Ten signs you might be playing an Old School Shooter

Ten signs you might be playing an Old School Shooter:

#10. You often shoot allies because their texture resolution is almost indistinguishable from the bad guys

#9. Assuming you find an ally, they are usually already dying and live long enough to impart a few words of wisdom or direction to you before messily expiring. Bonus points if an alien pops out of them.

#8. Everyone builds fabulously expensive complexes filled with steam pipes that serve no discernible purpose other than to act as a launch point for an invasion (to or from, doesn't matter).

#7. Said complexes often contain numerous rooms that are clearly designed only to serve as murder holes and ambush points.

#6. Everyone...absolutely without exception...wants to kill you. There are never any janitors, engineers, or passers-by who aren't either interested in your death or about to turn into an alien and then kill you.

#5. You are more than halfway through the game and either have no idea precisely what the plot is or why you're where you are at.

#4. You're more than halfway through the game and have realized that there is no plot.

#3. Your life depends heavily on random canisters  chunks of meat, or convenient medi-kits lying around randomly.

#2. You never, ever carry enough ammo to take on a proper army, even though you are, and random ammo stashes are conveniently everywhere, no matter how unlikely or alien a world you are on.

#1. You regularly meet very large, tough opponents who can only be harmed by hitting a glowing six centimeter wide spot where they accidentally exposed their pulsing cyber-heart.

The Many Faces of Old School

First, sorry for anyone checking in here for the OSR D&D movement....I'm capturing Old School as a term for video games today (yes, I've been on a bit of a game/tech bender for the last two weeks).

Specifically: the fascinating difference between Old School shooters and new school. Or, Call of Duty vs. almost every shooter prior to the arrival of Halo, if you like.

This started late on Tuesday night, as I tried to get through a few more levels of the Resistance: Fall of Man FPS quasi-military/survival horror shooter on the Playstation 3. I've been working on finishing all thirty levels of this game on normal difficulty since I acquired the PS3 back in February, and it's been a brutal slog all along the way, getting worse and worse with each new level. Last night, as my wife noticed my curses and spittle flying around the room after my fiftieth death in the 23rd level of the game (again, on NORMAL mode!) she observed that I seemed to be having something of a problem.

Specifically, a problem with repetitious dying....followed by finally getting the sequence right, only to move on to a new section, where I then died, only to restart back at the beginning of the prior sequence. Over, and Over, and Over. I wanted to crush the game disc. It was at this point that she asked me why I was subjecting myself to this...(keep in mind she was playing WoW as she asked, doing an instance that she knew so well she could close her eyes and pilot on through as the tank).

My only answer of course was because I wanted to experience Resistance's three games sequentially, but the truth was that long before I got to #2 I was going to get so irritated at #1 that I'd chuck it out the window and give up. I suddenly had an epiphany: I was playing a shooter released in 2006, built in an era when shooters were still different beasts. Halo had appeared, sure....but it's stink as a true game-changer had barely taken hold. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was still a year from release when Resistance: Fall of Man came out. Suddenly, in this context the game made horrible, horrible sense. I was playing a title built from the ground up on the principles of the old school shooter. Yeow!

I was less of a video gamer back in the day. I still bought a metric ton of Playstation and Xbox games...I was a dedicated Dreamcaster fanboy for a while (until Sega crushed my gamer spirit) and I was there for the first year of Playstation 1. I owned a Nintendo 64 and a Sega Saturn, if only to play the two or three games each system had worth getting. Amidst all this I had a Mac computer for most of this period, and you know what that means: my gaming outlet was the console (except for Baldur's Gate). Despite all of this, I played video games far less often than I have in the last five or so years.

Despite all these games I'd buy, shooters were not high on my list of favorite titles. The awkward controls of survival horror and adventure titles didn't feel so awkward back then. Playing with pre-analog stick FPS titles was a chore, and even then the mentality of old school shooters was often aimed squarely at gruelling, grinding punishment; it was typical to play a level through eighty or one hundred times to get it right so you could make it to the next checkpoint (unless you were damned good at them) and so I often avoided games like Quake, Unreal, and the many, many console clones and derivates that existed out there in favor of games which were more controller-friendly.

