There will always be a door to the light.......

My father has become a more tranquil man since his mother, my grandmother, died. As a person who sees himself as the mirror image of his father more and more every single day, the subtle differences in his nature have not gone unnoticed. At first, my father questioned his own immortality in the ways other people have deemed a “Mid-life crisis.” He bought himself a Honda motorcycle. He started showing other women more attention than he did his wife. He also moved out on his own for a period of time to do what he called figuring things out.

Later on, he decided to sell his motorcycle. And he started showing his wife a whole lot of attention. He and his wife, my mother, live in the room next to me. After making a deal with her, my father started going back to church. For Christmas we all pitched in and bought him a new banjo. Much to my surprise everyone pitched in and bought me a brand new acoustic guitar.

I happen to be one of worst guitarist one could ever sit and listen to. I took up the guitar a few years ago because my then best friend Chris did, and we all wanted to play punk rock. I never got away from punk rock and guitars. When I pick one up, even if I am playing something soft and slow, I find myself beating on the thing as if I was still learning to play Nofx songs.

But since Christmas, around three times a week, me and my father sit around and smoke cigarettes and play gospel songs. We have about four or five we can kind of sort of play alright. Sometimes the chord changes throw me off because I have to listen to his banjo closely to figure out the change and that puts me a couple of notes behind him. But we’re trying.

My father is also a storyteller. I have heard so many different stories so many times I know how he is going to tell each and every one verbatim. But I still enjoy hearing them. About a month ago Will came over real late one night and we just sat around watching television. At one point, my father woke up and walked into the kitchen to fix a sandwich. He ended up sitting in a chair for nearly three hours telling the same stories I had heard my whole life to Will. Later on that evening I ended up apologizing to Will for it, and to this day I wonder why I did.

I feel sorry for my father. Not in a depressing way or anything. It’s just my generation is one hundred percent fully aware of our youth and our own mortality. We came out of our mother’s womb with a copy of Catcher in the Rye in one hand, and Simon and Garfunkel lps in the other. Through television shows like The O.C. and Dawson’s Creek we get reminded that this period in our lives is a magical time. And one day, we are going to blink and be thirty and its all over. We use college as way to prolong our adolescence.

Truthfully, I never really enjoyed Catcher in the Rye. My coming-of-age novel of choice has always been The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Where the former is about angst and cynicism, the latter is about innocence and bewilderment. But both novels share the same theme. And that theme is what is important because I have never seen such a self aware group of people as my generation. We are stubborn, and self indulgent while my father’s generation was innocent in a not so innocent time. And I can make this assumption because when my father was twenty-two, he was reflecting on the ironies of his life to my four year old self.

**********

I had plans tonight. The plans never went through. Tim, I do sincerely apologize for not calling you back, but I fell asleep not long after we hung up the first time. I woke up nearly an hour ago in a weird haze. I dragged myself to the bathroom to brush my teeth and realized that the fever blister I had developed the day before has now swelled a whole lot. At first I thought it was a zit, but zits don’t just randomly bleed. This is my first fever blister and I have to be honest, it’s quite painful. Here in a couple more hours, after I finish writing this I am going to go on into work just because I feel like working in an aisle while there’s no one else around. Sometimes I crave being alone even though I curse my loneliness nightly.

After I brushed my teeth I decided I needed a shower. But before I turned the shower on, I placed a towel on the toilet so I could sit comfortably and gain one level as Riku in Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories. My Sora campaign in the game is completely completed. I have filled Jiminy Cricket’s journal and beat the game with a maxed out level 99 Sora. In Reverse/Rebirth, D’s journal is completely filled and I finished off the final boss three days ago with a level 62 Riku. Now I am just going to finish up the game by leveling up Riku to 99. My total time playing right now is sixty-eight hours, and I estimate my finishing time to be seventy-five. The last time I sought out this level of completion in an rpg was the original Kingdom Hearts on the Playstation.

************

I own all three of the current consoles. My Playstation 2 was the last one I bought. If one randomly mentioned that I bought a Playstation 2 just so I could play Kingdom Hearts, their assumption would be correct.

