The idea that games are becoming more realistic seems to stem from the evolution of a more complex visual and narrative aesthetic. Video games are becoming more intricate, requiring more attention to detail, and more awareness of plot nuances. Games are also becoming more self-aware - titles like Far Cry, Call of Duty, Mass Effect, and Assassin’s Creed all deal with complex sociological issues that immerse the gamer in a world similar to their own. But, especially when it comes to games like Assassin’s Creed, it’s clear that a lot of the “reality” of these games is in the tone. Modern games, such as Assassin’s Creed, deal with realism in challenging ways. By taking it out of its context, we can see Desmond’s journey as silly and magical, but the game tries to ground his journey in historical fiction, and the narrative appeals to our sense of reason. 

By carefully shrinking away from humor, games have become more “realistic” due to this sense of reason. Violence in Borderlands is humorous, in Halo 3 & 4, the violence is a necessary evil - Master Chief and Cortana become weapons necessary to save the galaxy. While we are able to take the narrative in games like Halo serious, we often ignore the realism in more “silly” and “playful” games, such as Borderlands, because the tone defies our sense of reason.

The tone is everything when it comes to creating a “realistic” world - Borderlands deals with challenging topics by piling on satire. What makes Borderlands unique is that it deals with many of the tropes of the sci-fi first person shooter genre, but manages to avoid the dark tone of games like Metal Gear Solid, Halo and Mass Effect. This breaks down when the narrative of Borderlands is examined.

(Heavy SPOILER alert following.)

Cortana and Angel are easy to compare, but serve incredibly different roles in the narrative. As artificial intelligence, they stay with the hero throughout, and assist him (or, her) through various means. Both were/are living human females, and both possess some sort of technopathic powers. Cortana’s identity is a key focus of Halo 4, but Angel’s identity, while an important question, is lost in a sea of characters. Most other NPCs in Borderlands 2 are more colorful and more present in the game, especially the cast of former protagonists.

To most, the death of one of the major protagonists is what finally spurred a revenge quest. For me, Borderlands 2 hinged on an all-too-real tragedy of a father-daughter conflict. While games such as the Walking Dead and Assassin’s Creed are built around hyper-realistic characters, the satirical, magical world of Borderlands hides its dark secret. By your actions in the game, you are finally able to achieve vengeance and save the planet by violently tearing a family apart. The game rewards you for this task, and holds your hand throughout it - Clap Trap remains your loyal companion, and his antics are lovable and lighthearted. By the end of the game, the evil mask has been removed, and Hyperion has been defeated. There is no harshness at the end of Borderlands 2 - the deaths have all been avenged, and all sense of seriousness has been conquered in favor of blind destruction.

(end spoilers)

A major type of game I chose to avoid playing is the “horror” genre. Games like Dead Space, Resident Evil, and Aliens: Colonial Marines all deal with “serious” topics to incite a reaction in their audience. Because these games shy away from humor, their tone is serious. Even Resident Evil, ripe with betrayals and conspiracies, feels real, simply because of the artistic choices put into place when creating the game. There is no magic, and no fantasy - only technology and science. Still, the games tell fictional narratives, and storytellers with stronger wills than I would likely find much more enjoyment and entertainment out of these “serious” narratives.

I feel like now is as good a time as any to address my personal point of view on difficulty levels and challenges in games. Those who know me well will know that, despite all perceptions of my so called expertise - I am a cheater. I find the hidden loopholes, the back doors, the false-walls, whatever silly trick it takes to get through the game with the greatest ease. It’s this reason that games like Devil May Cry and Street Fighter will always bore me - I don’t like to play by the rules. While I can acknowledge the greatness of these games, the challenge they pose to dexterity, memory, and technique on an obsessive level comes off as somewhat perverse to my more fragile approach to games.

This is contrasted with my love of Jet Set Radio and Stuntman. Both of these games require near perfection and a careful understanding of clunky controls. For whatever reason, being able to press the reset button and persist towards what should be an easily achievable task, learning from my mistakes each time and moving a bit farther every iteration is much more rewarding to me than failing because of a lack of dexterity or the sheer difficulty of the game.

