team-mates upright even as a hail of bullets, rockets, grenades and God-only-knows-what-else rain down upon me.

“Rain down on me”, you’ll note. Not “rain down on my armed-and-dangerous team-mates.” Because putting on the Medic’s big coat and the child-molester glasses is basically the same thing as painting a bullseye on your face.

If (like me) you’re a fairly casual player with less-than-perfect knowledge of the game’s maps, and less-than-less-than-perfect FPS skills, playing Medic is great. It allows you to contribute in a real and valuable way to your team’s success without needing the twitch reflexes of a fighter pilot. Just lock that healing-ray onto the arse of a more competent team-mate and follow them on a sightseeing tour of your local warzone.

(My uncle Derek was round my folks’ for the aforementioned Mum’s Day visit. He’s planning a holiday in Vietnam and Cambodia. “Don’t forget to pack a wife!” I said cheerily, to predictably blank looks all round. Sigh.)

The fearful and wonderful thing about the Medic is that you’re playing a purely supporting role – you’re almost entirely dependant on your colleagues, both for protection and to actually accomplish the goals of the level. This is immensely frustrating if you’re playing with chimps, but with competent people around you a decent Medic can be the difference between victory and defeat, by keeping the damage-dealers alive long enough to wear the enemy down, or supplying a burst of invulnerability at the exact right time. It’s immensely satisfying, and a way to feel good at FPSs without being any good at FPSs.

Every so often, though, you’ll find yourself in a spot where you actually have to put away the healing ray and defend yourself – if you’ve clocked an enemy Spy lurking about for example, or if all your team-mates in the vicinity have displayed insufficient respect for the rule that incoming rockets always have right-of-way. Up till this week, these situations have been characterised by my fumbling around with the weapon selection keys like a big fat-fingered fool, then getting my brains blown out. Now I tap Q, and go from selfless healer to SYRINGE-GUN KILLA in less than a second.

Then I run away. No sense in being a bloody idiot about it. If I could shoot straight I’d be playing a sodding Soldier.

Audiosurf (PC)
Audiosurf is a simple little game. Point it at a music file on your hard-disk and it generates a track, along which your guide your ship collecting coloured blocks. The faster and more intense the song you’re playing, the more blocks are available for you to collect. Link three or more blocks of the same colour and they disappear, scoring points. There are various different ships, each playing in slightly different ways. I’ve largely found myself gravitating toward Mono, which plays more like a racer than a puzzler - there is only one colour of scoring block and the main challenge comes from avoiding grey obstacle blocks, with a significant bonus at the end of the song if you’ve picked up no greys at all.

And you’ll want that significant bonus, because on completion your score is uploaded to the Audiosurf website, where you can see the best scores of everyone else who’s played that song. That’s the reason I spent half an hour last night repeatedly replaying the heart-pumping white-knuckle ride that is Identity by the X-Ray Spex, punching the air in glee as I finally managed to finish a run with no greys hit and no leftover blocks, becoming THE CHAMPION OF THE WORLD!

Ahem.

(By the by, other Blue Man Recommend-o-Tracks for maximum Audiosurfing fun include the Bill Shatner/Joe Jackson cover of Common People, Car Fiction by Echobelly, Robyn’s Cobrastyle and the proper, non-cheaty four-and-a-half minute album version of Vision Thing. I am the best at (some of) these).

Honestly, as a game it’s nothing special. But it looks like a rollercoaster in a theme park run by Tron and I keep getting drawn back to it to try new tracks, to creep up the leaderboards or for a ten-minute blast after a poker game or TuFTy session.

A hugely pretty, sneakily addictive little fiddle-toy for fewer than six of your Earth pounds? Up with this sort of thing.

4 Comments »

You’ll no doubt be delighted to hear that, following a fiddling evening with TV and camera, my torrent of righteous bile aimed at adolescent objectification-fest Guitar Hero III now includes instructive illustrations for the serious student.

Go. See. Be illuminated. Or, y’know, don’t. Either’s good.

Extended play of GH3 had made it clearer why they’ve made such a shameless dive toward the lowest common denominator, though. Put simply, it’s nowhere near as good as the first two games in the series.