I was reading an issue of Gamepro at work one night when I saw a simple advertisement going down the side of a page that showcased Jack Skellington. I can’t remember what the advertisement said at the top, but that doesn’t matter. I was intrigued. Further research enlightened me to how this particular game was going to somehow combine the worlds of Final Fantasy and Disney. It seemed far out there, and I did sort of right it off at first, but later on, I managed to find a picture of the best box art ever for a videogame. The moon, shaped as a heart, illuminating a group of five friends, two of which being Donald Duck and Goofy, as they stand on this tall ledge of a building looking over a darkened city. The faces of each character are unusual for videogame cover art because not one scowling, or smiling, or looking intense. Donald and Goofy, they look really emotionally sad. Riku has his back turned to the rest of the group, looking what I believe to be quite shamefully at his feet. Kairi, the only girl on the cover, is sitting on this ledge looking up at the same thing Sora is. Sora is the hero. On the cover he stands above them all, looking up at something we don’t see, holding the mysterious Keyblade. What kind of look do Kairi and Sora have on their faces? Why they happen to be looking up with innocence and bewilderment.

While an advertisement featuring Jack Skellington piqued my interest in the game, the cover art amazed me. After taking in every inch of it, more than the wanton desire to play the game, I felt that this game was special. In the same way I feel that certain songs and books are tailored to my sensibilities, so is Kingdom Hearts. While the game may not be the first to tackle a coming-of-age story for a generation bred on them, I honestly do believe it is the most poignant and important.

I absolutely refuse to delve too far into how the Disney moniker pushed self-centered people away. As someone who loves the game to an extreme extent, I don’t want those same close minded people to play it. I want them to avoid it. Technical issues do exist. Read any review of the game as you will surely find people complaining about the camera and clunky combat. Those are true issues. Do they hinder the gameplay? No. Give me any game, any, and I can nitpick it to death.

From the moment I turned the game on and heard that very minimalist music during the title the screen I was hooked. The first thing one does after pressing start on the controller is make a decision based on what type of player you are. The game starts with a personal decision that influences the rest of the journey. Then the real-time combat is introduced through a tutorial that doubles as the tone setter for the entire game. And this is important to me.

The original characters in the game are young. They are innocent due to the fact they are on the verge of adolescence, not adulthood. What this means in the sense of the overall picture of the Kingdom Hearts story is the fact these characters are going to grow up. And in an issue of GMR magazine, Tetsuya Nomura stated he already had the final scene of Kingdom Hearts as an ongoing narrative in his mind. So every single game in the series is going to eventually lead up to this final scene. Unlike Final Fantasy, which will continue forever due to each game being its own entity, Kingdom Hearts has a conclusion. Does that conclusion involve an adult Sora? No one knows. But what does all this mean to the tone of Kingdom Hearts?

Final Fantasy fanboys will find comfort in the scene where Aeris asks Sora to keep an eye out for Cloud and tell him she misses him. But they are going to be put off by the fact that Sora is a young boy with hope in a world where few have it. He isn’t brooding and mysterious like Cloud and Squall. The younger gamers who are enticed by the Disney characters are going to love Sora as a hero. But they are eventually going to be put off by the typical Square melancholy and tragedy of the characters. If they do see past that, the obscene difficulty will surely get them anyways. And that is the charm and absolute beauty of the tone. It’s hopeful, yet depressing. It reminded me, as person who has moved past adolescence and into young adulthood that the period before was this beautiful time. As a person who read Something Wicked this way Comes when he was twelve, I knew that the feeling of infinite summers are coming to an end very soon and freedom would eventually turn to responsibility. And that made me an introspective twelve year old. I was hopeful for my future, yet very sad because I understood, through my generation’s obsession with coming-of-age stories that it was all coming to an end.

That is the first four hours of Kingdom Hearts. We see Sora, Riku and Kairi wanting so badly to grow up and experience things, they decide to build a raft so they can get off an island they consider a prison and explore a much bigger world. We stumble upon a hidden cave where Sora and Kairi spent many a summer’s afternoon drawing pictures of each other and sowing a seed of friendship that we automatically assume will be stronger than anything in their lives, including the hardships of their desire to take on responsibilities and grow up and have adventures. The island is called Destiny Island. It’s this beautiful place where the sun is always shining and there’s always something to do for a kid.