When I play a game, I want to feel rewarded for my persistence. Exhibit A: Call of Duty: World At War. I immediately played on Veteran difficulty. It was clear to me that this was not the intended difficulty, yet because I wanted the achievements, I played anyways. (I later noticed I was playing on my father’s account, and wasted my achievements) I struggled through dodging the grenades, through gunfire that came from everywhere and nowhere all at once, and I memorized the levels. I knew where every enemy was on every level, and I dominated. It took some time, but completing the game was achievable for me.

I think this is the hardest thing for most “hardcore” gamers to palate: beating every game on the “Hell” difficulty doesn’t make you any more of a gamer, and playing League of Legends or Call of Duty doesn’t make you any less of a gamer than people who just play World of Warcraft everyday. One of my favorite things in League of Legends is the “honor” system. I play games to be “honorable,” but I also play games to enjoy them. As soon as the game becomes a chore (exhibit B: Massively Multiplayer Online) it becomes dull. 

I relate it to how I approached baseball as a kid. When baseball became highly serious and competitive  I no longer saw it as a fun activity. I have a sense of competition, sure, but I believe that winning should be 50/50. I don’t gain enjoyment from the fact that the other people are “losers.” The point in any sport, any form of entertainment, shouldn’t be winning, it should be enjoying your experience. 

Most people I know play Grand Theft Auto with cheats, blowing up police cars, killing civilians, and wrecking havoc on the city. This was the opposite of how I played GTA (and Saint’s Row). I was immediately immersed in the story, and the world. San Andreas and GTA IV in particular did a great job of making the main character a flexible, living entity in the sandbox world. When I play Grand Theft Auto, I obey the rules (so as to not attract police attention). I don’t run into police. I don’t commit mass murder. I don’t shoot unless shot at first. I spend most of my time driving. My goal in GTA IV was to get the achievement for beating the game in under 30 minutes. I did this without cheats, by judiciously using the taxi cab and not undertaking any side missions. I was able to complete most missions on the first few tries, utilizing the game’s mechanics (armed with the knowledge of the locations of body armor). In Grand Theft Auto, that’s all it takes. Knowing the location of every piece of body armor in the game, and how to use ambulances and taxis to their fullest extent, allows you to “cheat” in the game.

Borderlands 2 has a similar “cheat.” Anyone who knows me knows that my approach to Borderlands is borderline (pun intended) cruel. My knowledge of the drop system (learned from the PC version by playing immediately after release) enables me to play through the game with a wide variety of ultra-rare orange guns. By pitting the game’s system against itself, I am able to take down the difficulty level. In addition, the leveling system allows you to kill enemies vastly above your level. Most people “boost” their friends by having a higher level character take you to a challenging location and sharing the experience. I was playing solo, so I was forced to boost myself by entering into a location that was 10+ levels above me, and slowly eliminating enemies using a combination of my overpowered weaponry and pure technique. Whether this is breaking the rules, I leave up to anyone who reads this.

For those of you who know me best, you may know that my favorite genres are RTS, JRPGs, racing games and extreme sports. I won’t go into difficulty levels for these genres, but know that if you challenge me in SSX or Need for Speed, you can try and cheat all you want, but you may not enjoy the result.

featherweightfate:

My lame attempt at melding two memes

This is actually an opinion piece about the difference between Armored Core 3 and Armored Core: For Answer, and why I decided to take back AC: FA. In some ways, I feel like it was more a symbol of my current relationship with the gaming industry as a whole. 

I adamantly refuse to spend $50+ dollars on a new game. This is partially because I am currently unemployed, and I pay zero living expenses out of my own pocket, but also because I believe there are better experiences to be had with free to play games than with most P2P games out there. 

Also, even as a single, unemployed male living with his parents, I don’t really have time to play *every* game out there - I still haven’t finished Xenoblade Chronicles, for instance (those who have seen me play it may know that I’ve been working on it for nine months). 

When I purchased Armored Core: For Answer on new years, I had never played an Armored Core game, and was solely purchasing the first one I found. I enjoyed the game for a number of hours, getting far enough to establish my NEXT as something that I would feel comfortable piloting, yet I decided that the game was dis-satisfactory for me.