Controller issues aside, the old school shooter is a real thing. Many FPS fans either lament the end of the days when shooters put hair on your chest, and just as many (perhaps many, many more to go by per-unit sales of Call of Duty these days) cheered when they went away. Old school shooters were about being painfully tough, merciless and generally inimical to the personal enjoyment of the player. You usually played such games for bragging rights, or to be part of the elite club of gamers who could stomach the painful difficulty levels involved, all of which just prepped you for even more gruelling pvp. PC FPS fans were the most elite of all.

The point being, of course, story and enjoyment were often secondary to most of this old generation of shooter titles. The idea that a player could actually "relax" while playing a shooter? What madness!

So it was with this realization that I figured out I had been subjecting myself to a true old school shooter with Resistance: Fall of Man, perhaps even one of the last old school shooters to be produced, because by the time CoD4:MW showed up, I think the days of the nerve-wracking, painfully punishing shooter were about over. And with this realization, I figured out what I needed to do.

I searched Youtube, I found a guy crazy enough to play through to the end (on the hardest difficulty, too!) and record the whole thing. I spend about fifteen minutes watching someone else suffer through and show me what I was gridning through for. It was a huge relief that I "cheated" like this because let me tell you...the ending was not worth the agony of what that video displayed to me.

You know what was worth it, though? Putting away the Resistance 1 disc and popping in the Resistance 2 disc, to find a clever, structured graphically superior shooter with a modern set of mechanics for health, a "casual" mode for time-stressed older fathers, a cool story and a sense of pacing that did not punish you for looking away from the screen for two seconds. It was glorious! All the magnificent trappings of a shooter circa 2008. That was a good year for games, may I point out: Fallout 3 and Bioshock also arrived that year. I'll add Resistance 2 to the list.

I've heard they made some concessions for Resistance 3 to the old school fans who disliked how much of the old school was not in Resistance 2. I guess once I finish this magnificently better title I'll find out. I hope the concessions weren't too great...I rather like this brutal alternate history and would love to enjoy it without also feeling the nerve-jarring stress of a game designed to punish.

Just a Slave to Whatever Pretty Young FPS Waggles It's Ironsights My Way

Which is another way of saying I snagged Black Ops II and am loving it. And of course Halo 4 is kicking ass. This all points to an important fact: I am clearly engrossed with this sort of game, I clearly love the crazy-ass tough guy hombre marine (or space marine) narratives and the glorious, glorious graphics. I am not afraid of consolitis or console cooties like many PC gamers (thus allowing me to enjoy Halo 4) nor am I going to eschew a damned good Treyarch game (because Treyarch makes some damned good games) just because it has Call of Duty somewhere in the title (and yeah it is a CoD but I don't know what to tell ya....Treyarch always makes better games than Infinity Ward. IMO) and BlopsII is very, very good.

So back to playing some Black Ops II or Halo 4. I am officially done buying games for the Holiday...until the Steam New Year's sale, anyway!

The Shooter Report

When I'm not working my ass off, playing dad, running tabletop on Wednesdays and the occasional Saturday, reading, cooking, or cleaning, I am enjoying the time honored tradition of gunning down virtual foes in digital land.  So here are a few more games I tried recently that are worth talking about (or warning you about...). As always, I remind you that I am not always playing these games for very long (especially if the initial experience was horrendous) so my comments will be based on the actual length of time spent in the game.

Bulletrun

Not sure what to make of this. I played it a bit, and noticed that it felt like a competent shooter which tried hard to emulate the control scheme and even the feel of Call of Duty. It's basically a shooter title portrayed as a lethal gameshow event of the future, where glamorous gun-stars blow each other up then get resurrected to come back into the fray; it only has two play modes, one of which was team deathmatch and the other I don't know because I couldn't find a game. On my brief play through I noticed the following features/issues:

1. The match lasted a long time. It was basically a "whoever has the most kills wins after 15 minutes" type of approach and frankly felt excessive.