After we get introduced to the Heartless and set off on our adventure, after Sora accepts the responsibility of being the Keyblade Master, the next destination is Traverse Town. Traverse Town is the direct opposite of Destiny Island. The sun doesn’t touch a single street. Everyone in the town has been taken away from their world and dropped into this place. We meet Aeris, who laments about Cloud. It’s depressing and melancholy. As Destiny Island represents endless summers with those special friends we love, Traverse Town represents the harsh reality of responsibility with adulthood looming somewhere outside the realm of cars, clothes and girlfriends.

And from that point on, there is not a truly happy moment for any of the characters. Yes, Donald Duck and Goofy join up with Sora. And yes, you then start to visit worlds based on Disney flicks. But that feeling of melancholy exists throughout the entirety of the game, up to and including the ending. Will Sora see Kairi again? Can he help Riku overcome the Darkness he accepted in his heart? These are questions that are answered by the end, but not entirely. At the very end, we see Kairi, in a mysterious cave, crying as she looks at her younger self and a younger Sora as they each draw a picture of the other while laughing. But the fact is, we see Kairi alone.

***********

I mentioned above how The Perks of Being a Wallflower is my Catcher in the Rye. And hopefully I have outlined above well enough that one could assume Kingdom Hearts has more in common with The Perks of Being a Wallflower. In Kingdom Hearts, one visits the world of Neverland. After defeating Captain Hook, we get a cutscene of our group of heroes sitting on the top of that giant clock tower from the movie with Wendy. Wendy had previously explained to Peter how she wanted to go back home and not stay in Neverland. During this cutscene she is talking to Sora about the reasons behind her decision. She wants to grow up. Wendy and Sora are not so different from one another. And all the while, Peter is flying around the clock tower in his usual playful tone. The subtext of the cutscene was not lost on me and I found what I was watching to be so beautiful I started to cry. Kingdom Hearts, a videogame, made me cry. The story of Peter Pan is special to me in a way very few things are. Wendy and Peter are two people who love each other. Not in a sexual, or romantic way even. But they do care for one another. Except one is going to grow up and fall in love. She will get old and die. Peter Pan will not. He will never grow old. The responsibilities of adulthood will never be an idea in his mind. And that is beautiful.

I saved the game, wiped the tears from my eyes, and got in a car to go and eat dinner with my grandmother who was dieing. That was the last night I saw her alive. And that was two years ago from yesterday. I remember everything about that night because I was under the influence of self awareness. Something had moved me, and because of that I was introspective and sad, yet had hope for a future that seemed too bleak. The snow was falling heavy when we walked in to the restaurant. Few things are as beautiful as heavy snow underneath the neon glow of streetlights when one is smoking a cigarette and feeling introspective and sad. That dinner was mine and mine alone to experience.

Afterwards my mother and terribly sad father wanted to go to Wal-Mart for a few things. My little brother and I went to the electronics section and while he was looking at cds, I noticed, on the new release rack, Peter Pan on dvd. I bought it without hesitation. Afterwards I sat out in the parking lot, watching the snow fall and smoked another cigarette.

I beat Kingdom Hearts that night.

And three weeks later I went to my grandmother’s funeral where I saw my father cry for the first time in my life.

wes

Max Payne and more about Larry...

I nearly finished Magna Cum Laude before I took it back. Horrible experience in the actual gameplay. The trampoline system is uniquely unresponsive. The way I found to fool it, was this method: If a "Left, Up" is coming, the keeping pressing left as rapidly as you can, then once the icon passes by, start pressing up as rapidly as you can. There's some golden wisdom you're not going to find on GameFAQs. I did laugh. Alot at some points. To sum up a normal day for Larry at college; there's playing quarters with a monkey, then switching your brain with his, and of course watching porn with an actress and an arcade machine mimicing Holk Hogan, and what college day would be complete without playing "trampoline" (apparently it's a competitive sport now) with a russian spy, only to see her blast her way back to the mother land on a jet pack.

This is my metaphor. Lord of the G String. It's a softcore porn. It's also one of the funniest movies I rented last year. My problem is that the comedy is wedged between 25 minute lesbian love scenes. That's alot of fast fowarding. Now I'm not bashing porn, but when a guy wants to see his porn, then he gets his porn. And when he wants to laugh, then he watches something Steve Martin or whoever in it. Genre blending does work, Shaun of the Dead is a testament to that. But not in this senario. When you watched Backdoor Tramps #29, you didn't get to the end and complain that it wasn't funny enough. And when you watched the Big Lebowski, you didn't complain that there wasn't enough sex involved. There's a time and place for everything. In the case of Larry Lovage v. tim, alot of Larry's jokes were funny, but they were in the middle of consistent jokes that made my skin crawl.

