One of my goals in 2010 was to cultivate a deeper engagement with the entertainment that I consumed; I managed to meet my goal of reviewing at length here any videogame I finished (and one that I didn’t). I even managed a couple of comments on some music and books that I enjoyed.
On the downside, I abandoned my reading journal in the spring, and only kept loose track of television and movies—proving, perhaps, that passive television is truly an opiate. I’m hoping to restart and sustain my reading journal throughout 2011, and in service to that goal I’m going to attempt to make myself comment here about all the books that cross my path.
Here’s what stood out for me, good or bad, in 2010:
Video Games
Game of the Year: I thought that, for much of my Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood time, that it was going to be my Game of the Year. Then it had to go do… whatever that was. So the title of Game of the Year reverts to the darkhorse Alpha Protocol. Well done, Obsidian! Runners up: Bioshock 2, Red Dead Redemption (for the ending!), and LIMBO.
Best Game I played this year not from 2010: Fable 2.
Disappointments, shocking and/or total: FF13 (not a shock, total), AC:B (shocking), Mass Effect 2 (shocking, near total), Darkstar One (not a shock, near total).
Multiplayer: I hate multiplayer, but I still play AC:B’s multiplayer. Exciting!
Haven’t Finished: Metro 2033, Alan Wake, Fallout: New Vegas.
Music
Album of the Year: this one is a tie, between the majestic sweep of BT’s These Hopeful Machines and the thick, intellectual, timely layers of Reflection Eternal’s Revolutions Per Minute. Somewhere in there: Conjure One’s Exilarch.
Surprise Music of a year prior to 2010: Johnny Cash, Jem.
Disappointments: Whatever the heck My Chemical Romance released back there.
I like but I don’t understand the hype for: Kanye West’s My Twisted Dark Fantasy.
Movies
2010 in movies was kinda blergh. I don’t see a whole lot of movies, only the ones I think will be good. So I’ll just name…
a few that I liked: The Black Swan, HP7-1, Inception, Scott Pilgrim, Red, Prince of Persia (weird, eh?), The Other Guys.
Things that left me conflicted: True Grit, Tron: Legacy, The Tourist.
Still to see: Salt.
Television
Television is, I’m told, in a creative golden age right now. Even if the numbers for the networks are off and their hitmaking ability seems to be in the dumps, it seems like subscription-only (e.g. cable) channels have been knocking it out of the park. Some are good, but not enjoyable for me to watch (Mad Men), and some aren’t great drama but are entertaining (True Blood), and some have found a nice balance (30 Rock). I’m sure I missed a ton of stuff this year, so if anything is really good and missing, lemme know.
In no particular order, great TV from 2010: Burn Notice, 30 Rock, The Daily Show, Archer.
Great TV that I mean to watch: Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Dexter.
Great TV I saw for the first time in 2010: Ken Burns’ The Civil War, Mythbusters.
Books
I’m an avid reader, of both fiction and non-fiction. Lists here are hard, in part because I failed at my efforts to keep a reading journal! But here’s a list of stuff that stands out, in no particular order—and maybe not all of it is from 2010—but close enough.
Fiction: Best Served Cold, Joe Abercrombie; Incarceron, Catherine Fisher; Leviathan/Behemoth, Scott Westerfeld; and with their re-release in trade paperbacks I started to get into Glen Cook’s Chronicles of the Black Company.
Non-Fiction: The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb (the updated version; life-alteringly interesting); The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire, Edward Luttwak; The New Capitalist Manifesto, Umair Haque; Hardboiled Web Design, Andy Clarke; my new subscription to n+1 magazine; oh! Also Steven Moore’s The Novel, which is a history of… novels. It’s scintillating!
Older Stuff: I read a ton of literature on space exploration and colonization, started my way through the classics of modern macroeconomics (Keynes, Milton Friedman, Hayek), gave Socrates a good workout by way of Strauss and Bloom, and am looking for something more technical than Norwich on the Italian City-States.
Bitter Disappointments: The Affinity Bridge, George Mann; The Thousand, Kevin Guilfoile; House of Leaves, Mark Danilewski.
At this point I am hoping for a minor miracle to occur in Assassin’s Creed 3. As I began to have my fill of the vast and sumptuous recreation of Rome, 1503—reimagined here as a virtual playground for a free-running open-world do-gooder—and turned my attentions to the resolution of Ezio’s now overly drawn-out saga, I was thinking what a surprise masterpiece Brotherhood turned out to be. A scant two hours later I was sitting with my mouth open during the game’s endless credit sequence hoping that everything that had just transpired was a cruel joke. Wishing, in short, that I had missed something.
What happened to get from sheer enjoyment to despair? Sit down by the fire and let me tell you a story.