You see, because I had never played an AC game before, I didn’t know the difference between AC5, AC4, and AC: FA. The largest difference is that AC4 and AC5 have much more tactical gameplay, while FA has a much more “run and gun” style to its controls.

While they are two games in the same series, the fact that one is a numbered title and one is an offshoot makes all the difference in the world. To showcase this, when I returned the game yesterday, I traded it in for Assassins Creed: Revelations and Armored Core 4 (which, was a significantly cheaper game). 

I have not yet played Armored Core 4. I may not play it as much, yet I wanted to purchase it in the event that I felt I had made a mistake (returning FA), I still have an Armored Core game that will satisfy my “fix” as it were. For this same reason, I have been playing Assassin’s Creed.

The largest difference for me, as a gamer, between Assassin’s Creed and Armored Core, is not the gameplay, or the title, or the developer, or even the sales number. As a self-defined hardcore gamer, to me, the largest difference is the story. While I wanted to play Armored Core solely for the gameplay, I was unable to finish FA (and have little desire to play AC4) because I wasn’t satisfied by the relationship between gameplay and story. 

Armored Core: For Answer seemed to me a lot like Shadow of the Colossus. The premise of the story was that the NEXT units were getting wiped out by giant walking fortresses called Arms Forts. (I won’t spoil the ending of Shadow of the Colossus here, for those of you who haven’t played it). Armored Core: FA actually seemed to have an AMAZING story. My problem was, the gameplay wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.

In Shadow of the Colossus (and Assassin’s Creed) one of the most important activities in the game is climbing. To get anywhere, you need to take advantage of the game’s physics engine to climb up the structures in the game. This is a little bit different in vehicular combat games such as Armored Core, and this is what disappointed me the most about the Arms Forts. I wanted to be able to climb them, but instead, the clunky controls and awkward camera made scaling the giant machines extremely difficult. While the concept behind them was interesting, the gameplay didn’t really take advantage of their place in the story.

Aside from the Arms Forts, the story of Armored Core seemed to be a continuation of previous Armored Core games, and much of it was fairly inaccessible to a new fan. The factions and characters present in the game seem to be reliant on the player’s knowledge of the previous games.

This is something that I’m seeing increasingly in the games industry. While stories are increasingly being the focus of modern titles, many of these stories are inaccessible to a casual fan without buying (and playing through) each of the games in the series. A rare few titles (Mass Effect, Resident Evil, and Kingdom Hearts come to mind) allow for the player to read up on the plot of previous games, lessening the incentive to play the first game.

At the same time, I purchased Assassin’s Creed: Revelations to catch up on the story of Assassin’s Creed. While I may not get a chance to play Assassin’s Creed III, I was a fan of the first game, and many different sources cited Revelations as a good bridge between the second and the third games. I will never play Assassin’s Creed II, yet because the general premise of the frame (Desmond’s relationship to his ancestors) is consistent throughout all of the games, I am able to be immersed in the plot of Revelations. This was not the case with Armored Core. 

I decided to purchase Armored Core 3 because I was disappointed with the gameplay of Armored Core: FA. I have not, however, been drawn to play it since I switched games. Whether this is because I’ll have to start over from scratch or because I know the story and gameplay will be similarly disconnected, I have decided to shelf the game until the indeterminate future. While I support the franchise as a whole, I was disappointed to find that the title I had purchased was more expensive and inferior to the title before it. 

nintendocompositions:

Luigi’s Mansion | Catching Ghosts

cloud-wing:

awokenmtlt replied to your post: someone riddle me this

people were confused, Rainbowdork reblogged more…i think

thats actually a valid point, I was on tumblr a lot more when I was rainbow dork and the only thing I would reblog was ponies, and a LOT of them. I’ve been focusing a lot more on getting into the Air Force then tumblr recently, and quite frankly that’s a good thing and don’t plan on making tumblr any sort of a priority, which I did for a few months which was a very bad thing. Even after I’m sworn in and don’t have to worry as much about it I still intend on being on less, I will be going to the gym every day after work starting tomorrow, running every morning before work, and hanging out with friends a lot more seeing as once I’m in I won’t be able to do that as often. Maybe once I’m in and have my job I’ll be more active, however by then I’ll be more mature and have other things to do.