First game I'd ever seen the boobs in was Greendog: The Beached Surfer Dude. There's a code you can key in really quick and the title screen changes from stupid Greendog (the protagonist) to a picture of a nude woman lying on her side at the beach. I should note that there's a small chance I may have my games mixed up, because I have not found this code on any cheat sites, but I do remember it, and I'm almost certain it was this game. In any case, this didn't ruin the game for me. The code was damn near impossible to key in anyways. Point: It was highly avoidable. Most of MCL's nudity was avoidable too. There were two in game sequences of nudity, and possibly more, as I still had 4 girls to rape (the lack of quotations mean that I'm not joking). I found a vendor randomly, that sold "racier loading screens" and "graphic models nude." This stuff was avoidable, and for the most part was a majority of the nudity. But it wasn't the nudity, I can't stress this enough; it was the humor. Just gross disgusting, middle school humor. Which, let's face it, that's who the game was really marketed too.

And no more Larry articles for me.

I started Max Payne 2. I'm liking it, but I do have a problem. The setting doesn't seem right to me. I've already written all this once, and it got lost, so I'll be much less expansive. By the precendent of the first game, I am to believe that Max is the same guy from the first game. And to me, Max Payne, in Max Payne, was an absolute idiot. Now I'm in this setting where everything is a little less cheesy. Things seem a bit more dramatic. I might really feel bad for the guy (for once), but I'm still looking at him, thinking of his metaphors of "broken bottles of tabasco sauce." It's hard to get my mind set that Max has more than dust in his goofy Saved by the Bell hair. I can't say that they should take a cue from Square and have Max Payne 2, starring George Winthorpe. And I'm not saying that they should make another game with a retarded Max. I'm just saying that it's a shame that involved story sequels are held to standards by their original games. Not that Max Payne will be remembered for it's story, but when you play a game that cut's several times per chapter to a cut scene, you expect a game to attempt to involve you in a narrative. Regardless, Max Payne 2 is fun, and there's many times in all of our lives where we ask for something to play that is completely mindless. For these times, there is Max Payne, getting drunk, or going to school. Combine at your own risk.

-tim

Kuwabara, Kuwabara

To say that Metal Gear Solid 3 is one of the best "videogames" that's come out is really a misnomer. Certainly it is a game with a tried and true core gameplay mechanic, marked improvements over previous installments in nearly every area, and Hideo Kojima's legendary mix of attention to detail and a flair for the odd and experimental. All these make a truly great game, and despite what some critics may think, it deserves the highest honors available based solely on those aspects. However, there is more to the MGS3 package than all that.

To play, or rather watch, Snake Eater is to treat yourself to an interesting story that truly attempts to evoke an emotional response from you, the player. Now, that's all old hat for the MGS series, but Snake Eater to me seems decidedly less preachy than the original Solid or as surreal as Sons of Liberty. It finds an equilibrium between those two extremes. Why is that important? Because it shows that Kojima and his team genuinely learned something after each Metal Gear Solid game they've made, and moreover applied what they learned to the next game. How many other developers can you name that have done that?

Unlike Idle Hours' other contributors, I am have no background in film studies, but even a film layman can see that Hideo Kojima has a desire to direct in him and the talent to back it up. That he couples that with the ability to make these fantastic scenes of action, drama, emotion, etc. interactive is where I believe his true genius lies. You'll hear lots of people in both gaming and film talk about "bringing you into X" with "X" being either a movie or game. Most of the time it's just lip service, and the extent of immersion they provide is making the character movie when you manipulate the controller. But with Kojima, it's everything you can imagine.

How many times, when playing a Metal Gear Solid game, have you said "I wonder if it'll let me do this?" and found that it did? For me, it's numerous times. More times than any other game or series I've played in my time as a gamer, combined. To me, that qualifies Kojima as being both genius and innovator-in-chief of this hobby we call gaming. If anyone should be bestowed with the accolade of spearheading the charge of making games equal parts art and entertainment, there is no one else I can think of more deserving.