2. Quick match making was troublesome....I tried several times to get into a game, any game, before it finally took.

3. Starter characters have almost zero customization; the game's cash shop is built around making you look prettier, although you can earn cash to unlock stuff. One full game was just short of enough cash to unlock one interesting trait; at 15 minutes a pop, it was clear that doing it the free way would be tedious. I didn't stick around long enough to see if the game supported the "pay to win" concept, a deal-breaker by far (looking at you, APB).

   My fifteen minute play through suggested there's potential here, but not enough to recommend this game over other F2P shooters, especially Blacklight: Retribution which is a very solid and enjoyable game, and even though Blacklight has a cash shop I still haven't figured out how it benefits me, too much fun playing it.

I wonder how much time and money it takes to look this cool in Bulletrun

Team Fortress 2

I don't even know what to say about this anymore. I loaded it up (again) to check out the co-op experience recently added (Mann vs. Machine or whatever). The game inevitably throws me into the tutorial mode (maybe I need to skip that sucker) and in doing so I am reminded that TF2 is a game about spazzy super-fast characters, insta-kills, general insanity and a total lack of cohesion in the classic old-school style. Uninstall, scrub brain, move on, enjoy videos about characters without playing. This is the third or fourth time I've tried to play TF2 and I can't get ten minutes in before I question why it is so popular. I guess I know, but it's just not my cup of tea: TF2 is in the same genre as Nexuiz, Unreal Tournament, Quake Arena and other older-era shooters where characters move ridiculously fast, cover is something you duck behind while mouse-strafing faster than a jackrabbit, and there are no chest high walls because the dude who's crouching is also dying. In other words: a game that appeals to a very specific segment of PC shooter fans who don't grokk realism or an attempt at such in favor of characters who can mouse spin faster than a normal human could ever manage without passing out.

I mean, I could be wrong....but it doesn't matter, something about TF2 just rubs me the wrong way.



Counter Strike: Global Offensive

I've only played beta so far, but the game unlocks...tomorrow, I think (writing this Monday night). I decided to get in on the newest iteration. I've played the old version, and it's sort of lacking in this day and age, though I can see within its crusty shell the bits and pieces of a game that would have been far more interesting five or ten years ago (had I been more into shooters back then....bear in mind, my engagement with this sort of game is a fairly new phenomenon, a sort of liberating assertion that youth is not the sole requisite for enjoyment of games in which you play a murderhobo with a shotgun).

Anyway, the beta is kinda cool, but the maps so far seem a bit small compared to what I'm used to in other games, although it does keep the focus tight. They have a bot mode which is always commendable, though I noticed that the difficulty ratchets up from "retarded" to "lethal every time" with virtually no step in between. Also, the bot mode seems sort of hollow and just less interesting than regular competitive mode with live players. This is in contrast to some other bot modes I've enjoyed, such as Black Ops or Gears of War 3, where bots seem just fine and (usually) act smarter than your fellow man, so I would suggest there's more of an issue with the way they are programmed in the game than with bots in general. But I plan to play more pvp directly once it goes live. For the pre-order price ($13.49) it was hard to resist.

UPDATE: since I wrote this CSGO went live and I've been playing it a lot more....it's matches are pretty quick. About the worst thing I could say is, "some of these guys are damned good," but given the lengthy history of this game that's no surprise. I do have two observations after playing a bit: is it just me or do the terrorists always lose? And, sorry to those allies who died thanks to my twitchy gunfire! I'll get better, I promise.

This game does have its claws in me, and I like that I can play it in short bursts and feel satisfied. The maps are, as I mentioned earlier, very "tight" so the angles of approach and accompanying strategies become apparent for each one after only a few playthroughs.