A similar thing happened when I played xbox, I had a group of online friends, tried to get a bunch of gamer score and higher levels, and then one day I realized that absolutely none of that mattered in real life, which is why I’m never on xbox anymore. Tumblr is just like that and I don’t even think I need to make the comparison on how, because it’s quite obvious. 

Tumblr was really just a phase and it is going to be just that for everybody. We’re all going to stop using this eventually and move on with our lives. Though there are people on here I will never forget and would like to still stay in contact with, I feel like this site will soon no longer be used by a lot of us soon, maybe it’s just me, I dunno. 

Just gonna end this on one final point to everyone. Make your real life a priority, not your internet life, for it will only hold you back.

(wow this was a long rant)

My greatest personal challenge was the Demon Wall in Final Fantasy VII. Up to that point in the game, I had only a single save file. It was my first playthrough when the game was a few years old, and I had not power leveled to the point where the boss was a pushover.

To paint a picture of this situation, I was not yet a tween, and the only other JRPGs I played were Link’s Awakening and Pokemon Yellow. I had just finished Ocarina of Time, and I was looking for more of a challenge on the Playstation 1, so my parents bought me Final Fantasy VII.

I, of course, was hooked in by the story, by that Spikey-Headed Jerk, by the world that was so beautiful and well crafted, and by all the hard work that Squaresoft put into their game. I played obsessively. I spent hours leveling up to be strong enough for each of the bosses. I would go months without playing because I was stuck on one boss. I remember a long stint where I didn’t play because I wasn’t able to get past Materia Keeper no matter how hard I tried.

But, when I finally found my way to the Temple of the Ancients, I finally met my match. My party at the time was Barret, Cloud, and (I believe) Aeri(s)(th). I managed to find my way through the Temple of the Ancients (probably with the help of my strategy guide) without much trouble, and was face to face with the Black Dragon. I defeated him handily, and I managed to finish the fight with full limit. Both Barret and Cloud were on their third limit (Satellite and Meteor-Rain), and Aeris was on her second. I saved the game.

This was the biggest mistake I’ve ever made in any game to date. You see, when you save the game after the Black Dragon, you are stuck in the Temple of the Ancients. You cannot escape, and (if I recall correctly) you cannot leave the clock room, except to progress the game. You cannot get into any random encounters without defeating the Demon Wall.

So, I was stuck, fighting another boss, without being able to level up my characters or materia, or change anything except for my equipment and the materia equipped on my characters. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t beat the Demon Wall. I unleashed all my limits at the start of the fight, I tried using different magic, but no matter what I did, the Demon Wall hit too hard. He killed my party within the first few turns. I had finally met my match. 

I put down the game. I refused to play anymore. I decided it was too hard, and I could never get past this insurmountable challenge. I read my strategy guide over and over again, spoiled most of the rest of the game for myself. I didn’t care. It was too hard for me to beat this boss, and I would never see the end of the game. I also had Final Fantasy VIII around this time, so I moved on to that game (and got similarly stuck by a scratched disk 2). 

One day, when my babysitter from down the street was over. I decided to give the Demon Wall one more try. This time, I let my babysitter play. He said he had never played the game before, but he obviously knew how to play games. I don’t remember the fight, I don’t remember what he did, but somehow, my babysitter beat the Demon Wall. I was ecstatic. He had done the impossible. As quickly as I had met my doom, he had broken down the wall and I reached the end of disk 1 without another hitch.

I never moved on to disk 2 on this save file, I was too devastated by the tragedy and the boss at the end of disk 1. I later restarted the game and have readily stomped the Demon Wall on each subsequent playthrough. But the fact remained, I was able to hand over the controller to someone older, yet less experienced, and overcome a challenge that I myself did not have the tools and fortitude to overcome. Thank you, good sir, for teaching me it’s okay to hand over the controls.