Well, I've gushed enough over MGS3 for one post. It's time we address the dark side of gaming, as epitomized by Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude.

As the only one of the Idle Hours group that I believe has any prior experience with the LSL series, I figured I was going to have to defend this game from the valid arguments of being crude and decidedly unamusing. The older games, LSL III in particular, hold a special place in my heart as being one of those guilty pleasures of one's early teens that let you poke fun at your own budding sexuality with over-the-top innuendo and usually no payoff, mirroring the dichotomy between one's own sexual fantasies and then the harsh reality that destroys them (or maybe that's just me?).

Anyway, what I got with this new Lesiure Suit Larry was less the silly fun of my youth and more the laughable but usually pathetic puesdo-softcore porn movies they sometimes show on HBO that try to weave some contrived 'coming of age' story into the mindless sexual escapades of a hapless college student. These kind of stories are nothing to me but a futile attempt to try and dilute the animal stupidity inherent in pornography with a few cheap laughs inbetween the flesh slapping sessions. So, that's about the gist of Magna Cum Laude.

I can imagine in my mind the hopeful look on the face of the Vivendi Universal exec when he found out about this property from the library of their newly acquired subsidiary, Seirra. The visions of frat boys and lonely nerds lining up around the block to slap down fistfuls of dollars on this frankensteinian fusion of two of their demographic's primary pastimes; watching porn and playing videogames, must have consumed him as he pitched this marketing opus to everyone on that floor of the office building. If fate is just, then hopefully he's either been dismissed or relegated to the underbelly of game design (mobile phone).

This game is a shameless cash-in on the LSL name and the hormones of young adulthood. I can respect The Guy Game in the sense that it's very clear with its intentions; overcharging you for a drinking game and a few clips of topless (apparently underage) women. Aside from the rather unseemly alleged pedophilic aspect, The Guy Game is a harmless thing on par with the 'Girls Gone Wild' video series or the Cinemax channel after midnight. LSL: MCL, on the other hand, is a disturbing 'bait-and-switch' system that entices you with loading screens featuring real-life models posing as the female characters and then sporadically delivers only a cartoonishly bad imitation of intercourse.

It cannot reconcile with the fact that it is cartoon porn, so it hides behind often lame jokes (I too will admit that I occasionally got a chuckle, but it was rare) and liberal doses of toilet humor. To say that the originally LSL games were 'classy' is perhaps a stretch, but when compared to this drivel it's more than fitting. Unfortunately, it seems the kind of tongue-in-cheek sexual humor from the old LSL games is an outdated concept and the series itself seems to have little hope of living down this mastodonic blemish. I weep for the death of the point-and-click classic, and fear for the future of all gaming franchises from the long arm of moronic marketing.

- Will

Burt Reynolds took it in the testicles.

I am sitting in a friend's house at the moment watching the Super Bowl with a couple of other people. I sat here at his computer for about forty-five minutes while he took a shower upstairs. I snuck in Solid Snake style. Not a person knew I was here.

One of the things I read while I was sitting was Tim's recap of Leisure Suit Larry. The game sucks. The gameplay is non-existant, the graphics are laughable, the music and sound effects consist of nothing more than fart sounds and cartoon boobs may just be the dumbest idea ever. We gave up on the game after playing it for far too long, far too long meaning any time at all.

But the game was screwed before we even stuck it in to begin with. Any game would have a hard time comparing to what was in Tim's Playstation 2 minutes before.

As of this date right now the last videogame I personaly spent money on was Metal Gear Solid 3. I used my lunch break from work to pick it up along with a strategy guide I thought doubled as the packaged in art book that one could find on a shelf now. I was wrong, that verison of the guide wouldn't come out for another week.

Some people are Final Fantasy fanboys. I know people who will buy any game Rockstar puts out simply because it will be edgy or whatever. Some people own every single home cart version of the King of Fighters series. I happen to be quite the Metal Gear fanboy.

Now this is my confession. To this day I have never beat Metal Gear Solid on the Playstation. I borrowed it from Tim awhile ago with the intention on beating it. I think I had just bought Ico around the same time though, and eventually I heard of The Twin Snakes coming out. I returned the game to Tim and bought The Twin Snakes the night I test drove an Impreza, seeing if it was something I might have wanted. The game sat on the shelf for a couple of weeks until I finally had a free night to sit down with it. Twenty-Six hours later, without having slept, I beat the game, on the easiest setting, while my eyes felt like they were on fire. And I was moved. I had played a game that moved me, and made me think. The game has a narrative that rivals any movie or book I had experienced before.