Max Payne 3

I'll get this out of the way right off: I liked the multiplayer so much in Max Payne 3 I went ahead and bought the season pass. This is highly unusual of me (last and only time I did this was with Gears of War 3). It's that fun. Not everyone would agree.....the vast majority of players in the new player zone  might disagree and some of the people I spoke with seemed downright frustrated. I had two suggestions for them:

1. try the softlock mode if they weren't already (hard lock is for the mouse/keyboard people, I think)

2. Get a controller. This game is clearly optimized for controllers and might be accused of being a proper console port, but I'd say that Rockstar did that in a good way.

So I haven't even played the single player campaign yet and I can't get enough of the multiplayer in this game. It's third-person perspective, you get a random mook of various nationalities and ethnicities, and you shoot the hell out of all sorts of exotic locales (with many more available in the DLC). It's wonky, it's got a variety of additional play modes I am looking forward to exploring. Most importantly, after two games in the noob zone I felt so bad for everyone I was ganking (averaging an impressive KTD ratio the likes of which I've never seen before) that I moved myself over to the full regular game experience because it wasn't fun blowing away all the noobs with their enigmatic control schemes on the keyboard tripping them up.

Once I was in the regular area with experienced players I felt more comfortable; these were people who "got it" and although I saw accusations of hacks flying around, the people so accused were clearly not hacking, because I wasted them plenty and often....I think our entitlement gamer culture can't handle the idea that they might simply not be very good at something; "I  can't be bad at this, no! It must be the other guy is cheating. Yeah, that's it." Mhmm. (exception: boosters in MW3; those guys suck)

I'll report more on this game soon enough. It's addictive fun, and maybe I'll even get to see the single player experience at some point. It's definitely moving into my "continue to play" corral.

(UPDATE: Finally got to try the single player. Another story-driven hit for Rockstar, I'll have to devote a future blog just to talking about this game. Interesting stuff.)

Follow up on the Other Games

Still keeping up with Mass Effect 3's multiplayer, if only because I'd like to unlock everything, and it's still actually fun. The moment it goes from "fun" to "grind" I'll be closing it out, though.

I played a bit more Gotham City Imposters. Was startled to find myself in a game with a couple level 600 dudes. How does that even happen? These were extremely good players. If the game starts to fall into that pit, as they often do, of games dominated by a handful of elites to the detriment of less experienced players then I may eventually give up. We'll see. Is it even possible to get level 600 under ordinary circumstances in that game? How many hours would that take? If one reasonably advances about 3 levels an hour, which seems about right for my game experience so far, then to reach level 600 would require 200 hours of play time invested in the game.

I would get very, very sick of fake Batmen and punky Joker-wannabees after about hour 60, I think.

Not quite related, but I decided to clear out Rage to make some room on the hard-drive. I think I was about 1/2 of the way through the campaign, but despite some very comfortable shooter elements, I'll be honest: playing through Quake 4 again recently, and anticipating the Doom 3 HD BFG edition has only reminded me of id's old greatness, and Rage falls short. They should have left the car combat parts out and gone for classic id formula, instead of making it a crude faux-sandbox/Fallout wannabe with some fun but hollow drive-y bits. Or, they could have made it a real sandbox game. If Rage had actually been like Fallout 3 or GTA IV, instead of a pretedn cardboard mockup of the same, it would have done a lot better, I think.

Finally there is the aforementioned Blacklight: Retribution. I'm only playing an occasional game here or there, but I remain impressed at this free to play title. Still haven't figured out what their motivation is to get me to buy stuff with money. Still haven't seen direct evidence that it's got a pay-to-win element. If I keep playing, I may eventually buy stuff just to support them, because the game is very smartly designed and provides a very solid experience so far. Not a match yet that wasn't interesting or enjoyable.

Left 4 Dead 2: Cold Stream DLC

The new Cold Stream DLC for Left4Dead 2 has just been released: all four original campaigns from L4D1, the new Cold Stream campaign, and apparently 20 fan-made campaigns (I'll have to check that out asap). I mean....if there's anyone who doesn't have this, now's a good time. 75% off on a midweek Steam sale right now.

That is a lot of quality zombie survival horror FPS action for $5.