Going back to play a bit of Guitar Hero 2 in order to get some screenshots, it’s immediately noticable how much better it “feels” compared to the newer game. The note placement seems more natural - on occaision in GHIII’s medium difficulty it feels like notes have just been “missed out” at random, most notably in the incredibly familiar opening riffs to Paint It Black and Sunshine Of Your Love. Compare these to the thoroughly satisfying version of Smoke On The Water from the original game, and there’s no, er, comparison. More specifically, pretty much every time you think you can hammer-on or pull-off in Guitar Hero 2 (ie, play a note by just working the fret buttons without having to strum as well), you can. Several times in GHIII I’ve been caught in spots where the music suggests I ought to be able to hammer-on but the game doesn’t allow it. This is hugely annoying.

The third game’s tracklist isn’t as infested with horrible tedious see-how-fast-you-can-play-a-string-of-the-same-note thrash-metal bollocks as GH2’s, which is an obvious plus. It sabotages this by having a difficulty level that’s all over the fucking shop, having horrible tedious “boss battles” scattered through the game and then by dropping an joyless wall of fucking-stupidly-hardness across the last tier of songs. Also, the most-fun songs to play in GHIII (Kool Thing, Even Flow and Welcome To The Jungle, for the record) aren’t as fun to play as the most-fun songs to play in the previous two games. Of which we shall hear more later.

On the plus side, the new wireless guitar is lovely. Bigger and heavier than the original, and with a much longer strap so I don’t look like a member of the Byrds any more when I’m playing. So there’s that.

In summary, a large part of why I wanted Guitar Hero III was so that we’d have the second guitar ready for (us to take out a second mortgage and buy) Rock Band, which I’m quite unfeasably excited about. In that sense, I’m delighted with it. In every other respect it’s a disappointment, even taking aside previously mentioned issues. Guitar Hero had the best track list. Guitar Hero 2 is the best game. Guitar Hero III is bundled with the best peripheral. There you have it.

Come on, then, let’s have a quick Top 5 Most Fun Songs To Play From The Guitar Hero Series:

5) Who Was In My Room Last Night? - Butthole Surfers
An adrenaline rush like no other.

4) More Than A Feeling - Boston
I’m not proud. It’s a terrible, terrible song but it’s genuinely fantastic to play.

3) Freebird - Lynyrd Skynyrd
Gives Portal a run for its money in the “Best Game Ending Ever” stakes. The kids don’t like me playing this one, because I end up yowling along to it at an embarassingly loud volume.

2) Smoke On The Water - Deep Purple
Very, very little makes you feel more like an actual guitar hero than that riff. And the game does a terrific job of fooling you into thinking you’re actually playing it.

1) Sweet Child O’ Mine - Guns & Roses
A really testing yet good fun riff and a fantastic solo that ends in the game’s quintessential “My Fingers Just Did That With Absolutely No Input From My Brain” moment and then, brilliantly, a long pause with no notes that allows you time to bask in your own amazingness for having pulled the phrase off. Magic.

4 Comments »

As I’ve hinted before, I played an awful lot of Guitar Hero II last year. For all its flaws (mostly centred around an incredibly patchy tracklist and the Space Needle-sized difficulty spike between Medium and Hard) it gets most things generally spot-on and is excellent fun. So I was more than happy to splash out for the third game in the series for my youngest’s birthday, in a text-book demonstration of the time-honoured “As Much A Present For Me As For You” parenting manoeuvre.

For those of you who might not be familiar, there’s no character creation system in any of the Guitar Hero games. Instead you’re given a selection of rock archetypes to choose from - there’s a bemohawked punk, a denim-clad metalhead, a 60s-era classic rocker and so on. My characters of choice were always the fey Nightmare Before Christmas stylings of glam/goth type Pandora and, especially, Casey Lynch.

Casey Lynch, see, was the hard-drinking tough-as-nails alternarocker. Rail-thin, wild-haired and incidentally bearing more than a passing resemblance to m’verygoodfriend Lori in one of her more unruly moods, she reminded me of nothing so much as a female Iggy Pop. I was particularly fond of her usual close to a song - contemptuously throwing her guitar down and fixing the audience with a fuck-you glare. She was, make no mistake, utterly ace.

The attentive viewer will have noticed the repeated use of past tense in that last paragraph. And will be surmising that the game’s transfer from its former developers and general good-eggs Harmonix to Tony Hawk’s L33t Wheelieplank veterans Neversoft has seen something unfortunate occur. The attentive viewer would be entirely correct. Well done, attentive viewer.