Four months earlier I was Christmas shopping for some friends. I had everyone a decent game picked out except for my friend Jeff whom had already bought and given me Ghost Recon on the X-box. I knew Jeff liked military stuff, and to a certain point stealthy games. I think now it was fate that I ended up buying him Metal Gear Solid Substance on the X-box.

Three weeks before I bought The Twin Snakes I traded in Solider of Fortune 2 to purchase Dead Man's Hand. Dead Man's Hand is a game that tries really hard to be at least decent but fails. I applaud Human Head Studios for their effort in trying to create an original game in a setting that is wicked underused. But the fact remains, that when you don't include shooting animations in your character models for the multiplayer, effort only goes so far.

Long story short, I tried to explain the storyline of MGS to Jeff but failed miserably, explained my zest for playing the sequel, and Jeff told me he would trade me Substance for Dead Man's Hand so he could use it for trade-in credit. I told him it was a deal. The next day I came home with a copy of Substance, stuck it in the X-box and 27 hours later I had to reach down, pick my brain up and place it back in my head.

Much has been said about Sons of Liberty's storyline and it's lead character Raiden. My two cents? I absolutely loved every single moment of the game, especially the last three hours. It is a game that done more than make me think. It made me feel something. It made me laugh. And it is a game that is seared into my memory. Others have written about it so much better than I could ever hope to. But me, Wes, I loved it more than I have ever loved a videogame before. (That article originaly was on Insert Credit but this computer failed to load it directly. Insert Credit is the best website out there for those who love videogame writing).

All of that though was until I had the chance to sit down, in a darkened room, with a two liter of Mountain Dew and a pack of cigarettes, and play Snake Eater. Snake Eater marked a few firsts for me and the Metal Gear series. The first time I didn't beat one in a single sitting. The first Metal Gear game I had played on the Playstation 2.

I have a bunch of games that I consider favorites. Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy VI, Silent Hill 2 and Grim Fandango for example. Those are all games I will eventually write about here. About how they have affected me in many different ways. But Metal Gear Solid 3 Snake Eater is my favorite game of all time. It is a game I think about every single day since I finished it. It's a game I compare every single game too, including games I have already played. For me, its the new standard of genius.

This is all high praise and more so than that, one man's opinion. But I have also heard Tim call it the most near perfect video game of all time. And I have heard Will echo my thoughts of it being a new standard. And although I can't speak for them, the scene where the flowers turn red after the player is forced to shoot The Boss was stuck in my head from the moment we shut down the Playstaion 2 and turned on Leisure Suit Larry. And while we tried to get the young protagonist laid, or drunk, and while we grimaced at cartoon boobies, I was thinking of how games like Leisure Suit Larry are completely, 100%, unnecessary. And I mean that. While games like Snake Eater represent an elite class games that try to make expand the realm of interactive entertainment, stuff like Leisure Suit Larry are the lowest common denominator. It holds videogames back from being the artistic and even literary revolution they have the ability to become.

To finish.

Tim mentioned how bad game night was originated with Mary-Kate and Ashley Olson's Crush Course. While the game is the perfect game for anyone's bad game night, it is a better game than Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude.