If anyone gets this and wants to play send me a message on Steam. I think you can find me by my handle, which is: Camazotz, Lord of Xibalba

The Shooter Experience - Camazotz on Violence in Videogames

So this is the week Valve decided to grab me by the pantcuffs and shake me up and down (willingly, I admit!) and in exchange my Steam Library expands like a swollen beached whale baking in the sun. I thought I'd share this interesting article originally linked through Penny Arcade Report (source article is from Grantland here). I've been reading Tom Bissell's articles on Grantland since I discovered him a while back...in fact, he's the reason I decided to pick up Max Payne 3, a game I otherwise assumed was not "my thing," based on the fact that his review/discussion of it made the game sound far more compelling and interesting than I would have otherwise expected.

So Tom talks about the phenomenon of Spec Ops: The Line in relationship to shooters, and the gamers who play them, as a whole. It makes for some interesting reading, although I begin to suspect that Tom himself is a rather empathic and perhaps unusually sensitive guy, because a number of "discomfort" buttons for him appear to be set much higher than they are for me. I always grow concerned with any article in which the author suggests, implies or otherwise muses about whether or not Call of Duty, to take his example, is making the world a worse place. From the view of a pacifist and a social reformist who seeks to squelch all images and depictions of violence (be they fictitious or real) I might imagine a case could be made, but I wonder if a psychologist might consider the same argument? Could one demonstrate that playing (or making) a game which depicts gun violence without consequence to the player be a bad thing?

I love these games myself, and I regard myself as something of a pacifist in the sense that I seek to do no harm to others, refuse to own guns (not a popular stance with the in-laws, who belong to a long line of hunters), and prefer that personal protection be limited when possible to tasers. In recent years my position changed, a bit, and I purchased a compound bow thinking I could relearn archery (a skill I had as a teen) but its languished in storage ever since. In case you wonder if this is a family thing, it really isn't. While my parents weren't hunters (and generally disliked hunters who tried to hunt illegally on our land) they weren't unwilling to own guns and we had a rifle or two. My uncle had an arsenal. It wasn't a "learned trait" as such....my dislike of weapons came later, from knowing too many people in too many situations where a firearm added to the mix of volatile personalities spelled trouble.

My wife, by contrast, generally doesn't care for the same shooters I do, but she grew up her whole life owning and shooting weapons of a myriad varieties (she likes to go elk hunting annually with a muzzle-loader, for example). Her sense of gun responsibility is engrained. The mystique of weapons is lessened for her, too; they are a pragmatic thing which must be kept, maintained and treated a certain way.

So when I read Tom Bissell's interesting musings about the nature of virtual gun violence and whether it is dangerous or therapeutic, as well as the treatise on Spec Ops: The Line as to how the message of this game (which I haven't played yet but hope to soon now that I own it) is to prompt the player to question both why he is seeking his entertainment in the form of a violent video game tale and what he gets out of it, as well as the actual morally disturbed protagonist of the game itself, I have to also wonder whether Tom's views on this game (as well as of those who designed it) aren't sometimes missing the point of the whole "military shooter" genre. Like Tom said, when he plays it he does so to "let steam in" where others like to "blow off steam." I guess that depends on what the "steam" is here.

I think Tom missed the point of the metaphor....blowing off steam in this case probably does mean the same thing for many other gamers that Tom's personal sense of the experience means for him. The steam is a metaphor for reality, where we lack power, we suffer for boundaries and limits, we are all mortal and we all have physical and mental boundaries beyond which we hope never to get pushed. The game is a symbol for everything that is unattainable in life, wrapped in a clever simulation that models some aspect of the world around us in just convincingly enough of a fashion that we can put ourselves there, in an environment where for a short time the real world is remade in the image of the id. Even with games trying to "model" reality through hits and kills we still respawn or resume from the last checkpoint and try, try again. It's a feature I'd like in real life, to be honest.....the act of shooting 800 bad guys pales in comparison to the chance to redo things until done right.