Let’s begin with Assassin’s Creed 2, 2009’s game of the year and amongst the best games I have ever played. It was a sprawling world, full of beauty and murder, love and revenge, mystery and revelation. The designers had taken to heart the criticism of their first outing, namely that there was too little to do save chasing flags in their beautiful recreation of the Levant. So they added side quests diverse and varied, and a richer and more complex crowd AI. They added a cryptic series of puzzles designed to haunt visually and stimulate your inner conspiracy theorist. True, they seemed to have sacrificed something of their central premise, the tactical assassination simulator. Yes, there were plot holes as the timeline advanced. Perfection is always just out of reach.
I had assumed that Brotherhood would be a minor coda to Ezio’s story, a novella of bloody revenge on the Borgia with a unique and genuinely thrilling multiplayer experience added on. Imagine my surprise when it started something grander—effortlessly picking up minutes after the end of AC2. Ezio is principally confined to Rome, with only brief, linear excursions out into other locales, but that can be overlooked in a game on as tight a release schedule as this one was. They’d somehow jammed even more sidequests into the basic open-world formula, now replete with factions, faction quests, challenges, puzzle-lairs to overcome, chases to be had, lost memories uncovered, treasures and flags to be found, shops to be reopened, and Borgia district HQs to be overthrown. My oh my, and we haven’t even touched on the titular rebuilding of the “Brotherhood” of assassins beyond La Volpe and Machiavelli.
The storytelling is good, but tends to get lost in the details. I was sold on the mechanic of rebuilding Ezio’s familial fiefdom at Monteriggioni in AC2 on the grounds that having a base of power is precisely what an ambitious family wants, but making the whole of Rome a similar treadmill is pushing it in the extreme. I adore the brotherhood minigame, even if others didn’t appreciate its “Pro Football Manager” aspirations: you have a little screen where you outfit your charges and send them out on quests. Numerous times my wife would walk by and I would gleefully announce that I was playing “dress-up with my little assassin toys”. Having Assassin allies in town with you makes for some of the most compelling gameplay moments ever devised: Ezio silently raises his fist at the right moment; a eagle cries; and in the blink of an eye that squadron of guards between you and your target pitches over, silently cut down in a hail of arrows. Ezio rushes past into the Borgia compound and it is all over for Captain di Pietro. It’s exactly the sort of gameplay I was expecting to have presented to me, not the poorly conceived city management or insufferable War Machine sidequests. Free roaming is a blast, as ever, as is sizing up the best approach to taking out the Borgia lieutenants.
Back in the real world, Desmond, Lucy, Sean, and Rebecca are hiding in the ancient Auditore estate in Monteriggioni, and you are allowed more freedom to explore your surroundings than ever before. By obtaining access to your companions’ email accounts, you can trace the evolving relationships between your tight-knit little group; the writers have managed to forge convincing and compelling characters here (Desmond’s milquetoast aside).
So where does it all go wrong, then?
Well… in the designers fascination with their details, for a start. It is strange that in an “Assassins Creed” game one should conduct no assassinations save those on sidequests, n’est-ce pas? I thought that perhaps they were saving all of the intense stalking, infiltrating, and assassinating action for a thrilling climax where Ezio wrings his revenge (or tries to) from the Borgia, but instead everything goes completely off the rails instead.
The later chapters of the game are a laughable effort to convince you that there is a mercenary-fueled war happening in the outskirts of Rome and a series of bizarre, barely-interactive sessions of drawn-out dialogue and “combat” with the Apple of Eden. Mysterious cutscenes with strange pronouncements rule the day. One of the Borgia announces that “no man can kill me” like he’s the Witch-King of Angmar. Later, Ezio peers at the Apple, sits up, and concurs, starting a new and bizarre end sequence. (Spoiler: you kill Cesare. Meaning what the what was up with his Witch-King thing?)
In fact, there are few missions that evoke Assassins at all: infiltration, stealthy combat, concealment, etc. One entire chapter is a series of missions without chronological pause while you infiltrate the Castel Sant’Angelo, but Hitman this is not! At each mission break everything around you is reset. There’s little to no tactical planning to be done, and certainly no reward for doing so. Then you charge around invincibly wielding the Apple, then charge around some more in some other random place, then you zoom back to the present, mysterious things are said, a new faction introduced, and [REDACTED] happens, which is all highly disappointing.
So over the rails it went, slowly and inexorably throwing out all the goodwill it acquired. I noticed that the lead designer had left the company, and the game certainly plays like they ran out of his original notes, ran up against the deadline, and just threw a bunch of poorly conceived psuedo-mysterious plot twists in there for good measure. Sorting through that rubble to find a manageable story for AC3 will take a minor miracle.