wes

02.06.05 -tim's 2 cents

Every now and then, Wes, Will, and myself get together for what is known as bad game night. To my recollection, there have been three. The first was by far the best. We rented Mary Kate and The Other Olsen's Crush Course. It was geniunely a bad game. It was laughable, and not by standards of site or sound, but by content alone. The game was a series of mini games ranging from photography to sports. The best we did with the game was nailing the dance game. This was the doing of myself, and I often struggle with placing the feat on my video game resume. There were also parts that we could barely scrape by with. There were times when we went outside to smoke, and collect ourselves then plan a strategy. For Crush Course. For freaking Crush Course.
The second night, as I now recall never occured. I rented Fugitive Hunter. Something happened that prevented the guys from joining me, but I played through the game because Dammit... I paid for it. The game was bad obviously, but it was sincerely so bad, that I'm glad the guys didn't come over for it. I won't get into specifics other than it was just nearly unplayable.
The third night happened Friday night. We rented the new Leisure Suit Larry game. The clerk renting the game to me wouldn't let me live past the fact that I was renting a intended the kind of parties I stay away from. Although I didn't realize the extent of my actions, I still felt like a piece of crap. We had a camera set up. We got a composition book out to take notes. We sat on the edge of our seats waiting for retard-ed-ness to roll out of the tv and do a dance for us. I can't lie, some of the jokes in the game I laughed at, but for the most part I just felt sick and disgusted. As if a dirty old man came into the apartment and started telling us experiences in the red light district. I thought this would be another Crush Course experience. It had mini games, and storyline written by 8 year old kids that are home-schooled. Instead it was the three of us, feeling as awkward as we would if we went to real college campus and tried to medically rape girls. When the time came, and breasts came up on the screen, we just sat in silence. We gave up eventually. There was no fun in this game. Sometimes you play through a game, and deal with it's faults to progress the storyline, or sometimes just to complete the game. There was no motivation to fuel us.
The only knowledge I gained from the game was that there are games not meant to be played by some people. When I was 8 I got a copy of Leisure Suit Larry and Leisure Suit Larry 2. I got into them kind of because they were adventure games, and to this day, I love adventure games. But they weren't the best or even at par with it's competition. But I finished it and played through it, for the sake of breasts. Who is this game intended for? It's intended for people under the age of 18. You know what, I don't even want to finish this piece. I'm just leaving it at that. Sierra, on your good days, you're an angel. And on your bad days.... well.... you're this.

-tim

The Great Unhyped

So, I've been playing Mercenaries lately and aside from being a rather nice game its also got me thinking about some things. Namely, about gaming and the marketing hype machine thats begun to surround it. I submit to you, the gaming community, that Mercenaries is a model of the balance that should exist between marketing a game and the quality of said game. Now, by no means is it the perfect game, in fact I won't even say it's the best one to come out this month. However, it is a game that delivers everything it promised and wasn't shoved continuously down our throats in the months that led up to its release. That is something I believe should be commended and encouraged.

Few people will dispute the statement that 2004 was the best year of this console generation and perhaps even in the history of the hobby. What makes it such an immutable fact? Well, that would be the bevy of high-profile releases of course; HALO 2, DOOM 3, Half-Life 2, GTA: San Andreas, FABLE, World of Warcraft, etc. The untold story of 2004 is that it was also the year that many of these big name games were stained by the taint of excessive hype. The machine that marketed these games reached out to us through every medium (TV, Radio, Magazines, Internets, Movies, etc.) and bombarded us until the sales pitches became subconscious mantras and every new screenshot took the place of the last one burned into our retinas.

Did it work? Yes, apparently it did. HALO 2 sold over 4.2 million copies two weeks after its release, San Andreas 5.1 million copies two months after launch, the list of financial windfalls continues. However, I think the most telling example of a true 'marketing' victory can be seen in the over 375k copies of FABLE that were sold during its first week of release. Why is this so important? Because FABLE was a game whose hype outshone its content.

Who could forget the hype surrounding FABLE from the moment "Project Ego" was unveiled at E3 circa '02 to the day of its release? It seemed like not a day went by that there wasn't a new article in print or online detailing an aspect of the game, some even reaching novel length. Gamers the world over were frothing at the mouth to pick up what was billed as "The Greatest RPG Ever Made," by its official spokesman Peter Molyneux. I myself stood in a line for about five hours waiting for an EB employee to return from his exodus to the distribution center so that I could have my copy those precious few hours early. Sound pathetic? Well, I wasn't alone. In that same store were probably atleast 15 to 20 other people waiting with me.

The car ride back home with FABLE in my possession was a magical journey in which my vivid imagination played out any number of grandiose scenarios that I'd be able to act out with what was sold to me as a holy relic of gaming. The only scenario that I didn't imagine, perhaps wouldn't, was that it would be something less than perfect. Because, rest assured for it to live up to the hype surrounding it, FABLE would have had to be nothing less than perfect. It wasn't. The game I finally played was a good one, but one whose merits were completely overshadowed by its failings. Failings that under any other circumstances, I'd be tempted to look over in favor of its daring design achievements and originality. Therein lies the problem.