There's also a natural tendency to disconnect between fake violence and real violence. Actual studies have been done in which an audience of test subjects viewed specific scenes from movies vs. actual footage of real injuries or death (and damned if I can't find a decent link, sorry). The net result was that people had a palpable reaction to the known quantity of real violence....but considerably less of a reaction to the fake violence. I sometimes wonder if horror movies that are especially disturbing or effective in their FX aren't latching on to some element of the uncanny valley, albeit from a grotesque angle.

Admittedly, there are plenty of studies suggesting that videogame violence desensitizes people to real violence. I am not entirely clear on how accurate these studies are; one could argue that if, indeed, we had a nation of gamers growing up desensitized to violence (and it's entirely possible, I suppose) then wouldn't one expect to see more crime and violence in real life, as people became more prone to commit violent acts to which they felt fewer personal and social pressures to refrain from? It doesn't appear that way, and a study of national crime statistics over several decades (see Wiki here for some interesting info on this phenomenon) suggests that there has in fact been a sharp decline since the mid 90's. That at the very least suggests that there's no obvious connection between violent video games and violence (unless one were to try and postulate that crime statistics would be even lower than they already are if video games weren't around, but I digress). Hell, you could probably make a postulation that desensitization to violence has a correlation with dropping crime rates if you wanted to (not that it would likely be correct, but that's how the internet media likes to work).

Anyway, I think the phenomenon as a whole is more complicated than any single party wants to admit. I suspect desensitization caused by games has a stronger correlation with a shift in reduced empathy and asocial behavior that the internet serves as a tool for. The violence of shooter games has little to do with the inherent beast of man and more to do with the fact that we once were a more violent breed of beast, that centuries of acculturation has at last stripped us down to the point where violence is absent, and allowing us an easy, harmless and effortless means of exploring that dark side of human nature is perhaps a good thing. Until we as a society can start breeding or genetically altering for passivity, we're not going to see it go away. As is so often pointed out, most violence happens in places where video games are never seen, where poverty and desperation is rampant. It's always visible and shocking when it happens down the street from us, and highly visible (because that's how our newsmedia rolls) but the truth is that there are many regions of the world where violence is a normal, everyday occurence. And those places are not getting it from Call of Duty. Fear of the fictional is a trivialization of the problems extant in reality. I don't think that's what Tom Bissell was aiming for, but I do think it's worth framing a proper perspective on the issues he (and Spec Ops: The Line) try to pose.

I'll follow up soon once I get a chance to sink my teeth (har har) into Spec Ops: The Line. Maybe next week? We'll see!

Black Ops still rules. This was the CoD that finally won me over to the genre

Steamrolling through Steam. Also, Juno Reactor

I came across Boathammer, in which boatorious is attempting to dedicate 6 hours to each Steam game he owns, and he owns something like 70 of them. This seems like a great idea....on the surface.
I own 412 games on Steam last time I checked. I don't think I could pull the same stunt off, as a massive number of those games come from bundle deals that I couldn't resist simply because I only wanted to get the 2 or 3 games in the pack that separately cost more than buying the pack on one of Steam's holiday sales. Also, because some of the games I ended up with over time are just hideous. Atrocious. Painful to play. Finally, and it goes without saying, not all games are worth 6 hours of time. And a few are worth a lot more.

I also have a bad habit of contributing to indie bundle deals; and those "pay what you want" indie deals. Which means I have accrued a large number of indie titles, but have also found that I have enjoyed maybe less than 10% of them in a meaningful way, and found most of them to be either drek or at best mildly entertaining for 5-10 minutes.

So yeah, I thought about doing something similar to what the guy in the blog is doing, then came to my senses.

But enough of Steam and computer games! Here's some more music:

Inca Steppa by Juno Reactor, my all time favorite professional techno group, going on 20 years now:

Rage

Okay, I think I am officially stoked for this game. It looks good enough that it might just replace Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas as my two favorite CRPGs....

I may preorder it. It's due out October 4th, and the missus also wants a copy. That gives us roughly a month to enjoy it before B Day!