Faintly annoyingly, Pandora’s been dropped from Guitar Hero III altogether. But that’s a far better fate than what has befallen my girl Casey.

Gone is the almost-curveless badass who was plainly willing to fight every member of the crowd, one at a time or all at once. Instead, she’s been magically transformed by the power of adolescent wish-fulfillment into a standard-issue airbrush-pretty Maximtastic Barbie doll in fetishwear.

I mean, seriously. What. The. FUCK?

To add insult to injury, according to Casey’s character bio, this change of image has come as a result of her “embracing her feminine appeal”. Yeah. Because personally, I always equate “feminine appeal” with “one-dimensional object of lust”, don’t you?

And would that that were the end of the game’s problems. God knows I’m not as sensitive to the portrayal of women in the media as I really ought to be. I even liked Sin City (in which every single female character was a prostitute, for fuck’s sake!). But the misogyny is so pervasive and so gratuitous in Guitar Hero III that even someone as oblivious as me found himself repeatedly pulling up and saying “hang on a mo, that’s a bit unnecessary”.

Pop-punkster Judy Nails seemingly having nailed a couple of watermelons to her chest between GH2 and 3? Wow, that’s a bit unnecessary. The constant references to “getting” groupies? Wow, that’s a bit unnecessary. The PVC-clad dancing-girls that turn up to bump and grind on at least 3 of the game’s 8 or so levels? Wow, that’s a bit unnecessary.

Even if you’re the sort of troglodyte who doesn’t care how insulting, pathetic and utterly gratuitous this sudden, sadly all-too-explicable lurch toward the shallow end of the gene pool is – if you’re one of the game’s developers, for example – surely you care that it’s made the game quantifiably worse? GH2-era Casey Lynch had character. She had personality. She had a distinctive style that made her stand out and I know I’m not the only one who felt pretty fond of her.

GH3-era Casey Lynch has a nice bum.

And, er, that’s it.

You can’t develop an attachment to her anymore because there’s nothing to get attached to. Her animations, which previously oozed badassery from every pore, have now been replaced by her, well, prancing up and down in kinky boots and jiggling a bit. Less attachment equals less emotional involvement equals a less-good game. You useless, cretinous morons.

Fairly obviously this is a decision that’s driven by marketing (“Teenage boys buy our games. Teenage boys like tits. Therefore, our games need more tits! Brilliant!”) rather than, y’know, actual evil, but that doesn’t make it any the less disgusting that the second game’s most aggressive, in-your-face, self-assured – OK, I think the word I’m struggling for here is empowered - female character has been turned into a passive, preening safely sexy ornament.

I freely acknowledge that a certain genres of rock music are unrepentantly unreconstructed and that a degree of sexism and objectification remains par for the course in some cultural backwaters. I understand that there could be a defence made that Neversoft are just, like, holding up a mirror to the world, man, and that we should blame the tale, not the teller.

My reasoned counter to this argument runs something like this: fuck you.

My slightly more reasoned counter to this argument runs something like this: fuck you, you cheap, cynical arseholes.

My so-reasoned-it-hurts counter to this argument runs something like this: I don’t believe for a second that constant drip-feed of bums and boobs is anything but shameless pandering to the very lowest common denominator. So fuck them.

Furthermore, this is a computer game, it’s not fucking reportage. The game’s developers had plenty of choices as to what aspects of the rock world they were and were not going to portray – we’ve not yet seen any prog excess, for example, or Alice Cooper / David Bowie-style theatrics. The various evolutions of 25-plus years of punk and goth remain massively underutilised. So yeah. There really are a metric fuckton of different venues and characters the series hasn’t explored yet. Most of the possible choices they could have made regarding the game’s style and content wouldn’t be demeaning half their potential audience and insulting the rest. So fuck them.

Furthermore furthermore, even if the developers really were dead-set on showing the infinite variety of rawk by portraying the nasty knuckle-dragging idiocy of, say, a Kid Rock video, there are ways of doing so without being as hateful and misogynistic as the hamster-faced chimp himself. If there’s an iota of irony anywhere in the sea of sexed-up character models, groupies, and gyrating strippers then God help me I can’t see it. The game’s entire tone is leering and hubba-hubba and I really, really don’t like it. So fuck them firmly with a broken bottle on the end of a boarding pike.