So here we are. Great environment, great open-world gameplay, wonderful characterization of Desmond’s friends, excellent “Brotherhood” stuff. No tactical gameplay, no sense of being an Assassin, really. Ezio is more like an agile, indestructible force of nature. The series would be better off, gameplay-wise, by rediscovering its roots: it should be possible to recreate the experience of being an assassin. You build up a target profile, pinpoint their habits and preferred locations, scout the area, and choose your path to the target. Like Hitman, there should be numerous pathways to victory. All of the other stuff is necessary polish, but it should be in service to getting better at the core mechanic: using your parkour skills to stealthily approach someone and offing them for the greater good.
As for the story, I think we’re in trouble. There are now factions within factions and mystery people reinserting Desmond into an animus at the end, and I’m more than a little concerned that they’ve taken things to the LOST level where nothing can possibly make sense anymore. Complex mystery stories are good; adding additional complexity and mystery just because is bad.
Sad though I am to say it, AC:B gets a C-. Should’ve been so much more.
I should say a few words about the multiplayer: it is superlative, capturing so much more of the drama and tension the medium deserves than the single-player it isn’t even funny. I normally despise playing MP, but AC:B is the best MP I’ve played since Infiltration for UT. I hope it survives. The game’s multiplayer rating is an unqualified A.
I was never a fan of the much-beloved Castlevania games. They always seemed like unceremoniously and unforgivingly hard action-platformers. I’m a fan of challenging games, but not when all the challenge is in trial and error, and what little I played of the 2-d side-scrollers of Castlevania lore always seemed to go above my head. There was always a castle, some overwrought dialogue, and a labyrinthine maze full of brutal and seemingly random encounters. I’m given to understand that there is some great mythos and fun rpg-style elements if you can get into them.
At least the music was great.
Now comes Capcom with a “reboot” of the franchise as a God of War knockoff. I was skeptical, but more than one source I trust told me that the story was excellent and the payoff at the end both surprising and worth the effort to get there. More on that later, but I dove in.
Lords of Shadow isn’t just like God of War, it is God of War, stripped down to the meat. There are no un-necessary new weapons to acquire, just mandatory upgrades to your current weapon. There are no complex button-mashing quick-time events, instead a straightforward (yet all the more frustrating) timing-press quick-time event. There are a few cyclopean behemoths to scale and chip away at vulnerable bits on and lots of handsome cyclopean architecture to hang around on.
It has all of the problems of God of War, too: insane camera angles, fights that become unwinnable if you mess up the timing minigame, and a paucity of real puzzles (instead, a plethora of jumping puzzles complicated by that godsforsaken camera. It is also genuinely hard, as a Japanese game should be. Irritating jumping, tricksy combo controls, a necessity to shift back and forth between different flavors of magic… everything you would expect is there.
The combat is visceral, complex, and once you figure it out, actually somewhat satisfying. Prior to having the combo & magic stuff sorted out it is usually just annoying. There are two types of magic—good and evil, heal-y and damage-y—and a few different secondary attacks (none of which are really worthwhile). There are “hordes of foes” fights, minibosses, titans to scale, and proper throwdowns with the really, really, annoying titular Lords of Shadow.
And, by the gods, the story. Patrick Stewart delivers the narration with a bemused gusto: it’s dark, gothic fantasy—sparing no demoniac adjective, no frost-and-ryme coated shadow is left unexamined, for the Fate of the World rests on Our Hero, Ever More Tormented By The Memory of His Wife. Good lord, it’s bad. So bad it is usually good, if you’re in to that sort of thing. The narrated story makes no sense on its face: it is plausibly bad, leading to an interesting moment later—Patrick Stewart is narrating your actions as if following you around, but he always says that he is elsewhere. Weird.
Europe has become plagued by shadow, you see. There are three Lords of it: Vampire, Werewolf, and “Other”. Each has a piece of a mask that seems to grant supreme power if reassembled. You belong to some order that is apparently dedicated to fighting the shadow, wielders of tremendous Christian God-Power, but apparently run by completely insufferable idiots. You are the last in a long line of bad-asses in crimson and black who has been sent out to quest against the Lords of Shadow. You will constantly be looting priceless artifacts, puzzle solutions, etc. from the bodies of your fallen warrior brethren. Here’s an idea: rather than string out a couple solo questing knights at a time, why not send all the questing knights out together? In what is called “a squad”? If combining the priceless artifacts unlocks greater power… why distribute them in ineffectually small doses to your haplessly outnumbered solo warriors? Meh. It’s all just an excuse for a leveling curve and poorly-placed references to other games.
So: after all that, is there anything to like here?