FABLE was a commercial success, and in some cases a critical success as well. But, I can't be alone in my assessment if the game is listed as GameSpot's Biggest Disappointment of 2004 and even warranted an apology from Peter Molyneux. What went wrong here? More importantly, what does this mean for the future of gaming?

What went wrong is obvious; the hype was greater than the product being advertised. This isn't such an abnormal occurrence in the world of consumer products, as any number of late night infomercials can attest to. Even in the world of gaming such massive disappointments aren't entirely unheard of. What was different now is that if one looks just below the surface, one can see the hand of a higher power at work with FABLE and as well as on some of the games that suffered a similar fate in the wake of its catastrophic success.

By late 2004, one of the biggest criticisms one could levy against the Xbox was that there were no quality RPGs for the console, and it's a very fair criticism to make. When your strongest RPG, and essentially your only one, is a two year old PC port you've got problems. This is why FABLE's success was important not just to the developers and publishers behind it, but to Microsoft itself. That is probably why the marketing that went into FABLE eclipsed that of other, and I would say equally deserving, titles. The worst part is that it worked, the game turned a substantial profit off the legions of gamers who were blinded by the glamorous facade constructed around it.

To me, this establishes a dangerous precedent. If the industry behind games is reinforced with the idea that a game can be mediocre and still be extremely profitable if the hype generated around it is strong enough, it can only lead to disaster for those of us who enjoy gaming and yearn to see it reach a higher level of artistic achievement. With the costs of developing games that will be competitive in the current marketplace already substantial, one can reasonably deduce that they will be doubly so in the next generation. Thus, the 'overhype' solution should look that much more appealing to the corporate entities.

But, does it have to be this way? Can there not be a happy medium where a game is hyped enough to get it the right amount of exposure, but not so much that it overshadows the game itself? I say there can be, and Mercenaries is the perfect example.

In Mercenaries we have a game that had a good developer pedigree, an admirable showing at E3, and a few TV spots and print ads. You didn't hear what was going on in the development of Mecenaries on a weekly basis, and odds are you didn't want to. Sure, there was the occasional interview with the developers to gauge how far along it was and what we can expect to see in its final form, but at no time during these interviews did any of these developers announce that it would be the greatest of its genre. By the time the game finally released, I had all but forgotten about it. Then, the reviews came pouring in and I was intrigued. The reviewers had nothing but positive things to say about the title, and the few criticisms levied against it seemed largely subjective.

It was enough to make me want to pick up the game, and so I did. As I sat down to play it, I was not confronted with the disappoint that I felt with FABLE, but with an astonished admiration for it. Here was a game that was hyped enough for me to want, yet not so much that when I finally played it I was expecting something more than I got. I'm still playing the game, and from where I am now I can safely say that my experience with it has increased my admiration for it, instead of slowly eroding it.

This is what I want more of; games that are marketed enough to get my attention, but good enough to keep it. Is that so much to ask?

- Will

Hey, it's new to me...

So I saw a friend from high school today. We reminisced for about 30 seconds, and then went straight to talking about video games. Naturally, my current jones is Snake Eater. I remembered this guy liking these games when we were in high school, but for some reason I felt that he liked it because he liked the military. In talking to him today, I realized that he liked the games for the same reason I did (whatever those may be).

He mentioned that this might be the last game of the series, which was news to me. I try my best to stay away from the news media of games. I love games, but I get violently sick when I read news regarding them. Occasionally, there's an article or two that are just fact based that are interesting (Halo 2 adopts new control scheme..., DS design released), but in between are the are the opinion related articles and reviews (Halo 2 set to blow your ass back to a previous Monday..., DS rejected by audience still upset that Mario hasn't acquired grenades and machine guns...). And furthermore, Tommy Tallarico should leave the gaming news industry before my near minimum wage job provides me with the funds for a plane ticket and a baseball bat.
In any case, he told me the sad news MGS, and of course we both mentioned the PSP game coming up. Our reactions were similar as we simultaneously mentioned the following facts:

"He's doing one for the PSP though!" -excited

"But it's going to be a card game." -less excited, more confused

"But you know, if he decided to make a game where you look up words in the dictionary, I'd play it, and I'd be excited" -re-excited

You have no idea how much I trust this man now.

-timothy l.