If I seem really angry about this, it’s largely because I’m really angry about this.

Let the record show that I’m hardly a prude. I like women in general and the female form in particular. But I don’t think the way Guitar Hero III treats women is harmless. I don’t think I’m being oversensitive, I don’t care that it’s just a game and I don’t think that I’m taking it all too seriously. I hate how the term “politically correct” seems to have become a pejorative, how flouting it has become something of a badge of honour. Fucking hell, is it THAT much of a hardship to be show a little self-awareness? Is it THAT unreasonable to try and treat groups of people who generally have a pretty shitty time of it with a modicum of sensitivity and respect? Is it THAT big and clever to be offensive for no better reason than that you can?

Here’s the bottom line, then - I strongly object to having to wade through the tawdry nonsense to get at what’s still a pretty good game beneath the bullshit. It genuinely saddens me to realise that a mainstream developer working on something as high-profile as the Guitar Hero series thinks it’s remotely acceptable to present women as devices for male gratification.

So fuck you, Neversoft. Thanks for one more nail in the “Gamers Are Drooling Neanderthal Shitwits” coffin.

Edit - 12/2/08

Seeing as the Internet seems to be largely coming up a blank on pictures to illustrate the point I’m making, here’re some I prepared earlier.

Apologies as usual for my crappy photos-taken-of-the-TV screenshot style. I think they’re just about clear enough for you to see what I’m banging on about. First two pics are Casey Lynch from Guitar Hero 2, the second two are the same character in her GHIII incarnation, hard as it may be to believe:

Admittedly, some of the difference between the two can be attributed to the jump from the PS2 to the XBox 360 but still, I think the change in look, style and mannerisms is pretty clear even in these crappy shots. Somewhere between the two games Casey’s dyed her hair, had major plastic surgery and gotten work as a fetish model.

I think I speak for us all when I say for fuck’s sake, Neversoft. Grow up.

12 Comments »

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night might have the nuttiest in-game text (and most over-the-top voice-acting) I’ve ever encountered. It’s a masterpiece of Resident Evil-esque, “You Keep Using That Word. I Do Not Think It Means What You Seem To Think It Means” mangled Japlish and probably deserves a full-length post at some stage. However, I couldn’t wait to share this:

Turns out that Shaft really is the man that would risk his neck for his brother man.

No Comments »

Seriously, some actual posts on actual things are coming. Promise.

10 - Pac-Man Championship Edition (X360)
The original never gripped me like this. God, but I hate that little pink bastard.

9 - God Of War 2 (PS2)

Big, but not clever. So ridiculously macho that I felt slightly embarrassed playing it.

8 - Crackdown (X360)

A flawed gem, and a brilliant 3D platformer disguised as a Grand Theft Also sandbox tediumfest.

7 - Galactic Civilizations 2 - Dark Avatar (PC)
Best expansion pack ever. And I’ve a horrible feeling I’ll end up shelling out for the new one in the new year, too.

6 - Team Fortress 2 (PC)

The online shooter for people who can’t stand online shooters. In related news, I can’t stand online shooters.

5 - Guitar Hero II (PS2)

Nearly ruined by an aggressively awful thash-metal forum-kiddie track list full of songs that are a) rubbish and b) no fun to play. Fortunately, the good bits are even better than the first Guitar Hero. Freebird is the (second) best end-of-game boss ever, and the bit at the end of the solo in Sweet Child Of Mine where your fingers flash through a blindingly fast series of notes with absolutely zero input from your conscious mind is utterly euphoric.

4 - Puzzle Quest (DS)
It’s a strategic fantasy RPG! It’s a puzzle game! It’s the nerdiest thing ever!

3 - Ace Combat 6 (X360)

All my twelve-year-old, Top-Gun, Biggles-Flies-Undone dreams come true at once. Especially when you’ve got Ride Of The Valkyries / the Airwolf theme / Harold Faultermeyer blasting away in the background. Ace Combat 6! You’re still dangerous. You can be my wingman any time. Even if your cutscenes suck like an industrial sucking machine.

2 - Wii Sports (Wii. Err, obv)

The closest I came to exercise in 2007. The first time I managed to connect with a home run that left the stadium might have been my biggest gaming thrill of the year.

1 - Portal (PC)

This was a triumph. I’m making a note here – “huge success”. It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction.

No Comments »