Surprisingly, yes. The plot twists and dramatic ending that everyone was all in a lather over was pointlessly stupid, to me. Satan done it. He’s the easiest boss to beat, ironically, since you have unlimited health-regen magic. Then there are more dumb plot twists during the credits. But everything up to that point came together quite nicely, I thought. Your order is undermined, Patrick Stewart finally fills in the holes in his narration, and all that had been kept from you is accounted for. For all of its tortured prose, the story here is taut and hangs together. The scenery is gorgeous, if appallingly linear. The fighting, once you’re into it, is superb. And if you enjoy conquering seemingly unconquerable bosses, the emotional payoff for finally prevailing against the Lords of Shadow is quite nice.
I know I’m getting to this late (like, shortly before the release of Fable 3 late), but hey, better late than never.
I was immediately charmed by Fable 2’s visual presentation and its initial story hook: you start as a young orphan under the wing of your slightly older sister, Rose. You live on the streets and winter is approaching fast, so you need some cash. It provides immediate pathos and emotional connection with your character—and, eventually, the overarching story.
The writers also aren’t afraid of moving through time through story-based events—even ones that permanently modify the kingdom of Albion. They do a pretty good job of telegraphing these changes so you can make sure to wrap up whatever it is you’re working on.
Other than the ending feeling a little rushed or the not-quite-as-deep-as-it-seems combat system, there’s very little that I can complain about; although the social system is a bit too easy to game. Every town you encounter will love you blindly seemingly within moments.
Speaking of that social system, it is unique and interesting: you learn a variety of “expressions”, which you access via the social wheel. You can earn fame—by showing off trophies you obtain via questing—or otherwise impress or amuse the npcs you encounter in the world by dancing, making sock puppets, or belching, for instance. These expressions are used in a variety of secondary miniquests, but interestingly never deployed for any main story purpose. There’s plenty to do and see in Albion, even after the main storyline is over, from becoming a real estate baron to raising a family to tracking down a wide variety of magical artefacts.
I was impressed with the variety of activities, the wit and charm of the writing and world, and the tenderness of the characters. It isn’t a game that evokes strong emotions, but it is solid fun, and for quite some time. It’s only $20 and you can’t really go wrong with that.
I don’t think I’m going to bother finishing this one (its a level-grinder with too little variation or sense of wonder for my tastes), but I wanted to call your attention to this quirkly little Privateer-clone—specifically to its mistreatment of the English language. I’m not sure where they found actors willing to say the comically bad lines (incorrect tenses*, bizarre non-sequiturs**, strange use of interjections), but given the inconsistent and erratic delivery they obviously weren’t heavily invested in the source material to begin with. All of the spoken dialogue (and the plot itself) is worthy of MST3K’s attention.
Examples:
* “Landing permission was granted” is the response to docking requests.
** “This is the last time we’ll speak, and I await your reply” is a taunt you issue to pirates.
I’m drawing blanks. Trust me. Hilariously bad English. Cutscenes also linger on seemingly meaningless features. Once there was a cutscene depicting a battle followed by a cutscene announcing that I could read a news report about the same battle.
All of the pirates who are holding entire systems hostage (but only one such system per cluster!) are Scotsmen. Scotsmen exist in at least five different species of humanoid lifeforms. And they always say: “Here’s another one who thinks they can stop us!” I will break this strange pan-speciesist-Scottish conspiracy to hold one system per cluster hostage!
It’s a game where you have a ship and you fly around making money and ostensibly attempting to figure out who murdered your father (I already know it is the dad’s business partner but I’m sure that’s supposed to be a plot twist later). There’s an annoying woman who keeps getting you into trouble and otherwise pratters inane nonsense (in this game, this is often literally true) at your character; the two of you smile coyly at each other constantly despite there being no pretext for a relationship short of “she’s wearing really tight pants and stowed away on my ship”. Combat is same-y and there’s way too much of it. There are aliens invading the galaxy and I’m sure it will be connected to my father’s murder and zzzzzzz…
Now with 100% more Lair of the Shadow Broker. Not coincidentally, also with 100% more enjoyment.
That’s not to say the LotSB breaks the mold, offers new and exciting gameplay, or contains surprising twists, but I will say this: my complaints about Liara’s lack of involvement with the core ME2 experience were directly answered by this expansion pack. Why we have to buy the actually good parts of the game separately is a matter best left to another rant.
The missions are solid and enjoyable—they rehash the best that ME’s level designers have to offer, which is the ol’ walking on the outside of a spaceship gambit—but after depressingly linear and obvious space dungeons I’ll take it. Heck, I’ll even throw in a bonus point for a tactically interesting boss fight with destructible terrain. I had rather hoped that something like this would be the baseline experience with ME2.
The best parts, however, came in the stuff around the shooting. My Shepard could be herself again, and I felt like the conversation choices mattered again. And in the end, my strong-willed, fierce-but-exhausted, heavily scarred Julia Shepard has her Liara back, and with some unexpected new assets. I’ll take it and be happy.
